Article Spotlight: “It’s Official: Poverty Got Worse Under Biden”

Our Eviction Court Clients Won’t be at "No Kings" Protests

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on October 17, 2025.

Last week in eviction court, a young father who lives with his wife and two children, ages one and three, asked the judge for a few weeks to catch up on his past-due rent.

After recovering from some health issues, the young man now works at an Olive Garden for $15.25 per hour. He sells his plasma twice a week. He has been homeless before, he explained to the judge, so he is doing everything he can to prevent his young children from going through that experience.

All praise to the organizers of this weekend’s “No Kings” protests. But this young father, and likely no one else we see in eviction court, will be joining.

Image by Willthecheerleader18 via Wikimedia Commons

As I have mentioned here before, we never hear our eviction court clients complain about Donald Trump’s crushing the free press, browbeating higher education, prosecuting his political enemies, or bulldozing the checks and balances of the U.S. constitutional form of government.

As heinous and damaging as those actions are, concerns about them are luxuries our clients cannot afford.

As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would predict, they are focused on the struggle to keep a roof over their families’ heads, food on the table, and prescriptions filled. While No Kings protests are dominated by white, older, higher-educated people, the benches in eviction courts are disproportionately filled with young families, particularly Black people and other people of color.

The latter demographic did not show up in last year’s elections in the way that Democrats had hoped for. This despite the fact that some commentators, including once-and-maybe-future Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, claimed the economy was “extraordinary” under Biden-Harris. Some pundits claimed the right-wing media duped voters into thinking otherwise.

But people lined up in eviction court or facing foreclosure or struggling to keep their utilities turned on knew better. The cost for housing and other essential goods skyrocketed under Biden-Harris. Presidential voters who were concerned about the economy voted mostly for Trump.

Now, there is new evidence that the people who could see that their incomes were not enough to pay rising rent and food costs were right all along. This week’s article spotlight is “It’s Official: Poverty Got Worse Under Joe Biden” by Stephen Semler, published originally in Semler’s “Polygraph” Substack and republished in Jacobin.

Semler, a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, repeats what we and many others have pointed out: at the end of the first Trump administration and early in Biden’s terms, the U.S. figured out how to reduce poverty. As we wrote in December, 2022:

(Our clients) were making ends meet thanks in large part to some combination of Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, and maximized food stamps.

Together with a national eviction moratorium, we extended a lifeline to tens of millions of Americans. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University estimates that these programs prevented more than three million eviction cases

So what changed? Semler shows us in words and charts:

The horrifying surge in poverty — and economic insecurity more broadly — afterward is attributable to pandemic aid programs expiring or being eliminated during a cost-of-living crisis. In 2024, Kamala Harris chose not to campaign on resurrecting a version of the pandemic welfare state, despite it having led to a historic reduction in economic hardship in 2021 and the cost of living having been voters’ top concern since 2022.

As Semler’s charts show, on the Biden-Harris watch, U.S. poverty rate in 2022 increased at a faster rate than any period in a half-century. Childhood poverty more than doubled. As Semler says:

That approach gave us Donald Trump, whose own approach to worsening economic insecurity apparently involves slashing welfare further, deploying military personnel on US soil, and aggressively cracking down on free speech. The Trump administration’s militarized embodiment of cancel culture might be exactly what some people desire politically. But far more people — most people, it appears — simply want a brand of politics centered on reducing the shittiness of everyday life. Neither party is offering one.

To be clear, two things can be true:

1. Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are actively harming working-class and poor people with their policies; and

2. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and many Democratic office holders did not do enough to protect the rights of those same working-class and poor people.

The goal here is not to relitigate the 2024 election, which we analyzed last November. It is to avoid the same mistakes in 2026 and 2028 and beyond.

Hopefully, we will. The Democratic response to the current federal government shutdown is centered on access to healthcare. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are successfully focusing on affordability of housing, food, transportation, and child care.

Those are political agendas that our eviction court clients care about, and millions of others do, too.