As eviction filings pick up, a gradual crisis takes shape
In Indianapolis, eviction courts are packed as judges make their way through a monthslong backlog of cases. In Detroit, advocates 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 resort to relatives’ couches for places to sleep or seek cheaper rents outside the city.
It is not the sudden surge of evictions that tenants and advocates feared after the Supreme Court ruled in August that President Joe Biden’s extension of the eviction moratorium was unconstitutional. Instead, what’s emerging is a more gradual eviction crisis that is increasingly hitting communities across the country, especially those where the distribution of federal rental assistance has been slow and where tenants have few protections.
“For months we all used these terms like eviction ‘tsunami’ and ‘falling off the cliff,’ ” said Lee Camp, an attorney who represents tenants facing eviction in St. Louis. But those simple terms missed the complexity of the eviction process and the lack of reliable statistics to track it, he said. “It was not going to happen overnight. Certainly it would take weeks and months to play out.”
And even now, experts say, the available numbers undercount the number of tenants being forced from their homes either through court-ordered evictions or informal ones, especially as rising rents make seeking new tenants increasingly profitable for landlords.
While the number of eviction filings remained at nearly half of 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, the filings are also increasing.
In the first two weeks of September, just after the moratorium ended, eviction filings increased by 10% from the first two weeks of August. In the first two weeks of October, evictions increased by nearly 14% from the first two weeks of the previous month.
“In places that don’t have protections, these numbers are increasing pretty quickly,” said Peter Hepburn, a researcher at the Eviction Lab.
Gene Sperling, the economist overseeing the Biden administration’s pandemic relief programs, credited the $46.5 billion in federal rental assistance set aside by Congress last winter with mitigating the problem. More than 2 million payments have been made — nearly 1 million in August and September alone.
Just over 37% of all renters in the country live in places that still have local eviction bans or are postponing eviction judgments pending rental assistance, according to the Urban Institute.
But elsewhere, limited renter protections and limits in the distribution of rental assistance are spurring the increase in evictions.
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.
“The hallways were full; the outside was full coming up the steps; the foyer was full,” said Brewer, who is months behind on rent after losing her job on the assembly line at a home appliances manufacturer at the start of the pandemic. “You look around, and everybody’s knees are shaking like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ”
Some landlords say that the red tape of the rental assistance program has caused problems for them, too.
William Tran, who owns 38 properties in the Milwaukee area, said he is short $40,000 in unpaid rent, as some of his tenants have struggled to navigate the application process and others face long delays.
“It’s just a really cumbersome process, and it can be really overwhelming for a lot people,” Tran said.