With cases piling up, an eviction crisis unfolds step by step

In Indianapolis, eviction courts are jam-packed as judges go through a month-long backlog of cases. In Detroit, spokesmen are rushing to knock on the doors of tenants facing possible eviction. In Gainesville, Florida, landlords are filing evictions at a rapid pace as displaced tenants turn to relatives’ couches to get beds or seek cheaper rent outside the city.

It is not the sudden wave of evictions that tenants and lawyers feared after the Supreme Court ruled in August that President Biden’s extension of the eviction moratorium was unconstitutional. What is emerging instead is a more gradual eviction crisis that is increasingly affecting communities across the country, especially those where the distribution of federal rental assistance has been slow, and where tenants have little protection.

“For months, we used all of these terms like eviction ‘tsunami’ and ‘falling off the cliff,'” said Lee Camp, a lawyer representing tenants facing eviction in St. Louis. But these simple concepts lacked the complexity of the eviction process and the lack of reliable statistics to track it, he said. – It should not happen overnight. It will definitely take weeks and months to play out. “

And even now, experts say, the available figures dramatically count the number of tenants forced out of their homes either through legal eviction or informal, especially as rising rental rates make it increasingly profitable for landlords to search for new tenants.

Although the number of eviction reports remained at nearly half of the pre-pandemic averages during the first two weeks of October, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, in the 31 cities and six states it tracks, applications are also increasing.

In the first two weeks of September, just after the moratorium ended, eviction estimates increased by 10 per cent from the first two weeks of August. In the first two weeks of October, eviction increased by almost 14 per cent from the first two weeks of the previous month.

“In places that do not have protection, these numbers increase quite rapidly,” said Peter Hepburn, a researcher at Eviction Lab. “And we do not know where the roof is.”

Gene Sperling, the economist who oversees the Biden administration’s pandemic assistance programs, credited $ 46.5 billion in federal rental assistance set aside by Congress last winter to curb the problem. More than two million payments have been made – almost one million in August and September alone.

Some jurisdictions have used some of the money to introduce programs that provide alternatives to eviction or legal assistance for tenants. Just over 37 percent of all tenants in the country live in places that still have local eviction bans or postpone eviction sentences pending rental assistance, according to the Urban Institute.

But elsewhere, limited rent protection and restrictions on the distribution of rental assistance encourage the increase in evictions.

“No one should sleep well at night when there are still too many painful, avoidable ejaculations,” said Mr. Sperling.

In Indianapolis in late October, Pamela Brewer waited nervously for a hearing on her pending eviction in a courthouse packed with hundreds of other tenants. There, landlords have put new evictions on a backlog of thousands of elderly people from the pandemic that is currently being executed.

“The hallways were full, the outside was full when they came up the stairs, the foyer was full,” said Brewer, who is months behind on rent after losing his job on the assembly line of a household appliance maker at the start of a pandemic. “You look around and all your knees shake like: What’s going to happen?”

Brewer applied for rental assistance in September, but she said her application was rejected because she accidentally marked “no” in response to a question about whether she had been affected by Covid-19.

Her appeal of the decision is pending, and she does not know how long she will have before the judge will approve the eviction.

“I’m in limbo,” said Ms. Brewer. ‘I’m about to be thrown out. I’m 61 years old and I have nowhere to go. “

Some landlords say that bureaucracy in the rental assistance program has created problems for them as well.

William Tran, who owns 38 properties in the Milwaukee area, said he is currently missing $ 40,000 in unpaid rent, as some of his tenants have struggled to navigate the application process and others are facing long delays.

“It’s just a very cumbersome process, and it can be very overwhelming for a lot of people,” Mr. Tran said.

Overall, however, landlords collected rent during the pandemic about as regularly as they did before the pandemic, according to data collected by the National Multifamily Housing Council, an industry group for landlords.

Howard Spellman, a landlord with 37 rental units across California and New Mexico, said his tenants who were behind rent received rental assistance without major problems.

“I have done better during the pandemic because of the help of the government than in previous years,” said Mr. Spellman.

The real extent of the crisis tenants face is underestimated by the available figures on evictions, say housing lawyers and experts. “The landslide is absolutely here across the country,” said Katie Goldstein, director of housing rights at the Center for Popular Democracy.

There is no national database of evictions, and the random patchwork of local politics and record-keeping methods in courts across the country pose serious obstacles to creating one. One-third of all U.S. counties have no available data from court trials at all, according to New America, a left-leaning think tank.

And most tenants are forced to leave their rental units, not because of formal eviction cases, but because they have been illegally banned or their tools have been shut down, or because they want to avoid a eviction being added to their mail by leave their own. There were 5.5 of these so-called informal evictions for every formal eviction in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey.

A recent survey of low-income tenants in Washington State found that one in five tenants was exposed to a method of informal eviction during the pandemic, compared to one in eight before the pandemic.

In September 2020, shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded its eviction moratorium, Antionette Cobb returned home to find her St. Louis apartment almost completely empty. She had fallen into rent after losing her job as a housekeeper at a hotel months before due to the pandemic. In August, she had used up her savings. Cobb’s landlady turned down her offer to pay more than half of her $ 550 rent for that month, she said, and decided to seize the property instead.

“My heart just fell,” she said, remembering the remnants of her furniture strewn around the apartment: the sofa with the pillows removed; the box spring and the headboard without a mattress on top; legs on the coffee table without the glass top.

“I can not go to the store and buy things I’ve had for years, things my grandmother gave me, picture frames,” Cobb said. “It was heartbreaking, it was like I was nothing.”

Ms. Cobb has lived with a friend in Ohio and searched for a place in St. Louis that she can afford. But after months of searching, she has yet to find an apartment she qualifies for with the revenue she earns from Instacart deliveries.

“Eviction is just one part of a much bigger problem,” said Mr. Camp, the tenant’s attorney. “It is this access to accessible housing. It is the debt that has accumulated on top of these families that has fallen into arrears during these months. It is a culmination of various factors that only affect housing stability in general. “

Housing lawyers say that the rental assistance program has not been able to solve these major problems.

“Rental assistance was not designed for tenants; Rental assistance was designed to stabilize an industry, ”said Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants, a law firm in Kansas City, Mo., and housing campaign director at People’s Action, another progressive advocacy group.

Without increased protection for tenants and intervention in the exploding rental market, tenants will continue to be displaced through the courts or otherwise, she claimed.

June King was approved for more than $ 20,000 in rent assistance to cover months of rent she was unable to pay at her Gainesville apartment after she suffered a serious case of Covid that prevented her from returning to work as a nurse for seven months.

But in October, she found a note on the door stating that her lease would not be renewed and that she had until December 31 to get out.

She is desperately looking for a place for her and her husband and two children to move to, but affordable options are small.

“I’m really scared of not being able to find anything and be left out there,” King said. – Especially during the holidays.