It starts with a note on the door.
What that piece of paper says and how a tenant must respond to it varies based on the situation. Did they not pay the rent on time? Did they destroy property? Did they violate their lease agreements?
Depending on the answers to these questions, a tenant may have three to 10 days to pick up sticks and leave their unit, damaging their credit, uprooting their lives and, in many cases, leaving them homeless and marked with a scarlet E: eviction.
Eviction, the legal process by which a landlord forces a tenant to leave the property, is at the root of a crisis in the United States, a country in which many residents can’t weather even a minor financial setback as wages stagnate and wealth continues to flow upward. One car repair, one medical crisis, one traffic ticket can take an individual or family from stable housing and throw them into a spiral from which they may not recover.
According to new data released by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, that crisis has grown precipitously since the turn of the century.
Matthew Desmond led the research team in their work, scouring court records and other private data sources to compile one of the most complete records of formal eviction proceedings available and published it in April on its website. Desmond is the scholar responsible for the book “Evicted,” which broached the subject of the scope and impact of evictions on the most marginalized groups in the United States.
The results demonstrate a near doubling of evictions in the United States between 2000 and 2016, from 518,873 to 898,479. The total number of evictions peaked at more than 1 million in 2006.
The results demonstrate a near doubling of evictions in the United States between 2000 and 2016, from 518,873 to 898,479.
The data show a shocking geographic distribution concentrating evictions in the more diverse, more impoverished southeast United States, with evictions filed against 16.5 out of every 100 households in the hardest hit major city of North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2016.
Seattle, in contrast, had an eviction rate of .63 out of every 100 households.
These local numbers are probably too low, said Xochitl Maykovich, spokesperson for Washington Community Action Network.
The methodology included only evictions that involved a court, ignoring economic evictions or people who know they will be evicted and leave housing before their record gets tarnished.
“I love that they’re doing the research, but it needs to be more in depth,” Maykovich said.
Even proportionately small numbers of evictions have a devastating effect on the households involved, potentially tearing children from their parents and leaving people homeless. Studies show these impacts fall hard on marginalized groups, particularly families with children headed by a single woman of color.
“People lose jobs. People have their kids taken away,” said Adam Protheroe, the head of the Housing Unit and staff attorney with South Carolina Legal Services, the statewide legal aid organization. “Whatever organized life you have comes apart at the seams.”
“Whatever organized life you have comes apart at the seams.”
As concerns about housing affordability grow in thriving urban areas like Seattle, nonprofit and governmental agencies are working to find ways to keep people in place or prevent an eviction from staining their records. And, while tenant-friendly laws do some of the work, experts say that legislation can do only so much when the people they’re meant to protect lack access to legal counsel and affordable housing options that won’t end with another notice on the door.
Eviction is a race problem
Anyone can get evicted, but data suggest that Black and Brown communities get hit much harder than White ones.
Anyone can get evicted, but data suggest that Black and Brown communities get hit much harder than White ones.
In the 10 major cities with the highest eviction rates, according to Eviction Lab data, five had larger populations of Black residents than White ones. This in a country in which Black people made up 12.6 percent of the entire population.
In only one of these cities — Chesapeake, Virginia — did Black residents make up less than 40 percent of the population.
In a study published in 2016 in the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review examining the connection between racial discrimination and evictions, Desmond and fellow researchers Deena Greenberg and Carl Gershenson reported that previous studies of U.S. cities found that 80 percent of people facing eviction were people of color. In a Philadelphia study, 70 percent of people facing eviction were women of color.
In a previous paper, Desmond wrote, “If incarceration has become typical in the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction has become typical in the lives of women from these neighborhoods.”
The 2016 paper didn’t find a robust connection between racial discrimination and eviction of Black households in Milwaukee, the city at the heart of the research, likely because people just didn’t rent to Black households in the first place.
This vicious reality rang true to Michael Lucas, deputy director of the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, the largest provider of free legal services in the Greater Atlanta area.
“Our client base is overwhelmingly Black and overwhelmingly Black female heads of households who are dealing with these issues,” Lucas said. “Eighty percent of our client base are Black families facing eviction.”
“Eighty percent of our client base are Black families facing eviction.”
Atlanta has an eviction rate of 5.12 percent, or 16.94 evictions per day. In Fulton County, where Atlanta sits, the rate is double, with 39,032 evictions filed in 2016.
Representation matters
It’s true that Georgia and other states in the South lack robust renter protections, Lucas said. Being a day late or a dollar short on rent could land you an eviction filing, which by itself is damaging to an individual or family’s rental history.
But while he would like to see more renter-friendly laws, that’s not the first problem that Lucas would solve.
“I would put in place greater access to legal representation,” Lucas said. “With legal representation, even in a landlord-friendly state like Georgia, a good attorney can turn the tide for a tenant,” Lucas said.
And that’s a rare thing for a low-income tenant to get.
Of those 39,032 filings in Fulton County, the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation took on maybe 100, Lucas said.
In South Carolina, where Protheroe operates, South Carolina Legal Services closed 458 eviction cases in 2016 out of 86,682 filed in 2016. That number includes cases that attorneys shepherded through court, but also situations in which they gave a client some advice.
In Seattle, people facing eviction can get advice from the Housing Justice Project, an effort by the King County Bar Association, but only the Legal Action Center follows a case from start to finish in court, said Mark Chattin, the center’s directing attorney.
The center oversaw 130 cases in 2017, Chattin said. In 2016, there were 3,713 eviction filings in King County and 1,485 evictions.
Those numbers used to be worse. The Legal Action Center has up to eight attorneys after an infusion of cash from the city of Seattle. At its lowest staffing, the center had just one.
Renters in Seattle have stronger protections against evictions than the people that Lucas and Protheroe represent, but that doesn’t guarantee them safety. Seattle politicians are successful at passing laws that make it easier to get into housing and harder to be evicted from it, but without access to an attorney, those laws don’t mean much.
The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections enforces the Just Cause Ordinance, which restricts the reasons for which a landlord can evict a tenant. They received 1,684 calls, emails, contacts and referrals in 2017 related to the Just Cause Ordinance. Many of those referrals were from the Legal Action Center and Housing Justice Project — organizations with limited resources.
“If a landlord has improperly evicted a tenant, we encourage them to seek legal assistance with that,” Wendy Shark, spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email.
If you or your family is really hard up, chances of getting an attorney go down fast.
The Legal Action Center accepts money from the city, which completed a competitive bidding process in November 2017 for services offered in 2018. That bidding process resulted in a contract that stipulated that the center should have a 95 percent success rate, defined as clients being in housing six months after receiving services, Chattin said.
“We are based on results, so we have to screen very, very carefully to make sure the clients we’re taking we can help,” Chattin said. “On the other side, we’re the only ones that do this.”
The Housing Justice Project doesn’t have this restriction, which means their attorneys see the bulk of the evictions that take place in King County, said Edmund Witter, the Housing Justice Project manager.
“If you’re going through an eviction in King County, I probably know about it because we handle 90 percent of the evictions,” Witter said.
Witter and his team intervene in evictions that aren’t slam-dunk cases. That gives them a deep insight into the flaws in the system that allow a woman to be evicted over a $4 shortfall in rent, or a cancer patient unable to find a new place to stay after an eviction ruined her rental history.
“A lot of judges see it as a contract law question,” Witter said. “Historically speaking, it’s an equity question — yes, this person didn’t pay $4, but should they lose their home?”
“A lot of judges see it as a contract law question,” Witter said. “Historically speaking, it’s an equity question — yes, this person didn’t pay $4, but should they lose their home?”
Even if a household facing eviction could find a way to raise the money in the hopes of hiring a private attorney, the chances of them finding one is still very low.
None of the attorneys interviewed for this piece know of private-market lawyers who take on eviction cases, especially for low-income people.
People facing eviction are mainly low-income, and attorney fees, a potential incentive, aren’t available in a landlord-tenant case, said John Pollock, coordinator for the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.
But Pollock and his organization firmly believe that anyone who walks into a courtroom deserves a right to counsel. The scales of justice tip inexorably toward a landlord who shows up with counsel to fight with a tenant who doesn’t.
The court system, as many people who interact with it know, is not based on a layman’s version of justice, a compelling narrative of right and wrong. It often requires an attorney who can translate the very real issues behind a client’s story into a defense that the court is capable of embracing.
“That’s not their fault,” Pollock said. “Legal proceedings are complex, and evictions are no exceptions to that rule. There are many defenses they could have to eviction that they do not realize.”
Unlike criminal court where a defendant must be provided access to an attorney, there is no such uniform expectation in civil court. Some governments provide limited access — Seattle recently moved to guarantee that undocumented people facing legal proceedings would have access to representation.
The biggest player to ensure right to counsel in eviction proceedings is indisputably New York City. The City Council passed an act in 2017 guaranteeing that everyone making under 200 percent of the federal poverty level will receive counsel in eviction proceedings. It will take five years to fully implement the program, and the city has committed $155 million to do it.
Additional cities including San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C., are looking at potential new laws to expand access in eviction suits as well.
It just makes sense, Pollock says.
“When it comes to counsel, it’s all about prevention,” Pollock said. “You keep much more serious problems from happening.”
This “stitch in time” philosophy means stepping in before a family becomes homeless, before parents lose their children, before a worker loses their job, before a child loses months of educational attainment. Getting in before those dire consequences surface prevents human suffering, but it’s also coldly pragmatic.
If people do not become homeless, there’s less money spent on homeless services. If parents keep their children, that’s less money spent on the foster care system. If children avoid early traumas and stay in school, they’re more likely to have better outcomes later in life, sparing costs on the criminal justice and mental health systems.
“Counsel is not free, but if you can divert people away from homeless shelters, if you can keep them housed, it’s a huge cost savings,” Pollock said. A lawyer doesn’t cost anywhere near that.”
Can’t stop, won’t stop
The public investment can’t stop at a right to counsel. That doesn’t solve the underlying problem — that poor people, who are often Black and Brown, can’t afford to live in areas of economic opportunity like Seattle.
That means affordable housing, and lots of it.
“We need much greater support for truly affordable, responsibly managed housing,” Lucas said. “If we had enough of that, there would not be a market for the slumlords that we have to work against.”
“We need much greater support for truly affordable, responsibly managed housing,” Lucas said. “If we had enough of that, there would not be a market for the slumlords that we have to work against.”
Atlanta has inclusionary zoning policies that require market-rate developers to build below-market-rate housing, but it doesn’t get into the deeply affordable price ranges his clients need. That’s going to take government intervention, Lucas said.
“We have seen that the market does not have a solution for the lowest-income folks and housing,” Lucas said.
Seattle and the Puget Sound region are wrestling with a dearth of affordable housing and how to raise money to produce it in the quantities that it will take to help the poorest residents. Roughly 30 percent of renters are rent burdened in King County, according to the Eviction Lab data. That means they pay more than 30 percent of their income toward rent.
If they stumble, if an unexpected bill falls at the wrong time of the month, that can send a household into eviction proceedings that then compounds their inability to get back into the housing market. Even if an eviction is filed and never enacted, it can haunt a person through their rental history.
“The way the system works is if you’re poor, you make one mistake, we’re just going to grind you down,” Chattin said. “We don’t give second chances if you’re poor and if you’re people of color.”
*This article has been updated.
Ashley Archibald is a Staff Reporter covering local government, policy and equity. Have a story idea? She can be can reached at ashleya (at) realchangenews (dot) org. Follow Ashley on Twitter @AshleyA_RC
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