On Thursday, Oklahoma County will experience its biggest eviction docket in living memory, with more than 300 cases on the court schedule.
Since 2020, eviction bans and rent assistance were credited with helping tenants stay in their homes, while evictions fell below pre-pandemic levels across the country.
Thursday’s docket in Oklahoma County—perhaps the largest eviction docket ever in one of the nation’s top-evicting states—shows how an action of last resort has become routine again.
During panels at the Oklahoma Coalition for Affordable Housing’s state housing conference in Midwest City on Wednesday, attorneys and renter advocates suggested tactics to reduce evictions and some barriers to improving the outlook for renters.
When Oklahoma’s landlord-tenant law was adopted in 1978, it was based on a sample law developed by the nonpartisan Uniform Law Commission. But Oklahoma lawmakers excluded tenant protections from the state’s law.
Oklahoma is one of a handful of states that allows landlords to evict renters for filing health and safety complaints. In Oklahoma, it’s illegal for local governments to create landlord registries that cities in other states use to conduct regular inspections that ensure renters are living in safe conditions.
Last year, state lawmakers approved a law that increased the amount that renters can deduct from their rent to cover serious repairs their landlords refused to make. But efforts to update the law more broadly or protect renters from landlord retaliation have yet to be successful.
Housing attorneys say landlords have the responsibility to maintain properties, but renters don’t have many options if needed repairs go unaddressed.
“Until we get our laws up to the national standards, we are kidding ourselves,” said Richard Klinge, director of the pro-bono eviction assistance program from Oklahoma City University’s law school. “We’re pulling people out of the river, but they’re coming in at the top, and it’s not going to change until these immoral laws are changed.”
How Oklahoma communities could reduce evictions
In Tulsa, a small number of corporate landlords are responsible for most evictions. An even smaller subset profit from fees and other penalties by filing repeated evictions against the same renters.
[ Read more: In Oklahoma, corporate landlords are filing evictions without the legal right to sue ]
Katie Dilks, executive director of the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation, said one way to reduce those types of evictions could be to increase the filing fee, which hasn’t risen since 2004.
“This system only works because it’s cheap and fast, because that allows you to do it routinely,” she said. “If it’s not cheap and it’s not fast, then you’re not turning a profit.”
Along that vein, slowing down the process could be another way to reduce evictions, Dilks said. In Oklahoma, renters must leave their homes as soon as 48 hours after the court grants an eviction.
Oklahoma law doesn’t place a cap on late fees or rent increases. When they’re behind on rent, some tenants face fees that are higher than 10% of what they owe.
“The reason people end up paying it is because their alternative is to be evicted 48 hours later, and so they come up with the money somehow,” said Jennifer Montagna, an Oklahoma City housing attorney for Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma.
Shandi Campbell, director of Housing Solutions’ Landlord-Tenant Resource Center in Tulsa, said that connecting renters with tools like food assistance, child care and health care benefits can help them become financially stable and avoid eviction.
“Those (community resources) can be enough to free up some funds so that those tenants are able to make on-time rental payments every month,” Campbell said.
Alicia Ryan, Central Oklahoma Community Action Agency’s community resource and development coordinator, said getting information to renters about services to help them is key because a lot of people don’t know about what’s out there.
“Knowledge is key with anything in life, so the more you know, the more you can navigate the changing times in your area,” Ryan said. “And we have people who don’t know how to navigate it because they don’t know where to start.”
Contact BigIfTrue.org editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Twitter.
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