Mari Finkley has already been homeless once during the pandemic. For two weeks in October, she lived out of her Dodge Journey with her dog and 11-year-old godson. The 29-year-old found a new place, and fresh hope. But she’s behind on her rent again.
Finkley was pushed out of her Gainesville, Fla., home by her previous landlord after she stopped driving for Uber and fell behind on the rent. She suffers from severe asthma, and her doctor warned her the job put her at high risk for exposure to Covid-19.
“Are you going to risk potentially dying just to pay a bill?” Finkley says. “But if you don’t pay the bill you’re going to be homeless. You have to literally decide what’s worse.”
Finkley is a member of a burgeoning class of long-term underemployed and unemployed Americans who have slipped into poverty during the pandemic. Many of them are renters teetering on the verge of homelessness, even as large swaths of the U.S. economy have rebounded and coronavirus vaccines raise hopes for a brighter 2021….
Millions of renters are fighting a wave of evictions as poverty surges https://t.co/Yhf7r9UEJM via @BW
— Bloomberg (@business) December 22, 2020