Summary: <p>Last week, the federal government, in a limited way, extended the eviction moratorium in place since the start of the pandemic. It's a temporary solution to a long-looming crisis — a crisis we explored in our series "<a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking-americas-eviction-crisis">The Scarlet E: Unmasking America’s Eviction Crisis</a>" back in 2019. In this excerpt from that series, we catalog the long line of thefts and schemes — most of which were perfectly legal at the time — that led to where we are today: a system, purpose-built, that extracts what it can, turning black and brown renters into debtors and evictees. </p> <p>Matthew Desmond [<a href="https://twitter.com/just_shelter">@just_shelter</a>], founder of <a href="https://evictionlab.org/" target="_blank">The Eviction Lab</a> and our partner in this series, and Marty Wegbreit, director of litigation for the <a href="http://cvlas.org/" target="_blank">Central Virginia Legal Aid Society</a>, point us toward the legal and historical developments that evolved into the present crisis. And WBEZ’s Natalie Moore [<a href="https://twitter.com/natalieymoore">@natalieymoore</a>], whose grandparents moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, shows us around a high-eviction area on Chicago’s South Side.</p> <p> </p>
