Donald Trump’s government shutdown is having an increasing damaging impact on more than the federal employees and contractors going unpaid, including threatening shelter for perhaps millions of people.
* Here’s a report on the Arkansas landlord who sent eviction notices to tenants at 50 properties in anticipation of a cutoff of federal rental subsidies.
* Here’s the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette report on how the same situation threatens support for thousands of people in subsidized housing in the Little Rock area.
* I’m not sure it will matter to many landlords — particularly in Arkansas, the worst landlord-tenant state in the country — but here’s one of many reports that it is illegal to evict tenants victimized by the stoppage of federal government payments.
This is just poor people, after all. The Trump base is probably happy to see them punished. But the landlords — remember where Trump’s fortune is rooted — are another matter.
So, too, are air travelers.
Sen. Mitch McConnell could reopen government, but he’s beholden to Trump’s tantrum. Arkansas’s Republicans in Congress haven’t been exemplars of courage either. Call them. Tell them to get McConnell to call a vote on House-passed legislation to reopen government and have separate work on border security (which Democrats support, too, just not arbitrary sums demanded by Trump in addition to existing unspent appropriations for unspecified “walls”.)
UPDATE: The housing situation will grow more complicated if the shutdown drags on. Here’s some background from the National Housing Law Project.