Showing the human side, cost of evictions
This weekend, we’re excited to publish stories on housing evictions that University of Connecticut professor Mike Stanton and his advanced investigative reporting class worked on throughout the fall semester and into the new year for our Housing Solutions Lab series.
We predict you’ll be impressed by the work of students Wyatt Cote, Faith Greenberg, Hudson Kamphausen, Jake Kelly and Meredith Veilleux, who were guided by Stanton, a former veteran Providence Journal reporter, and Day courts and crime reporter Greg Smith.
You’ll meet tenants desperately pleading with judges for more time to pay their rent and landlords pointing out they have mortgages, taxes and other expenses to pay. You’ll learn what’s driving the rising eviction numbers here and statewide and read about some of the solutions that are already in place or could be expanded.
In addition to the stories we’re publishing on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, we’ll be releasing a podcast mid-week in which the students talk about the solutions they identified during their reporting.
The Day enjoys an excellent and mutually beneficial relationship with UConn’s journalism department. Current and former staff members teach there, and we’ve hired many UConn grads over the years. Maureen Croteau, who was head of the journalism department for many years, is a longtime member of The Day’s board of directors.
This was our first time working with Stanton, and we hope he’ll sign on for future projects. As the newsroom’s usual hectic pace accelerated last fall, we needn’t have worried when we couldn’t devote a lot of time to help them. Stanton, who led the project, weaved together the students’ writing to produce the masterful stories you’ll read in Sunday’s print edition (online Saturday).
He talked to me about the process on Thursday. The first step was obtaining the data from the Connecticut Judicial Branch on statewide eviction cases dating back to 2017.
“We had the data piece of it, then we really had to tell the human story, because really, that’s what this is all about,” he said. “To take that data and go to housing court. To get to know the players and understand the process.”
The evictions reporting team met with judges, mediators, court clerks, lawyers, tenants and landlords and tried to illustrate through their stories how the process unfolds. They read court files and looked at what had been written about evictions in other parts of the country.
When Carlos Virgen, assistant managing editor for audience development, and I went to UConn one day last fall to interview the students for a podcast, we were impressed by how well-informed they were about evictions and that they had thought a lot about solutions.
“They grasped right away that this was part of a larger social problem that goes beyond the four walls of a courtroom,” Stanton said. “It’s a story about society, and income and inequality and coming out of a pandemic. All these broader forces that are manifested in eviction court but go beyond the four walls of the courtroom.”
Day Staff Writer Smith attended housing court sessions and meetings with the class and helped the prospective journalists gain real-world experience.
One day, Smith and student Cote drove to the New London apartment of Rosa Acevedo, who was facing eviction, and knocked on her door. She had recently taken in two young grandchildren and her husband was dying. Still, she spoke with Smith and Cote, who approached her in a respectful manner, identified themselves and explained what they were doing.
“She had the door half open,” Smith recalled. “I knew it wasn’t going to last long. We peppered her with questions. He (Cote) was as professional as possible. He also sat with me while I interviewed her in court. She was crying.”
Read more about her in this weekend’s story, and let us know what you think.