Elected leaders must call on landlords to honor this demand, and take all necessary measures to halt all non-payment of rent evictions, ideally before they are even filed.

Landlords must not post 72-hour notices, nor file evictions for non-payment of rent until this crisis has been abated. They must accept partial payment of rent and agree to make payment arrangements once the situation has stabilized.

Renters who will be financially impacted by the coronavirus due to missing work (voluntarily or otherwise), or their businesses not being patronized -- as is the case for many locally owned Asian restaurants, should not have to face this public health crisis while dealing with the stress of an eviction or 72-hour notice. Even if non-payment is not coronavirus related, evictions for non-payment of rent directly increase our houseless population, which we expect to be disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus. We must take bold action immediately.

In the state of Oregon a renter can be evicted for being $1 short on rent by the 13th of the month; their landlords are under no obligation to accept partial payments, make payment arrangements, or drop the eviction if the tenant comes up with that missing $1 by or before their court date.

The vast majority of evictions are NOT long and costly processes, they are the fastest civil legal procedure behind getting a restraining order, especially for non-payment of rent if the tenant doesn't have any reason to withhold (which requires carefully following several steps to be protected from eviction).

For a tenant behind on rent, the whole process takes a bit more than 30 days from filing to lock out, though in most cases the tenant moves sooner than that to avoid an eviction going on their record, and it costs the landlord less than $200 in filing fees. The consequences to the renter, whose greatest crime is being poor or having a financial emergency, are significant.

This is economic violence, even when we aren't dealing with a major public health emergency. But if we want to contain this virus and reduce the number of people who are critically ill, we must allow people to stay home from work when they need to without worrying about how they'll be able to pay their rent. No one is better off if people who should be staying home are coming to work, we need to do everything we can to make sure they don't have to.