EVICTED DURING A PANDEMIC

CHESAPEAKE — Noon was approaching and Omayra Acevedo had a choice: Make rent at the extended stay motel where she’d been living with her fiance for six months, or risk becoming homeless in the middle of a pandemic she feared would kill her.

Acevedo and her fiance, both 47, had paid $338 a week in rent for the first three months they were at the InTown Suites on Battlefield Boulevard in Chesapeake, and $295 a week since. They both had jobs and got paid on opposite weeks, which meant they had money coming in every Friday when rent was due.

Then the coronavirus hit. Acevedo lost her job as an office assistant, which paid $1,800 a month before taxes, two-thirds of their joint income. She had filed for unemployment and, late last month, knew she would get a check soon, but wasn’t sure when.

Acevedo and her fiance, Michael Gordon, said they tried for several days to let InTown Suites know they wouldn’t be able to make rent on March 27 — by telling the on-site manager multiple times and asking her to reach out to the regional manager, as well as reaching out to corporate through the company’s website.

They heard nothing by the time they came back from the food pantry — a maiden trip forced on them by coronavirus and unemployment — to their room at 11 a.m. Friday. They were locked out, an hour before rent was due.

Acevedo and Gordon aren’t alone. The Virginia Poverty Law Center has seen a spike in the number of tenants in extended stay motels being illegally evicted or threatened with it, even though the courts aren’t processing eviction cases, said Phil Storey, a staff attorney at the center.

Storey said the center’s eviction hotline received two such calls from extended stay tenants in the year before the pandemic, but about a dozen since. And he suspects the number of people being illegally evicted is far higher.

“My guess is that for everybody who gives us a call, there’s probably a dozen other people or more at that same location,” he said.

Storey said he’s seeing these “extrajudicial” evictions statewide, but a concentration of them in Hampton Roads. He predicts he’ll keep getting calls as more layoffs happen, weekly rent payments continue to stack up, and landlords have no legal way to evict tenants. “I don’t expect it to end,” he said. “It hits the fan every week.”

Legal gray area

At least four recent complaints to the center have involved

InTown Suites motels — three in Hampton Roads and one outside the area. The center hasn’t seen a corresponding increase in landlords evicting tenants from more traditional housing, like apartments, Storey said.

Tom Johnson, a spokesman for InTown Suites, said he’s not aware of any long-term tenants in the company’s Virginia motels being illegally evicted since March 16, when the judicial emergency order was announced. He said the company has and will keep complying

with state and local laws. But Johnson didn’t answer whether Acevedo and Gordon’s door had been locked because they hadn’t paid rent.

Raymond Hartz, executive director of the Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia, said his office has gotten two calls about improper evictions at extended stays. By calling and telling them that what they were doing was illegal, Hartz and other lawyers at legal aid were able to get the landlords to back down and let the tenants back in their rooms.

Extended stay motels occupy a gray zone in the housing market — they are at once motels and apartment complexes. If people have stayed in a motel, hotel or boarding house for 90 days or less and don’t have a lease, managers can kick out such “guests” without going to court. But if they’ve lived there for 91 days or have a lease, state law shrouds them in legal protections against eviction, just like tenants living in apartments and houses.

One of the main protections is that landlords have to file civil lawsuits against tenants who are behind on rent or otherwise violating their leases, and then prove their case in court. But many people don’t know they have those rights, so when a manager or landlord gives them the boot, they slink away, Storey said. “Unfortunately, unscrupulous people will take advantage of that…will do what they can get away with,” he said.

A halt to legal evictions

Extrajudicial evictions are a common tactic for landlords, even during normal times when they can sue, go to court and eventually get sheriff ’s deputies to legally remove a tenant, Storey said. They try it and see if tenants cave; if not, then they can use the courts.

Which they do, more than almost anywhere. Eviction rates in Virginia are among the highest in the nation, according to 2016 data released by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab in 2018. Four Hampton Roads cities — Hampton, Newports News, Norfolk and Chesapeake — were ranked in the top 10 in the country among large cities.

But landlords can’t legally evict tenants right now. The coronavirus pandemic has forced the court system to stop all but the most urgent proceedings. Storey said he knows of no courts in Virginia hearing eviction cases, nor any sheriffs who are physically removing tenants from their homes.

On March 16, the state Supreme Court’s chief justice ordered that non-essential, non-emergency court proceedings be postponed through April 6. Attorney General Mark Herring immediately announced the chief justice’s declaration of a judicial emergency included new eviction cases.

“It would be an absolute outrage for Virginians to be evicted from their homes during this emergency, especially as we are asking them to practice social distancing and stay home to prevent further spread of COVID-19,” Herring said in a March 17 news release. “This temporary eviction suspension is particularly important for hourly wage earners who are more likely to lose income and not be able to pay their rent because of business closures.”

On March 27, Chief Justice Don Lemons ordered the “judicial emergency” extended through April 26.

Still, people are being illegally kicked out of their homes, and the pandemic is thwarting the safeguards that might normally stop that, Storey said. After hearing about illegal evictions, tenants’ rights advocates would typically go to an extended stay motel or apartment complex to talk to residents about their legal rights. But the governor’s stay-at-home order and guidance on social distancing has made that impossible.

“This is like the worst time ever for outreach,” Storey said. “With people as isolated as they are, it makes it very difficult for us…that’s the frustrating part.”

It’s not just happening in Virginia. There have been similar reports in Atlanta, New Orleans and South Carolina. On April 2, a security guard and maintenance worker at an extended stay in New Orleans were arrested on aggravated burglary charges.

They allegedly tried to kick out tenants by using bolt cutters to destroy their door lock and barging into their room, one of them pointing a gun.

A judge quickly dismissed the charges and freed the motel’s employees. But, according to the report from The Advocate newspaper, more than a dozen other tenants at the motel left after management threatened to lock them out and shut off power and water, despite the governor’s order suspending all evictions. With little money, some said they planned to sleep in vehicles or on the street.

Eviction experts are warning that the country could be headed for a massive housing crisis after more than 16 million people filed claims for unemployment in the past three weeks. Like Virginia, many states have halted evictions because of the pandemic, but some for only 30 to 60 days, or whenever the state’s emergency declaration is over, according to a Washington Post op-ed written by the Princeton Eviction Lab’s Alieza Durana and Matthew Desmond.

Some states haven’t, and landlords are still filing eviction lawsuits. The Eviction Lab experts warn “that if evictions aren’t permanently stopped that could lead to a resurgence of the virus, after stay-at-home measures ‘bend the curve’ of infection. Evicted families end up in homeless shelters, where people eat and sleep next to each other — the opposite of social distancing.”

Knowing his rights

A 58-year-old man, who’s been living in an InTown Suites in Virginia for years, has been filling in the gap in tenants’ rights outreach by giving other residents printouts he found online that explain their rights as tenants. The Virginian-Pilot agreed not to release the man’s name or precisely identify which motel he’s staying at; he said he’s scared managers will retaliate by evicting him.

Like many of his fellow gueststurned-tenants, the man said he didn’t know he had acquired tenants’ rights after staying at the motel three months.

But when he knew he wasn’t going to make rent and saw “the writing on the wall” after watching others get evicted, he started researching online.

That led him to the Virginia Poverty Law Center’s eviction hotline. On April 2, the day before his next full rent payment was due, he went to see the onsite manager. By then, the man said, he had spoken with lawyers at the center, another lawyer, and the local commonwealth’s attorney’s office. He said he showed the manager the relevant laws, and told her he was a tenant with rights and she couldn’t legally evict him.

The manager said she knew, and within minutes, the man had a new, working keycard to his room — they’re normally changed out every week — even though he hadn’t paid.

But he said he’s worried about other people who don’t have the wherewithal to stand up for themselves. Like people who don’t know English, don’t have access to the internet or don’t know how to do the research that would lead them to the Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act or a nonprofit like the Poverty Law Center.

The man said there are a lot of people like that living in his motel, which he estimated has 200-plus units. “All of these people don’t know their rights,” he said. The man said that, once the fallout from the pandemic blows over and he’s able to get a job, he’s leaving InTown Suites.

‘Expensive to be poor’

Back in Chesapeake, Omayra Acevedo and her fiance bought themselves some time, but it cost them. On March 27, right before rent was due, Gordon overdrew his checking account to cover their rent through the following Friday, essentially borrowing against the April 3 paycheck from his job as a private security guard.

Gordon said that triggered fees totalling more than $200. “This is the way it gets really expensive to be poor,” Storey said.

More importantly, the money he’d now spent had been earmarked to pay rent for the following week: April 3 to April 10. But the third was one of Gordon’s paydays, and he unexpectedly got a bonus from his employer, which covered the overdraft fees and rent.

The next date is looming, which would have been one Acevedo’s paydays. On Wednesday, she said she didn’t know how they were going to pay it, but hoped to work out a schedule with the InTown Suites manager that would have them pay every two weeks.

Johnson, the InTown Suites spokesman, confirmed the company is working with Acevedo so she can stay in her place. He said that “in the midst of these difficult times, InTown Suites is attempting to work closely with all guests experiencing unexpected economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.” But on Friday, Acevedo said, the onsite manager asked how much money they would be able to pay, forcing her fiance to again overdraft his account to pay rent.

Acevedo’s unemployment won’t let them stay on a weekly schedule, at least not completely. She’s now received two unemployment checks, each for $163. When the first one came, she was shocked at how paltry it was.

Acevedo’s employer laid her off because of the pandemic. But even if her job as an office assistant still existed, she wouldn’t be able to do it.

Acevedo said the job can’t be done remotely and, because she’s suffered from chronic asthma since she was 15, she’s afraid of coming into contact with anyone. She usually goes to the hospital once a month because of her condition and has already been three times this year. She has a breathing machine at home.

Acevedo said she’s been holed up in her motel room for weeks, leaving only to deal with rent and go to the food pantry, where workers put groceries into trunks without opening doors or making people open windows. She stays in the car when her fiance goes into Walmart to get her prescription. When her fiance comes home from work, she makes him strip down and shower without touching anything before they resume anything approaching a normal life inside their unit.

The coronavirus has taken Acevedo’s job, money and her usual access to food. She’s scared it will take her home and force her out on the streets, leaving her unable to practice social distancing or otherwise protect herself from something that could wreck her already weakened lungs, and kill her.

“I’m stressed out,” she said, crying during a phone interview. “I’m just hoping it gets better. I mean, I know that you think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. But mostly it’s…it’s hard.

Later, she was more direct about her fears. “I don’t wanna die.”