Street roots., June 08, 2018, Page 9, Image 9

Page 10
Street Roots • June 8-14,
News
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G E T T Y IM A G E S /IS T O C K P H O T O
A notice on the door
BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
I
t 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. It
is a process that will damage their credit,
uproot their lives and, in many cases, leave
them homeless and marked with a scarlet E:
eviction.
Eviction, the legal process by which a
landlord forces a tenant to leave a property,
is at the root of a crisis in the United States,
which is 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, or 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. It was
published in April on the organization’s
website, EvictionLab.org. Desmond is also
the scholar responsible for the book
Evicted, which broaches the subject of the
Evictions have doubled in
the United States since 2000
and, given the current
economic climate, it is
unlikely that these rates will
fall any time soon. In a time
when many individual
families live from one
paycheck to the next, it is
marginalized groups who are
facing heightened risks of
being evicted.
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 data shows 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.
Portland has an eviction rate of just over
1 percent. That’s just over 3 evictions for
every 100 households.
The methodology included only evictions
that involved a court, thus ignoring
economic evictions or people who know
they will be evicted and leave housing
before their record gets tarnished. No-cause
evictions, which have been used in Portland
to clear out entire buildings for
redevelopment, do not get counted.
Seattle, in contrast, had an eviction rate
of .63 out of every 100 households.
“These local numbers are probably too
low,” said Xochitl Maykovich, a
spokesperson for Washington Community
Action Network. “I love that they’re doing
the research, but it needs to be more in
depth.”
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 that these
have a particularly hard impact on
marginalized groups, particularly families
with children headed by a single woman of
color.
“People lose jobs. People have their kids
taken away,” explains 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.”
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
See EVICTIONS, page 11