Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s executive order putting a moratorium on evictions in Michigan expires Friday, leaving housing advocates worried about what comes next.

Joe McGuire, a staff attorney with the Detroit Justice Center, said Whitmer should have extended the moratorium already, and that many other states have instituted longer and more comprehensive bans in the face of COVID-19 than Michigan has.

“Given how serious a crisis Michigan faces in particular, I don’t know why we don’t have a broader and longer ban on evictions when you look at what other states have done,” said McGuire.

McGuire is hopeful that Whitmer will extend the moratorium, though at this point “some damage will have already been done” as people facing eviction prepare to move out.

“The governor could do a lot of good by expanding the order to also put a halt on mortgage foreclosures,” McGuire said. “Which would not only help individual homeowners, but would also help landlords, who obviously right now are concerned about meeting their own financial obligations.”

A federal moratorium on mortgage foreclosures only applies to homeowners with federally-backed loans.

McGuire said tenants should also have a grace period after the COVID-19 state of emergency officially ends to catch up on rent. And the state should do more to make tenants aware of their rights.

“Whenever this moratorium ends, we’re going to see a big wave of evictions, a tidal wave of evictions, given what has happened to the economy,” McGuire said. “We shouldn’t have people suffering irreversible consequences to their housing because of this. Because we don’t want a housing crisis to follow a public health crisis.”

On Thursday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office sent a cease and desist order to the owners of the Jeffersonian Apartments in Detroit. It says they attempted to evict nearly 80 residents, some of them elderly, in violation of Whitmer’s order.

Detroit’s 36th district court has said it will not hear eviction cases until after April 30th at the earliest.

Tiffany Brown, a spokeswoman for Whitmer’s office, said on Thursday it had “no update to share at this point” about whether the governor plans to extend the moratorium.