The other people facing housing woes amid pandemic: Mom and pop landlords

The peril for Americans who cannot pay rent because of COVID-19 is well established. Less apparent is the financial ruin that faces millions of mom and pop landlords who live rent check to rent check and need the income to pay bills.

Take Tina Brown. She’s a landlord in the Bronx, one of the five New York boroughs, and just as the lockdown set in, she lost the two-family house where she’d been living because her tenants had stopped paying rent years earlier. She’d like to move into her family’s other building. But she can’t because that tenant likewise stopped paying rent last year and cannot be put out because of the state’s eviction moratorium. Until things change, Ms. Brown is sleeping on her sister’s floor.

According to an analysis of government figures, the country has 10 million to