Iowa eliminates 30-day eviction notice policy
Thousands of Iowa’s renters could see less notice for evictions following an Iowa Supreme Court ruling. The decision ends a federal COVID-19-era requirement that landlords give tenants who have not paid their rent a 30-day eviction notice. Now, landlords are only required to give three days’...
dailyiowan.com
Iowa eliminates 30-day eviction notice policy
The new ruling could leave low-income tenants more vulnerable to eviction.
Jack Moore, Managing News Editor
February 5, 2025
Kelsey Kremer/The Register
Outside Iowa’s Supreme Court and the Iowa Judicial Branch Building on Monday, April 22, 2019, in Des Moines.
Thousands of Iowa’s renters could see less notice for evictions following an Iowa Supreme Court ruling. The decision ends a federal COVID-19-era requirement that landlords give tenants who have not paid their rent a 30-day eviction notice. Now, landlords are only required to give three days’ notice.
The court’s decision makes Iowa the first state in the country to rule against the federal statute.
“It will burden an already heavily burdened system,” Christine Hayes, director of development at the Iowa City Shelter House, said. “It’s cruel. It is wrong-headed, and it is likely to have very serious impacts on our work and the people who we are serving.”
The decision centers around a rule in the 2020 federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES Act, which requires landlords using some form of federal assistance to give 30 days’ notice to their tenants prior to eviction.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act was passed to avoid mass evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a 120-day moratorium on all evictions with the 30-day eviction notice requirement.
Those provisions expired, but because the 30-day eviction notice requirement had no official end date, landlords have continued to practice it. While there have been challenges to the statute in other states, none have taken to overrule it, except Iowa.
“It was a surprise,” Director of University of Iowa Student Legal Services Amanda Elkins said. “It was one of the most surprising things, and I’ve been at SLS for about 10 years.”
Iowa Legal Aid, a free law office for tenant-driven issues, argued putting a limit on a provision that had no end date would go against the law written by the U.S. Congress.
Jim Kringlen, the managing attorney for Iowa Legal Aid in Iowa City, said to the Johnson County Board of Supervisors in 2023 resources for low-income renters were dwindling at both the state and federal levels.
“We do have resources for people who are experiencing homelessness, but sometimes they are stretched too thin, and the resources are not adequate,” Kringlen said.
The Iowa Supreme Court’s opinion on the case, written by Justice Edward Mansfield, ruled the eviction notice policy was meant to be temporary, just like many of the other provisions in the CARES Act, and it expired after the 120 days in 2020 like the eviction moratorium.
Elkins said she was not expecting the Iowa Supreme Court to rule in favor of ending the eviction notice statute because of the precedent set by other states. She said the decision will likely not impact many UI students despite the high percentage of renters in Iowa City. More than 70 percent of UI students live off campus.
Approximately 40 percent of UI Student Legal Service cases involve disputes between landlords and tenants. But a small number of those cases involve eviction. Elkins said within the last fiscal year, they’ve had seven cases where students were having an eviction dispute.
Elkins attributes the low number of cases to many college students having the financial means to avoid eviction, so it rarely crosses their desk.
“I honestly think that this is going to have a much bigger impact on other low-income Iowans,” Elkins said.
Low-income renters who have federal subsidies going toward their rent costs are now vulnerable to this new rule. More than 60,000 people in Iowa utilize housing subsidies with 2.8 percent in Johnson County.
The number of people filing for eviction has also been rising in the count with more than 740 evictions recorded in 2023.
Christopher Warnock, an Iowa City-based attorney who specializes in law representing both tenants and landlords, said he was surprised by the change, but he thinks the Iowa Supreme Court made the right decision in recognizing the CARES Act was meant as temporary.
“I was surprised because there’s such an atmosphere of anti-landlord,” Warnock said.
Warnock said evictions can often take a month on their own due to legal proceedings in small claims court. Adding the extra 30 days, he argues, only kicks the can down the road to the next month when a tenant can’t pay.
“They want to say that, ‘I don’t want to move,’ ‘I don’t have another place to go to,’ but they’re digging themselves in deeper and deeper in terms of their debt,” Warnock said. “You have stayed in the place for another two months, but now you owe $2,000 more. Is that really helping people?”
Warnock said he does not expect the change to have an impact on the number of people filing for eviction.
Hayes at Shelter House said she expects the decision will create a larger issue for Iowa’s unhoused population. She said since January 2023, the average length of stay at the Shelter House has tripled.
“I expect a clog in our Rapid Rehousing system trying to get people housed because more people are in crisis,” Hayes said. “The goal is to keep people from experiencing homelessness. That’s what our eviction prevention or homelessness prevention program is for. So, you don’t have to have that crisis to access the resources, but now that seems significantly less probable.”
And all of those dumbasses didn't want the Indian jawn to be in office.
