New York landlord Rosanna Morey.

Photo: Jillian Melchior

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Thursday injunction against New York state’s eviction moratorium didn’t come too soon for Rosanna Morey. She is dying of blood cancer, and her worst enemy lives downstairs.

Ms. Morey, 48, lives with her teenage son in Seaford, N.Y., in a high ranch house she bought in 2013, about five years after she was diagnosed with a rare, incurable and unpredictable cancer. Ms. Morey undergoes chemotherapy, and last year her sister offered to move into the ground-floor apartment to help care for her. In June 2020, Ms. Morey told her tenant, Lorrie Santucci, that she wouldn’t renew the lease. Ms. Santucci, who has lived there for about three years, refused to leave. According to Ms. Morey, Ms. Santucci hasn’t paid rent since November.

New York state’s Covid-19 Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2020 permits tenants to declare hardship because of the pandemic and prohibits landlords from evicting them or even challenging their claim in court. By a 6-3 vote, the justices held that the scheme violates the “longstanding teaching that ordinarily ‘no man can be a judge in his own case’ consistent with the Due Process Clause.”

Under a nationwide moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, landlords can face fines or jail time for evicting tenants who fall below an income threshold and cite Covid hardship for their failure to pay rent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in June that the CDC had “exceeded its existing statutory authority” with the moratorium, but he joined four colleagues to let the ban stand until it expired “in only a few weeks.” The CDC extended the moratorium anyway, and on Friday a federal district judge declined to block it. The justices are likely to revisit the question.

Covid relief measures like the Paycheck Protection Program were designed to help the vulnerable while dispersing the cost among current and future taxpayers. The eviction moratoriums are different: They impose severe hardships on certain people in the name of helping others. The toll is especially high on small landlords like Ms. Morey, who must pay for insurance, mortgages, property taxes and upkeep regardless of whether they’re receiving rent payments. Ms. Morey says Ms. Santucci owes her almost $16,000.

Ms. Morey standing beside her home in Seaford, N.Y.

Photo: Jillian Kay Melchior

Landlord-tenant disputes can be bitter. Ms. Santucci’s lawyer, Glenn Michaelson, has urged his client not to apply for rental-arrears funding available through New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program. “The two women are mortal enemies,” he says. “I’m not going to do you any favors in this situation. . . . I’m not filling out paperwork to enable the landlady to get this ERAP.” Ms. Morey’s lawyer, Mindy Roman, says her client would be reluctant to accept such government funding because it could complicate legal efforts to evict Ms. Santucci.

Mr. Michaelson proposed a settlement in spring 2021 under which Ms. Santucci would agree to move out by Oct. 31 if Ms. Morey dropped all claims for back rent. He says the landlady and her lawyer “should have gotten down on their knees and thanked me.” Ms. Morey declined the offer, noting she had no guarantee she could enforce the departure if Ms. Santucci remained in the apartment on Nov. 1.

“You want utopian justice?” Mr. Michaelson taunted earlier this week, in our interview before the Supreme Court ruling. “Go the distance with me, and see how that’s going to end up for you. . . . I’m not that smart, and I’m not that political, but all I have to do is pick up a newspaper and read, and I see they’re not going to be able to evict by Sept. 1. And they’re negotiating with me like they’re in a position of power?”

On Friday Mr. Michaelson said the high court’s ruling “really doesn’t have much of an effect on my case.” He noted that the CDC moratorium remains in effect, that New York courts are severely backlogged, and that even under ordinary circumstances it’s difficult to evict tenants like his client, who is 75 and uses a walker. Ms. Roman acknowledged that it may still take months to evict Ms. Santucci. “This tenant is not leaving,” she says. “She’s going to get carried out by the sheriff, and time is on her side. Unfortunately for my client, who’s dying of cancer, time is really an issue.”

Brandie LaCasse, one of the plaintiffs who challenged the New York eviction moratorium, is more optimistic. “I’m elated because the hardship declaration is the reason I haven’t been able to evict,” she told me Friday. She’s a single mom and an Air Force veteran who served combat deployments in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. She cashed in her roughly $100,000 Thrift Savings Plan to invest in rental property, but she’s taken “a huge financial hit” as two tenants stopped paying rent. “The fact that I have a deed in the state of New York means absolutely nothing,” she said before the court ruling. “That deed is garbage.”

Ms. LaCasse would like to move into the single-family home she owns in Rhinebeck, N.Y., but she can’t boot her tenants, who are nearly $25,000 behind in rent. In court filings, she described herself and her underage daughter as “effectively homeless.” Ms. LaCasse works three jobs and says she’s seeking a fourth “to offset the cost of my tenants not paying so I don’t get so far into debt, I can never get out.”

Tiktok of one of the tenants setting a fire inside a landlord's home. Video: Brandie LaCasse The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Ms. LaCasse showed me a TikTok video in which the tenant’s daughter uses an aerosol can to spray a heart on the mirror of a bathroom in the house, then lights it on fire. She says her tenants have broken doors, put holes in the walls, and clogged the septic tank, causing what she estimates to be tens of thousands of dollars of damage. (The tenants declined to comment.)

The CDC order doesn’t preclude evictions of tenants who are “engaging in criminal activity while on the premises,” “threatening the health or safety of other residents,” or damaging property. But landlords I interviewed said they’ve struggled to evict even in extreme circumstances and even in places like Connecticut, where the state eviction moratorium lapsed earlier this summer.

Alvin Blount, 56, bought a rental property with pre-existing occupants in May 2020 in Naugatuck, Conn. His upstairs tenant, Mary Rodriguez, has accumulated more than $7,000 in past-due rent and refuses to leave. She has also caused at least $15,000 in property damage, says Mr. Blount’s lawyer, Dana Guiliano. Mr. Blount says Ms. Rodriguez flooded the apartment, blew out the electrical system, and piled up trash on the porch and yard. The squalor has attracted roaches, rats and complaints from neighbors, he says, and it has also made the vacant first-floor apartment unrentable.

I texted Ms. Rodriguez detailed questions, which she didn’t answer. “This is harassment,” she wrote. She told Marc Fitch of the Yankee Institute, who originally reported on Mr. Blount’s troubles, that she wants to move, has struggled to find affordable alternative housing, and is coping with personal and family health problems.

Alvin Blount’s rental property in Naugatuck, Conn.

Photo: Alvin Blount

Ms. Guiliano says this eviction should be simple, even with the CDC moratorium in effect, but Connecticut courts are backlogged and don’t seem to be differentiating between cases involving serious nuisance and mere nonpayment. Mr. Blount filed his case 12 months ago, but upstairs Ms. Rodriguez remains.

“There’s no justice for the small landlord,” Ms. Guiliano says. “It’s unbalanced, and it seems intentional.” She now suspects that Connecticut’s political leaders “want to keep it backed up” and “want to keep the tenants in.”

Spouses Vivi Gloriod and Marty Jensen discovered this year that a tenant had used a fraudulent identity to rent one of their properties in Denver, a fact police confirmed. They don’t know the tenant’s real name, but whoever it is now owes six months in back rent. They filed for eviction in June, but landlords face tough odds in court. Before the pandemic, landlords could seek to evict bad-actor tenants for defaulting on rent, but with the CDC moratorium in effect, they have “no other option but to try to evict based on the criminal or nuisance activity,” which is harder to prove, says Victor L. Sulzer, a Denver attorney.

On July 29, Denver police executed a search warrant on Ms. Gloriod and Mr. Jensen’s rental property and arrested three adults for a range of offenses including distribution of methamphetamine, weapons possession and forgery. One man arrested at the building has been charged with nine counts, according to Denver’s district attorney. I tried contacting the tenant, but the phone had been disconnected.

The good news is that an eviction is finally imminent. But “if they have been sitting in our house, if they have been cooking that meth that they’ve been dealing in our city, the house will have to be taken down to the studs,” Ms. Gloriod says. As for recovering their financial losses, “there’s no recourse.” Is that how the CDC spells Covid relief?

Ms. Melchior is a Journal editorial page writer.

Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Mene Ukueberuwa and Dan Henninger. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition