Political campaigns have a way of raising important policy issues indirectly, and so it is with housing eviction in the Georgia Senate race. The Republican nominee, Herschel Walker, last week accused his opponent, Senator Warnock, of being party to eviction proceedings for tenants in a building owned by his church. 

While Mr. Walker grandstanded a bit, pledging to pay back rent himself, Mr. Warnock offered the thinnest defense:  the private firm that manages the  Columbia Tower at MLK Village building had sent the notices; Mr. Walker was just trying to “sully the name” of Ebenezer Baptist, Martin Luther King Jr.’s home church.

Yet the fact that private managers of what’s considered a well-run building feel the need to threaten eviction of a dozen chronically late-paying tenants actually tells an important story Mr. Warnock is unwilling to tell:  The threat of eviction is an important social control that helps maintain the revenue building maintenance requires and, crucially, protects other tenants from bad behavior. 

Mr. Warnock, of course, could not offer that common sense advice because, since the start of the pandemic and even before, Democrats have demonized the very idea of eviction. The Biden administration had sought to continue the eviction ban first initiated by the Trump White House as a (dubious) public health measure in March 2020.  It took the Supreme Court finally to lift the ban, extended unilaterally by the CDC, in August 2021. 

The ban built on an emerging left view that evictions per se are inherently problematic. This view gained salience with Matthew Desmond’s book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” (Crown Books, 2016). Mr. Desmond documents the effects of evictions in Milwaukee, from those being evicted to those who own buildings from which they must evict tenants.

Based on case histories from which one might draw various conclusions about whether evictions can be justified, he concludes that eviction per se is problematic. As Mr. Desmond said, “We are learning that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.”

Yet the pandemic eviction ban was never well-justified — and eviction overall should involve due process but not be banned. The Covid ban enabled tenants — who were included among the millions who received financial assistance from Washington — to stiff one of the many businesses they patronize. Food can surely be seen as essential — but there was no support for the idea of not paying for groceries (except among progressive DAs).  

There were victims here: the millions of mom-and-pop property owners who could not pay their mortgages and faced foreclosure — or who had to put off the repairs and improvements on which bill-paying tenants depended. The ban was extended even as Washington appropriated a staggering $46 billion in rent relief, which was slow to be distributed. 

More broadly, the right to eviction is a salutary form of social control. Tenants, especially in lower-income neighborhoods, need to be protected from bad actors who may be dealing drugs or worse. As the great urbanist Roger Starrr wrote in 1977, about New York: “No one relishes the prospect of evicting failed households from housing developments. The process surely does not solve the family’s problem. But like many another practical public act which falls short of the ideal program of the philosopher king, it does at least remove the threat to others in the development.”

Notably, when the eviction moratorium was lifted, the largest number of proceedings in one state (Massachusetts) were not for back rent owed but for “lease violations.” These include “engaging in criminal activity while on the premises;  threatening the health or safety of other residents;  damaging or posing an immediate and significant risk of damage to property.”

The enforcement of such social norms are crucial in low-income neighborhoods, where the hard-working are at particular risk from those engaged in criminal behavior. That’s why even public housing authorities have chosen to screen out drug dealers. 

Herschel Walker was right for the wrong reasons. Eviction notices are part of good housing management. Mr. Warnock is guilty not of heartlessness but hypocrisy.