Well, I for one never believed the moratorium would expire as promised at the end of August. Never. And, very quietly, after subtle signals at the Illinois State Fair, the Governor went ahead and extended. Why? Pick your reason. Delta variant (hmmmm…. there were less than 3000 cases yesterday and the pandemic seems to be more of an endemic and less of an emergency now that Illinois has been “restored”); emergency rental assistance money (why isn’t that making its way into the hands of landlords sooner? We’ve heard this excuse before); maybe it is to coincide with the likely improper but somehow in force Center for Disease Control eviction moratorium; or maybe “just because”… The reason really doesn’t matter. By way of executive order 2021-19, the moratorium is now extended to September 18, 2021.
If you’ve called our offices lately, you may know that we are so swamped with cases, that, for right now, we aren’t taking on cases for new clients (we are trying to service the clients we have). This setback just makes the process a bit more complex. If this post seems jaded and somewhat depressing, it is. I greatly empathize with housing providers enduring this long, long slog through the politics of Covid-19 and I’m as weary as I am sure most of you are.
The relevant portion of the executive order provides:
That’s short and sweet. The new language in Section 9 changes a bit of a procedural loophole related to making challenges to a defendant’s Illinois Tenant Declaration. So, for the time being, evictions can be filed in those good old emergency situations and against “non-covered persons” and not against covered persons nor people not delinquent in rent. I’d say it is 50/50 that as we close in on September 18, (especially considering last year’s Covid-19 case curve) we might see one more of these.