Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day

through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public

health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover,

please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, Stephanie Desmond speaks with Emily Benfer,

a Wake Forest University law professor and co-creator of a COVID-19 housing policy scorecard, which tracks state-level measures to prevent evictions.

They discuss the severe eviction crisis that is looming across the country as COVID-related unemployment threatens to force tens of millions from their homes in the coming months.

Let's listen.

Emily Benford, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So early on in this pandemic, we saw eviction moratoriums and we saw Congress provide $600 a week and extra

unemployment. These programs could be ending soon. Then what? Then I think the United States is going to

see the biggest housing crisis in our history. I mean, we have never seen this level of housing instability or threat

of eviction in such a truncated amount of time in our entire country's history. Just to put this in

perspective, about 10 million people over a period of years were displaced from their homes

following the foreclosure crisis in 2008. And early estimates today have estimated that between

20 to 28 million renters are at risk of eviction and as many as 16.9 to 17 million households.

...