‘EXTRA AFRAID’
Black residents are the most vulnerable Florida renters facing increased threat of eviction during pandemic
Every few days, Bathsheba Collingwood sprays her furniture and walls with bleach to scrub away new traces of the persistent mold she suspects caused her 3-year-old son’s asthma.
The bathroom pipes have been leaking into her closet for months, leaving puddles on the carpet when she takes long showers. The nails holding her living room floor in place sometimes poke up, stabbing at her feet.
In the winter, her heating was unreliable. And as the weather warms, her air conditioning unit isn’t working either.Still, she’s fighting to keep the two-bedroom apartment on Mercy Drive.
If she is forced to leave, the 2007 Acura MDX she spent her stimulus check to purchase from a buy-here-pay-here lot in April will likely be her next home.
“Now, I’m extra afraid,” said Collingwood, 38. “Nobody else is going to take me. Nobody else is going to move me in with three evictions.”
Tens of thousands of people in Florida lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, leaving many at risk of eviction. But renters living in predominately Black neighborhoods were most vulnerable, new data compiled by the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at University of Florida show. The data, which includes two years of eviction court filings
“The wealth gap by race in the U.S. is just staggeringly large. It’s not just that there’s inequality. It’s that it’s incredibly persistent, even at a time when, over that same period, some other disparities have gotten a little smaller.”
— Alexandra Killewald, a sociology professor at Harvard University
for 61 of the state’s 67 counties, provides the most comprehensive look at eviction the Shimberg Center has ever produced.
An Orlando Sentinel analysis of the filings and U.S. Census Bureau demographic data in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties in 2019 and 2020 shows that when Black residents are the largest racial group in a ZIP code, the eviction rate is likely to be significantly higher than in most predominately white ZIP codes nearby.
That was true before the pandemic and it persisted even as state and federal moratoriums and local rental assistance programs dramatically lowered eviction filings, which could ramp up again once those protections — which have failed many renters — are rescinded.
“My district is like a tale of two cities,” said City Commissioner Regina Hill, who represents an area stretching from the skyscrapers of downtown Orlando to the economically blighted neighborhoods on the city’s west side. ”I have the economic machine downtown and I have those who make less than $8, $9, $10 an hour, and those who are homeless.”
Hill’s constituents live in the ZIP codes with the largest Black populations in the region.
Two ZIP codes in her district — 32805 and 32808, which includes Parramore and West Orlando, where Collingwood lives — consistently saw eviction rates higher than the county average before and during the pandemic.
This is not the sign of a “broken” system, said Nikitra Bailey, an executive vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending. “Unfortunately, it’s working exactly as it’s been designed.”
She, along with other housing researchers, sociologists, lawyers and advocates, said the racial disparities in evictions are the result of decades of federal housing laws and government lending practices that have largely cut Black Americans out of homeownership — and the protections it comes with. While it can take months or years for a bank to foreclose on a homeowner, it often takes landlords just days to evict a renter.
Currently, about 70% of white Floridians own homes compared with only 47% of Black residents, according to Blaise Denton, research manager for the Florida Housing Coalition.
“There is no income bracket where more white people rent than own,” Denton said. “And there is no income bracket where more white people rent than own free and clear.”
Conversely, for Black Americans, homeownership does not surpass renting until the highest measured income level, Denton said. That also means those most insulated from housing instability are white.
And with real estate as the most valuable asset for most families, the homeownership gap has also contributed to a persistent wealth gap that makes it more difficult for Black families to keep up with rent, car notes, utility bills and other expenses when a financial emergency arises.
“The wealth gap by race in the U.S. is just staggeringly large,” said Alexandra Killewald, a sociology professor at Harvard University. “It’s not just that there’s inequality. It’s that it’s incredibly persistent, even at a time when, over that same period, some other disparities have gotten a little smaller.”
Evictions higher in Black ZIPs
Osceola County has the smallest Black population in the region. Still, the ZIP code with the largest concentration of Black residents has the fifth-most evictions of the county’s 17 ZIP codes, according to Shimberg Center data.
The eviction disparity is far more apparent in Orange and Seminole counties, where the Black population is larger, the data show.
Seminole’s 32771 ZIP code in Sanford is nearly 27% Black, the county’s largest concentration of Black residents. It is home to historic Goldsboro, which was one of the first Black-incorporated towns in the state. It also saw 806 eviction filings between 2019 and 2020, the most of any ZIP code in the county, and had the second-highest eviction rate when adjusted for population. That’s despite a median household income of nearly $62,000.
In Orange County, the five ZIP codes with the largest Black populations all appear in the top 10 ZIP codes for eviction, both by raw numbers and by eviction rate.
On one side of downtown is ZIP code 32803. It is 73% white and includes Lake Eola Heights, Colonialtown and Lake Underhill. There, less than 2% of renter households faced eviction.
About four miles away is ZIP code 32805 in Hill’s district. It’s home to the historically Black Parramore neighborhood and stretches into West Orlando.
About 75% of the residents there are Black, the highest concentration of Black residents in the county by ZIP. Its renters are more likely to face eviction than those anywhere else in the region. Between 2019 and 2020, renters in nearly 1 in 10 units were sued for eviction.
“That is representative of the national crisis,” said Emily Benfer, a visiting law professor at Wake Forest University and one of the nation’s foremost experts on eviction. “The threat of eviction during the pandemic is concentrated in communities of color overwhelmingly. And that was also the case and the highest risk factor before the pandemic began.”
‘We could have caught up’
Until January, Donald Harper lived in a five-bedroom home off Old Winter Garden Road in ZIP code 32805 with his wife and five of their nine children.
Before the pandemic, the family was living within their means. Both Harper and his wife worked and Harper, who was a chef for a Loews Hotels restaurant, could cover the $1,995 a month they paid in rent with a single paycheck. They had struck a rent-to-own deal with their landlord and, after three years of renting, had plans to buy the house this year.
But on March 21, 2020, just 10 days after the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 had caused a global pandemic, Harper and his wife were both laid off. From March 2020 to February, layoffs disproportionately harmed Black Floridians. According to the state Department of Economic Opportunity, the unemployment rate for Black workers was 11.2%. For white workers, it was 7.8%.
In the beginning, they thought they would be back at work by June and would be able to ride things out. They home-schooled the children and tried to keep making rent payments with a combination of their savings, their last paychecks from work and, eventually, their unemployment checks.
But then the extra federal unemployment benefits ended, Loews stopped covering Harper’s medical insurance and his return date for work was pushed back again. Harper filled out countless job applications but more than 30 employers told him he was overqualified for the positions they had open.
Harper kept making payments toward rent until July. In August, they started to fall behind. His landlord, a longtime family friend, filed to evict the family on Dec. 17. Days later, Loews called him back to work security for $15 less per hour than his last position and he got a second job as a delivery driver for a local bakery.
He promised his landlord they would catch up.
Harper offered to pay at least half the rent each month until he was back on his feet. He tried to get help through a county-run rental assistance program but the money was capped at $4,000 per family and landlords had to agree to forgive the rest of the back rent.
County officials said they emailed Harper’s landlord to see if she would agree to the terms of the program but she never responded. Reached by the Orlando Sentinel, Harper’s landlord refused to be interviewed on the record.
It took just five weeks from the initial eviction filing to the day an Orange County deputy sheriff showed up at the Harpers’ door with his landlord and a locksmith to force the family out.
In one day, they packed up the five-bedroom house and moved their belongings into three storage units. Harper and his three boys went to a homeless shelter in Clermont. His wife and their two girls went to another one an hour away in Melbourne.
They lived separately in shelters for nearly three weeks before moving in with family in Winter Haven.
“To go through such an ordeal like that when you’ve never experienced anything like this before was shell shocking,” Harper said. “If she would have just left us in the house, we could have caught up by now on all of the back rent . ... I expected my landlord to have more common sense and more common courtesy.”
‘I don’t even call it a moratorium’
The moratorium on evictions issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should have protected Harper’s family. They fit all the criteria: They suffered a major financial loss because of the pandemic. They attempted to make payments. They sought government assistance. They were at risk of homelessness if they were evicted.
They were also one of the many families forced out anyway.
“I don’t even call it a moratorium because it doesn’t blanket stop everything like you would think,” said Jamos “Jay” Mobley, senior housing attorney at The Legal Aid Society in Orange County.
All the CDC moratorium did was give them more time. Before the pandemic, when a landlord filed for eviction, a tenant could only present a defense if
“I think the most important thing that we can do as a community is ensure that people stay housed. Homelessness is a trauma for anybody who finds themselves in that very unfortunate situation . ... I don’t think that, unless you have found yourself on the brink of homelessness, that you can understand how terrifying that can be.”
— Allison Krall, president of the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida
they were able to pay the rent their landlord said they owed into a court registry within five days. If they didn’t, the landlord automatically won on Day 6.
For now, automatic defaults have been paused.
But landlords are more powerful in Florida than most other states. If they push back at all, even with the moratorium in place, they are likely to win, Mobley said.
“All the landlord has got to do is file a piece of paper that says they want a default and they will get it,” Mobley said.
Even when that happens, the CDC moratorium should stop the final stage of the eviction. But many are still getting pushed out.
“I think the most important thing that we can do as a community is ensure that people stay housed,” said Allison Krall, president of the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida. “Homelessness is a trauma for anybody who finds themselves in that very unfortunate situation . ... I don’t think that, unless you have found yourself on the brink of homelessness, that you can understand how terrifying that can be.”
And it’s not just emotional trauma.
Researchers have found that more evictions meant more deaths during the pandemic, as people were forced to share space with family members and friends or move into shelters full of strangers.
Even in normal times, just getting an eviction notice leads to declines in mental and physical health. It increases the likelihood of sexual assault for women and the risk of lead poisoning and food insecurity for children, while shortening life spans overall, Benfer said.
Eviction is “this perfect storm that leaves particularly Black households extremely vulnerable when crisis strikes,” Benfer said. “And when an unexpected emergency arises, let alone a pandemic, that takes away all your pillars of resiliency and stability, like housing, your children’s education, your employment, and just sets you up for this downward slide that’s jagged and dangerous and harmful, and there’s no ladder back up.”
Eviction ‘shaping the lives of women’
an
Across the country, eviction paperwork is usually kept by county clerks, not state agencies. That means tracking every eviction filed even in a single state can require communicating with dozens of local administrators. Nationally, it’s thousands — subject to different records laws and using varied data storage systems.
Records often go missing and, even when they can be accessed, there is typically no indication of the tenant’s race, ethnicity or gender, making it difficult to assess which groups are suffering the most from evictions.
And those filings are still just a fraction of the number of people forced out of their rental homes each year. Missing from the court’s count are all the people who face informal evictions.
That can look like a landlord posting a notice on a tenant’s door without ever filing a lawsuit — knowing that many tenants will leave quietly, rather than fight. That’s the “nice version” of informal eviction, said Alana Greer, director of the Community Justice Project, which provides legal services to people of color in low-income neighborhoods.
“It’s often, ‘I’m going to turn off the electricity or
I’m going to tow your car or I’m going to come to your apartment with a baseball bat,’ ” she said. “There is intense intimidation that can happen.”
But despite the limitations of the data, researchers have repeatedly come to the same conclusion: Black renters are far more likely to be victims of eviction than any other racial or ethnic group.
Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America studied eviction data in Orange County from 2017 to 2019 and found that every single neighborhood that was more than 50% Black had an eviction rate that was higher than the county average, according to Sabiha Zainulbhai, a senior analyst for the organization.
In his 2016 book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” Princeton University sociology professor Matthew Desmond said it is Black women in particular who are most harmed, comparing the eviction crisis for Black women to the crisis of mass incarceration for Black men.
“If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished Black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” wrote Desmond, who also founded Eviction Lab, which tracks evictions nationwide. “Poor Black men were locked up. Poor Black women were locked out.”
Collingwood lives off Mercy Drive in ZIP code 32808, which is about 69% Black. It is home to the second-highest concentration of Black residents and has the second-highest eviction rate in the region. Between 2019 and 2020, 1,815 people faced eviction in her ZIP code.
She was evicted the first time in 2019 shortly after she gave birth to her son. She couldn’t work and quickly fell behind on rent. After the eviction, most landlords would not even consider her
as a tenant, so she lived with her mother for a time, before they had a falling out and she became homeless.
First she lived in her car, sleeping in hospital parking lots. Later, with the help of her son’s father and cash from her tax return, she lived in an extended stay motel. Then, a former neighbor who had been evicted around the same time as her told Collingwood about 7M Real Estate.
They would take tenants with past evictions.
She moved into the apartment last May. The 40-unit complex wasn’t her first choice. It wasn’t as quiet or as clean as she wanted it to be, but she moved in anyway.
“It’s not where you live,” she told herself. ”It’s how you live.”
Scared to move
The plan was to stay for a few years. She would ride out the pandemic, work and save. Hopefully, by the time she was ready to move again, her eviction would be so old that other landlords with cleaner, safer properties would give her a chance. But after repeatedly getting her hours slashed at the local Chinese restaurant where she was a delivery driver, she fell behind on rent.
Most of her neighbors were in similar situations. Since last summer, Collingwood has watched almost all of them disappear — by April, all but about seven of the 39 families who lived there when she moved in were gone, by her count.
The lucky ones had time to pack their things and move out, sometimes as armed Orange County Sheriff’s Office deputies watched.
The unlucky came home to find their belongings on the lawn in front of their units and their locks changed.
In August, 7M Real Estate filed an eviction suit against Collingwood and about 40 other tenants across two properties. Hill, the city commissioner, said she thinks the evictions were “retaliation” after the residents banded together and reported the leaks, mold, roaches and other issues to the city’s Code Enforcement Division.
A judge ruled that Collingwood could stay in her apartment and, on Dec. 22, the federally funded Orange County Eviction Diversion Program paid $4,000 in back rent on her behalf to property management company Midtown Realty.
That should have protected her from eviction for at least 60 days, but Urban Square — a company that recently bought the complex Collingwood lived in from 7M for $1.5 million — filed suit against her again in January, after she had again fallen behind.
Representatives for 7M Real Estate and Midtown
Realty did not respond to request for comment. Urban Square declined to be interviewed through its attorney.
Collingwood is worried that any future landlord wouldn’t take the time to dig into her evictions and learn that her latest two were for the same apartment and should never have been filed.
“All they’re going to see is three evictions,” she said.
Suspecting that the end of the CDC order is looming and expecting that she will soon be forced to leave, Collingwood started
a GoFundMe fundraiser in hopes that people would help her raise money to move. In just over one month, she was only able to bring in $120. After fees, $115 was deposited onto her Chime bank card.
Collingwood is
“With these evictions on my record, I’m afraid to even go to more apartments and ask them to consider me,” she said. “... I’m scared to even try to move anywhere.” discouraged.