Gov. De Santis extends Florida’s COVID-19 moratorium on rents for another month
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided to extend the statewide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures another 30 days, lasting through July 1. The former ban was scheduled to end at 12:01 a.m. June 2.
DeSantis issued a 45-day suspension on evictions and foreclosures on April 2, citing the stay-at-home order issued by the state to prevent the spread of COVID-19. He extended the ban on May 14 for another 18 days.
“Governor DeSantis issued an Executive Order that extends temporary relief from mortgage foreclosure and eviction relief for home owners and tenants thru July 1, 2020, because he believes it is the right thing to do given the detrimental economic impact of COVID-19 on Florida residents,” said Helen Aguirre Ferre, director of communications for DeSantis.
Although many businesses have started to reopen, state unemployment figures show 10% of South Florida’s workforce remains out of work. Statewide, 12.9 percent of workers have filed unemployment claims.
During a press conference Friday in Boca Raton, DeSantis said he had not yet decided whether to extend the eviction moratorium.
“We’ve got a bunch of different things that are expiring,” DeSantis said. “We obviously are also going to look at Florida’s overall posture on some of the restrictions and so we’ll be having a lot of announcements over the next few days.”
In an email to the Herald sent earlier in the day on Monday, Ferre said there was “nothing at this time” when asked if the governor had made a decision about the extension.
A queue of evictions
Public records show that more than 700 residential and commercial evictions have been electronically filed in Miami-Dade since March 12, when Mayor Carlos Gimenez declared a countywide state of emergency due to the COVID-19 virus. Those filings are sitting inside a legal queue that will be opened when the ban ends.
Sean Rowley, advocacy director of tenants’ rights units at Legal Services of Greater Miami, said it will be up to individual judges to decide whether eviction filings entered during the moratorium should proceed.
“Our position is that the cases should be dismissed and there are important reasons for that,” Rowley said. “Landlords who filed in violation of the moratorium might get a favored status over the ones who followed the rules. But the whole idea behind the ban was that tenants would have the time to apply for unemployment assistance or do whatever they needed to do to come up with the rent money. Filing an eviction against them before they could do that was premature.”
Gimenez and the Miami-Dade Police Department suspended all eviction activities on March 12. Although evictions can still be filed electronically, only the police can execute a writ of possession, in which tenants and their property are forcibly removed from their home.
A spokesperson for Gimenez said Monday evictions will remain halted as long as the emergency order continues and currently has no plan to lift the ban on enforcing residential or commercial evictions.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office also suspended eviction actions “until further notice” on March 17.
And although many landlords have filed their evictions in hopes of getting a good spot in line, some experts say that is a bad idea from a legal perspective.
“We have more than 30 evictions ready to go, but you just have to be patient,” said Armando Alfonso, an attorney who represents more than 80 landlords around South Florida. “If the tenant lawyers up, there’s a possibility the eviction notice you filed can be dismissed, and due to a Florida statute, the landlord can be forced by the court to pay the defendant’s legal fees.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 5:29 PM.
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