For most of her adult life, Shalonda Banks lived with a roommate, family member or partner. After years of working two jobs that paid $8 an hour, at 32 years old, she felt confident enough to move with her 9-year-old daughter into an apartment of their own.
It lasted less than six months – the length of the pandemic in the United States so far. After falling behind on her rent, Banks woke up to an eviction notice on her door.
“That’s half of my income,” she said. “I didn’t go back to sleep that night. I barely even eat. I haven’t been this stressed being a single parent. … This is putting my child in jeopardy.”
Across the nation, experts have been sounding the alarm on the rapid increase of evictions they say are sure to come. In March, Congress passed the $2 trillion CARES Act, a relief package that sent a $1,200 stimulus check to qualifying households.
But rental assistance advocates argue that with the rapid rate of covid-related unemployment, that single payment wasn’t enough to help everyday Americans avoid evictions. Without rental assistance, they say, moratoriums may be a moot point, especially if tenants don’t know they exist, leaving them vulnerable to a judge’s discretion should the case make it to eviction court.
While some states have had moratoriums in place to pause evictions, many expired before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new restrictions that went into effect early this month.
To be eligible under the CDC moratorium, renters must be unable to pay rent due to a financial loss, like being laid off or receiving tremendous medical bills. They also have to earn $99,000 or less this year or meet other income requirements.
The CDC moratorium covers approximately 96% of renters nationwide, compared to just 30% under the CARES Act. Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy for the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said the new measure is a step forward, but now the biggest challenge is ensuring renters know about it.
“On the whole, the moratorium is working,” Saadian said. “We are seeing a decline in evictions, but there are landlords, especially corporate landlords, that are trying to move as quickly as possible to evict people before they know their rights under the moratorium.”
In Mississippi, where Banks lives in Harrison County, landlords must give tenants a three-day notice in writing for nonpayment of rent. A minimum of five days after the renter has been served, the renter and landlord appear in a small claims courtroom in Justice Court, where if a judge sides with the landlord, renters can be evicted immediately.
A patchwork of organizations across the state are seeking to help renters who may be unable to make rent due to the pandemic. According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, Jackson had the fifth highest eviction rate in the country before the coronavirus hit.
“Too many Mississippians were already paying rent that was unaffordable to them before the pandemic,” said John Sullivan, senior program director for the Gulf Coast region for nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners.
According to data from the US Census Bureau, 67% of extremely low-income Mississippians spend more than half of their income on rent, an issue compounded by covid-related job loss.
“It’s not a sustainable situation,” Sullivan said. “That money for rent takes away money for medical expenses, food, care for your children. The rent eats first. That rental amount will get paid each month, and if somebody has a decreasing revenue, that does not decrease the amount of rent. “
Thousands of Mississippians have filed for unemployment benefits during the pandemic, which created a trickle-down effect, said John Jopling, housing law director with the Mississippi Center for Justice.
On April 2, the day after Gov. Tate Reeves issued a state eviction moratorium, the center received a call from a man in north Mississippi whose landlord had cut off his electricity. While the ban didn’t go into effect until April 3, Jopling said landlords across the state cut off electricity as a way to circumvent the order.
With the center’s help, the tenant was granted a temporary restraining order against his landlord. His utilities were turned back on, and he was able to stay in his home.
After receiving more calls from people in similar situations, the center created a pandemic response team of sorts to address the needs of Mississippians who would soon be facing evictions. They operated primarily through word of mouth and, to date, have worked with 131 families. In August alone, a month after a CARES Act moratorium on evictions ended, they received 31 calls.
Mississippi’s eviction moratorium lasted through June 1. However, Jopling said, the Mississippi Center for Justice received approximately 75 calls from renters whose landlords were threatening eviction despite the order. Jopling said he called several landlords to talk them through the process and was “cursed out” as a result.
“It was like, ‘Well, the governor doesn’t pay my bills.’ It was talking people back from the edge, the landlords who were just determined to put somebody out, but also talk the tenants back out of their panic and genuine anxiety about being placed out on the street in the middle of an epidemic. We were able to do that in a lot of cases by just presenting them with a copy of the governor’s order.
“It wasn’t always that smooth. Some landlords went ahead and constructively evicted by lockout or by utility termination. … That was the early period, what April and May looked like.”
Legal aid attorneys in Louisiana, Oklahoma and other states previously told Big If True that landlords had filed evictions in violation of the CARES Act. Some didn’t use the court system, instead forcing tenants out with illegal utility shutoffs or lockouts.
Hundreds get help with rent, but many more at risk of eviction
When Ian Gustafson arrived at the Mississippi Center for Justice in June, he primarily worked with renters to help determine if they were eligible for rental assistance.
About $18 million in federal funding was made available for a state rental assistance program, and the Mississippi Home Corporation (MHC) began doling out those funds in June. However, Gustafson said, the program wasn’t well-publicized, and “there were pretty stringent income levels and your rent had to be below a certain number, depending on where you lived in the state.”
To be eligible for the funds, Jopling said, families had to be low-income and eligibility varied by the percentage of income for the region.
As of Aug. 28, the latest numbers available, MHC had received over 3,100 calls regarding the rental assistance program, and according to MHC spokesperson Rivers Orman, more than 1,500 applications are currently in process.
So far, about $1 million in rental assistance has been given to more than 400 Mississippians, Orman said. However, an analysis from last month estimated 263,000 to 403,000 Mississippians were at risk of eviction.
MHC Executive Director Scott Spivey said getting financial assistance lies solely on tenants, and landlords cannot apply for relief on their behalf.
“Tenants have to be proactive, not only of keeping themselves under the CDC’s umbrella from being evicted but being proactive about seeking rental assistance,” Spivey said.
Banks is one Mississippi renter who needed help paying her rent. Although she received assistance with her utilities through local organizations, she found the paperwork to get rental assistance too taxing. She’s now been threatened with eviction three times after not being able to make her $695 rent.
When Banks first moved into her two-bedroom condo in Gulfport in March, she worked two jobs as a cook at McDonald’s and as a housekeeper at a local hotel, each at $8 an hour. But when her daughter’s school closed that same month due to the pandemic, Banks, a single parent, had to quit her housekeeping job so she could stay home with her daughter since she couldn’t afford childcare.
She continued to work at McDonald’s, but management cut back on shifts and stopped offering employees overtime.
A couple of months ago, she was promoted to manager. She now earns $10 an hour, but it still isn’t enough to cover her bills each month. Her mom moved in to help out with her daughter but isn’t able to financially contribute.
Banks said she has never missed a rent payment but is often late. She makes partial payments on her rent and utilities as a good-faith effort, but then late fees apply and she’s “in a hole.”
“I’m living paycheck to paycheck and barely doing it,” she said. “If I don’t break it down like that, then my lights will be cut off, my water will be cut off, we don’t have food. I’m trying to be a mother, be a woman, step up and handle my business, do the best that I can.”
Lee Bryant, the property manager for Banks’ condo, declined to talk specifically about Banks but said he tries to help renters when they can’t afford to make their payment. As a property manager, Bryant oversees “500 doors.” He also owns a couple of rental properties.
Of those 500 doors, he estimates 10 to 15% haven’t paid their rent on time.
“There are tenants out there who have busted their butt to pay their rent money,” he said.
Others, he believes, tried to take advantage of the system.
“We abide by whatever the legal people say we abide by,” he said. “There were a few in the minority that took advantage of that, and all we did was grit our teeth until such time the governor said the moratorium was off.”
He’s filed eviction notices on some tenants two or three times.
A property manager for 30 years, Bryant said, “I do, to the very best of my ability, try and work with any and all tenants before the thought of eviction comes into my mind.”
Depending on the circumstance, like a tenant’s job loss, Bryant said he has accepted partial rent payments, which Banks said she has made on multiple occasions. He’s heard calls to “cancel rent” but said it’s not practical, as landlords have mortgages to pay.
“There are folks out there that feel like the landlord or owner of the property owes them or that they can carry the load better than what a tenant does,” Bryant said. “We have bills just like they have bills. We have mortgage payments.”
When the pandemic first hit, Bryant said he allowed tenants in the properties he owns to make deferred payments. The tenants in the buildings he manages, however, didn’t receive deferments.
After the state and CARES Act eviction bans were lifted, he started filing evictions again. So far, none of his tenants have made reference to the CDC moratorium.
Bryant said he doesn’t know if any of his tenants qualify under the CDC ban, saying the responsibility falls on their shoulders.
How the CDC’s moratorium works
Sam Buchanan, executive director of the Mississippi Center for Legal Services, said his organization is trying to disseminate information to tenants throughout the state, but he said renters are responsible for taking certain steps in order to be protected by the ban.
“It is incumbent upon the tenant to see if they qualify under the CDC moratorium,” Buchanan said. “They have to sign a document attesting to them having that certain criteria for them to be eligible.”
The order says each adult named on the lease or housing contract must give a copy of this document to their landlord for the ban to apply to them. That can also be done in court to halt the eviction, said Saadian, the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s vice president of public policy.
Tenants who don’t know about the moratorium or aren’t eligible will likely be evicted for lack of payment.
“I lose sleep at night,” Bryant said. “I have a heart, a big heart. I chose to do this, so I guess it goes along with the turf, but it does bother me when I have to evict tenants. But business is business.”
Banks is losing sleep, too. She hasn’t paid the September rent yet, and while she can borrow money from family members, she doesn’t want to owe anyone else more money that she doesn’t have. Her daughter saw the eviction notice and asked her mom, “Are we going to be put out?”
Banks had hoped to move to another apartment but will likely move in with friends to save money before living on her own again.
“I feel like if this wouldn’t have happened,” she said of the pandemic, “I would have made it.”
Sullivan, the senior program manager for Enterprise Community Partners, said that without rental assistance, families across the country are going to lose their homes.
“This isn’t a short-term problem,” he said. “This is a problem that’s going to last well into 2021. With the limited unemployment assistance available, with the federal government not taking any action to provide any more relief for people impacted, we’re really hitting the point where this is starting to become a huge problem.”
The National Low Income Housing Coalition has previously stated that at least $100 billion is needed to provide an estimated 11.5 million tenants emergency rental assistance.
Tenants owe about $25 billion in back rent, according to Moody’s Analytics. That number is expected to balloon to $70 billion by the end of the year.
“Our hope is that landlords would join our efforts and the efforts of other people to get Congress to pass emergency rental assistance,” Saadian said. “Between the moratorium and rental assistance, that’s really the best way to keep renters in their homes and to make sure that landlords have the resources they need to continue to operate their rental properties.”
None of the eviction moratoriums – state or federal – have been accompanied by rental assistance.
“It’s a very solvable problem,” Jopling said. “To just have a moratorium and no rental assistance is just kicking a can down the road. If people can’t pay their rent in May, they’re not going to be more likely to be able to pay it in August until something turns around in terms of the job market. Now, there’s another moratorium. … All that’s going to happen is on Dec. 29 there’s going to be a whole lot of people who are going to owe thousands and thousands of dollars, and I don’t see how they’re going to be able to pay it.”
Sarah Fowler is a freelance journalist covering social issues out of Jackson, Mississippi. She can be contacted at sarahfowler2885@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter.
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