Causes and Consequences of Eviction

Episode Notes

Transcript

Daniel Webster:

They’re faced with impossible choices both before, during, and after. Having to choose between spending on necessities, between housing, transportation for a job, housing, and a surgery they might need and the eviction just increases that

Speaker 2:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ron Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Our topic today is eviction, its causes and its consequences. We’re going to look at evictions from two perspectives, one with a wider angle lens focused on trends, troubling trends at state and national levels, and a second perspective with a Zoom lens as we focus on the serious impact housing and security has on children, other individual people and families. We’re going to begin by digging into an interesting and important report that the Montana Legal Services Association recently released entitled the Montana Eviction Impact Report. For those of you who are like me, don’t like acronyms, I’ll warn you that at times I’ll refer to Montana Legal Services, Association as MLSA, and we’re also going to be joined by the author of a recently published Incredibly Moving Op-Ed in the Salt Lake Tribune about the author’s experience with eviction as a child and his perspective on the resources that should be accessible to all tenants.

Our guest today, Bill Hooks is the director of advocacy at Montana Legal Services. Bill joined MLSA following a career as a criminal defense attorney in state government and in private practice. He served for five years as Chief Public Defender for Montana’s office of the Public Defender. Daniel Webster is a housing attorney at Montana Legal Services. He joined MLSA in 2022 after receiving both his law degree and certificate in American Indian law from University of Montana Law School. During law school, Daniel served as a housing justice intern and a consumer law intern at MLSA and Ransom Wydner is the vice president of pro bono and Social Impact at six 50, a Utah based software company specializing in corporate legal documents. Ransom is also a member of LSCs Emerging Leaders Counsel for which I am very grateful. Let’s jump right in and first I’d like to hear about Montana Legal Services recent report and then I’d like to bring Ransom into the conversation to share his unique personal perspectives on eviction. Bill and Daniel, let’s start with you. Could you tell us about why MLSA decided to do the Montana eviction impact report and what information you wanted to capture in that report and share with the public?

Bill Hooks:

We decided to develop the reports or a couple of critical reasons. Montana is a very large state geographically we’re spread out throughout the state and we don’t have any court database that could collect the type of information about evictions. When covid hit and when we started feeling the impact of the pandemic and when we started realizing the wave of eviction that we were going to be dealing with, we knew that we had a lot of challenges and we didn’t have the data that would help us. So we commissioned the report to help inform us understand the challenges that folks are facing in Montana dealing with the impact of evictions, the evictions themselves. We wanted to improve our strategic thinking in terms of how we can distribute resources and how we can develop policies and practices to better meet the needs of people who are dealing with eviction.

And we want data on which we could come up with ideally sustainable ways to try to reach people in need to try to inform judges and others about the consequence of eviction and just to conduct outreach and make people aware of the challenges that we were seeing and without a report that could access that information and provide it to us, we felt like we were kind of operating in the dark, so we had some resources available to us. We had an LSC disaster grant that we were able to utilize as a platform and make a request for additional funding to help us conduct the data assessment that we knew would be critical to the report. We got some additional funding from the Montana Justice Foundation and the Steel Reese Foundation encouraged us to evaluate and assess the impact of evictions in particularly rural areas of Montana communities with less than 5,000 people in Montana. There are a number of those communities. Were the only LSC legal aid organization in Montana, so we needed help in getting all the information we thought would help inform our decisions and the reports met all of those needs. I think,

Ron Flagg:

Yeah, I think the report from my perspective is critical. Too many people around the country when they hear about evictions and housing instability have a vision of large cities around the country and don’t think about rural areas and obviously in Montana there’s far more rural areas than there are even medium-sized towns. So the light you shine on eviction in rural areas is particularly important. Your report effectively explains how eviction is both a symptom of larger problems and a cause of larger problems. Could you talk about that sort of dual aspect of evictions?

Bill Hooks:

Sure. The larger problems that I think the report highlight for us and we see it across Montana housing costs were high in Montana and they were getting higher. People have been spending increasing percentages of their income on housing and our report indicated in my mind, fairly alarming numbers of renters who were spending more than 30 or even more than 50% of their income on rent. With Covid we saw and felt a huge impact on employment. People were losing their jobs or had reduced hours, so their income was less at a time when rent was requiring increasingly more percentage of the income that they were bringing home. Some of the respondents that we talked to in our survey were undergoing some significant medical costs. Again, I think that’s related to CO. Many were working families were working parents trying to deal with childcare cuts, which are a pretty big financial burden in some of the situations in which people reported to us, we talked to them, they were experiencing domestic violence in the household. There were a number of existing barriers to people getting resources. Again, in Montana, people are far flow and it can be difficult to access the type of resources they need, particularly when a pandemic hit. So there really was a tsunami of factors that were hitting Montana all at the same time, which led to the eviction problem. And so I think the housing instability issue reflected a number of these factors that people were dealing with and being challenged by.

Ron Flagg:

Let’s for a moment, talk about the relationship between evictions in Montana and the larger problem. A lot of people throughout the country and obviously in Montana live check to check they’re kind of on a razor’s edge in terms of their susceptibility to having their lives turned upside down by any change, an accident, an illness, what have you. One of the striking statistics from your survey you don’t see in surveys, the number a hundred percent show up very often just because there are always outliers, but a hundred percent of the Montana household surveyed experienced some combination of increased household expenses adding to their existing cost burden during the pandemic, and these included cost related to medical or family emergencies. They added childcare expenses, changes related to divorce, domestic violence or added child or elderly dependents. And again, if you’re living check to check and are just balancing your budget week by week, month by month, any of those things can throw you over the edge.

Bill Hooks:

Debt hit Montana. I think in one particular regard that comes to mind, tourism is a big aspect of our economy and people who are in the service industry or in the tourist industry often are either dependent on the peak season or living paycheck to paycheck. So when factors hit the economy that have a negative impact on that stream of income, costs are going up everywhere else, but that paycheck, the amount that’s in the paycheck is reduced or they don’t get the paycheck, that becomes a critical tipping point. And as you noted, everybody we talked to was in that boat and so the evictions that they talked to us about and that they came to us for help with were all a symptom of larger issues that were going forward. The inability to pay rent was a factor of many other aspects of their life at that time.

Ron Flagg:

Can you talk about the cascading effect of evictions? Most of the people we work with in legal aid have seldom if ever encountered a client that only had one issue, and certainly people who face evictions not only already come to you often with other issues, but if they do suffer eviction, their problems cascade. Can you talk about that?

Bill Hooks:

Sure. I think the best place to start, and maybe it says it all, is the quote, eviction is not a condition of poverty. It is a cause of poverty. The impact of an eviction has ramifications in the lives of the people that we represent on an order of magnitude, just the cost of having to go through an eviction, the financial impact is significant and the folks that we talked to and or reflected in the survey indicate that it took a big chunk of their income just to get evicted. And then there are the emotional and physical consequences of being evicted, struggling to find new housing sometimes with an eviction on their record in communities in which there already is a dearth of affordable rental housing. So the problem is compounding. There aren’t enough places to rent on a basis that is affordable for many of the people who come to us.

Then they get evicted, they’re put back into the community with even fewer rental units that they can access or that they can afford if they have an eviction on their record so to speak. That can be even harder, especially in issues where people are dealing with subsidized housing. And that’s one thing that Daniel can speak to with a higher degree of expertise certainly than I can, but the financial, the societal, the personal and emotional impact that this has, we can measure it in some ways and we do in the report, but it is also intangible and unmeasurable how people feel I think when they are in this situation. And for those families or working parents with kids at home, the impact on the children as well is profound. Daniel thoughts?

Daniel Webster:

Yeah, and I agree with Bill. One issue, a significant amount of our clients facing eviction have affordable housing, either project-based section eight or often vouchers, and if they get in a fiction judgment, in many cases they’re not even eligible for affordable housing for three years and these vouchers allow ’em to pay 30% of their monthly adjusted income and now there’s no way basically they’re going to find a rental unit that’s anywhere near that. Often it’s 50% or more of their income they’re going to have to spend. And a lot of our communities in Montana are small where people know everybody. So getting evicted work gets around town. Sometimes they might get evicted from a landlord who owns half the rental units in the town or something like that, or even if they’re not evicted, even if there’s a dispute and they move out, that shuts down a large portion of where they’re able to find housing or even apply for housing.

And then there’s application fees. They have to start applying for gas to go look for rental units. And when they’re going through the eviction process, sometimes they’re, well, do I spend this money, try to pay off some of the rent I owe? Maybe the landlord will let me stay or do I spend this money on a new rental unit? They’re in faced with impossible choices both before, during and after having to choose between spending on necessities between housing, transportation for a job, housing and surgery they might need. And the eviction just increases that. If they get a money judgment for attorney’s fees or holdover damages, then the landlord can go after them for garnish their wages in the future collection attempts and just before and after. They’re just faced with difficulty and impossible choices.

Ron Flagg:

So were the findings of your report surprising to you? Obviously long before you did the report, MLSA has represented people in housing cases, so what you found, was it in line with what you expected based on your prior experiences?

Daniel Webster:

Yeah, it was pretty much in line with what we expected. When tenants come to us, they’re facing, I got behind on rent because I had to fix my car so I could get to work.

Ron Flagg:

Who’s being evicted? What are the demographics of the population being evicted?

Daniel Webster:

Well, there’s a substantial portion of single mothers with children in the household. Almost 50% of the households that responded to our survey had at least one child in the household. 69% had an individual with mental illness in the household, 18%. There is domestic violence in the household, and so these are often families or single parents often struggling with substance abuse issues or mental illness issues or increasing expenses of things they absolutely need to pay in addition to their rent.

Ron Flagg:

One thing that struck me when I first started looking at eviction data, it didn’t necessarily strike me as intuitive, was the fact that having children greatly increased the likelihood that you were at risk for eviction. Ransom, We’ve been talking about a report and percentages and things that are important and moving, but you bring a much more personal perspective to this. I was so deeply moved by your recent piece in the Salt Lake Tribune, your experience of evictions, multiple evictions as a child, and now your ability to look back at those experiences with a clear understanding of the situation, including all of its complexities and that combination was really quite eyeopening. Could you tell our listeners about your experiences and why you wanted to write about them?

Ransom Wydner:

Absolutely. Ron and thank you so much. I love being a part of legal services Corporations emerge leaders Counsel. I think the work is very important, so thank you very much. It’s always great to have an opportunity to talk about something I’m passionate about. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about eviction from my own experience. I’ll be honest, it was kind of uncomfortable writing something very personal in such a public way, talking about the challenge of my childhood. I try not to define myself by growing up poor. Everyone’s life is hard just in different ways. This is the way that my life was hard, but I’m glad that I did. I’m glad that I got a chance to talk about these sort of intangible things that Bill was talking about, the intangible impacts of eviction, things that are harder to measure but maybe easier to understand for the average person.

That’s why I wanted to touch on, I hope that it helped to humanize eviction, especially for children. The largest group impacted by eviction in the United States is children under five. That’s something I didn’t know until recently. I think that the Princeton’s eviction lab put out data that New York Times did some reporting on that topic that the largest group impacted by eviction in the United States is children under five, which is just so heartbreaking and I think the average person can connect to that maybe a little bit easier than to data. Mlsa report does such an amazing job highlighting those impacts. I think it’s shocking, especially the impacts on children. As far as my own experience, I was two years old the first time that my family got evicted and there were four children living in the house at the time, including my oldest brother Bruce, who has autism and is nonverbal.

We talked a little bit about 69% of the respondents in Mlsa report had somebody with a disability in the household. That’s interesting to see that in my own family. And also there was a newborn baby in the house. My little brother, Kirk, a newborn at the time, he’s a grownup person now. He’s 36 years old. Nova. At the time of our evictions, I was about two and Kirk was a newborn and people will say, just pay your rent. You won’t get evicted. These were four kids. My parents had a very strange life. My parents, I love my parents. My dad was a very strange person, anti-government. All of us were born at home. No social security numbers, no birth certificates. So I think a person might look at someone like my dad and not have a lot of sympathy when their hair brain schemes go badly and they get evicted.

But there were four kids in that house who didn’t make any of those choices, and now those four kids were homeless. We moved about 50 times as a kid, not always because of eviction. We’ve moved something like 13 times just in the early nineties. We’ve tried to count ’em all up, me and my siblings, and we think it’s around 50 mostly. We lived in Arizona and Utah, so the things that Daniel talked about really resonate with me getting evicted in a small town where everyone knows each other, getting evicted in a market where one landlord or one company owns a lot of the available units, those are huge challenges of housing insecurity. In more rural areas, which people maybe don’t consider when they think of the eviction crisis, they think of a big city. Those more rural areas are also less likely have strong eviction protections built into their landlord tenant laws.

That’s another thing to consider. My family lived in a lot of attics. We lived in a lot of spare rooms, we lived in a lot of motels. We spent almost a year living in the basement of a nudist who celebrated Christmas every day. So we weren’t unsheltered ever. We always had a roof over our head, but there were some very strange roofs, and I think that’s something that is true for a lot of children who get evicted. They don’t end up in what most of us think of as homelessness, but it is functionally homelessness, these very unstable situations that can be very difficult for a child. I wanted to share my story frankly, because I can and a lot of kids who grew up like me can’t. I’m very lucky. All of my siblings I feel avoided. The worst outcomes that are so common among children whose families get evicted and get caught in a cycle of housing instability. A lot of kids who grow up like me frankly aren’t around anymore to tell their story or they don’t have a platform or their lives are so stressful, they don’t have the time or space to reflect and share. I do have a platform and so I felt almost an obligation to talk about my experiences because millions of children have grown up with the same experiences or even worse.

Ron Flagg:

Well, I’m certainly grateful for having shared your experiences and I wouldn’t normally do this, but to our listeners, I urge you to read this piece, Google Ransom, Wydner W and Salt Lake Tribune, and it’ll pop right up as the first item. This is a must read. So Ransom just shared how the effects of evictions and housing insecurity lingered in his life for years. Bill and Daniel, what did you or do you at MLSA find are some of the consequences of eviction that people experience years after the original eviction?

Daniel Webster:

Yeah, and some of what I mentioned before, the inability to get affordable housing to get a voucher. They can be prohibited from applying for even getting on the wait list for three years and then that wait list might be another two to three years. And the issue with the small communities, they might be in a place they’ve been in for five years, rent’s been $600, then they get evicted and rents have increased greatly and the best they can find is a thousand dollars rental unit on a limited or no income. One thing is that losing the mailing address we’re experiencing now in Montana with Medicaid unwinding and if they get evicted, they might not have provided a new address even known to do that, or they might not even have a new address and they’re missing notices about Medicaid unwinding or other benefits that could be helpful to them. And another thing is I’ve seen some distrust with the legal system. Some clients might be a little less willing to try to protect their rights to try to keep their housing after going through that process that’s traumatic and costly. They might move out when maybe they don’t have to or move out when maybe there’s a solution. And so you see that and once they move out, vacated the unit, they’ve lost some of that protections, they’ve lost some of that housing that might be affordable for them.

Ron Flagg:

You talk about the distrust of the legal system and one can understand that, but what in your experience is the impact of having a lawyer in the eviction process? Does it make a difference?

Daniel Webster:

Oh yeah, it definitely makes a difference. They are thankful to have someone on their side. Often it feels like for them, maybe it’s the first time in a long time anyone’s believed them, listened to them, help them. And like any court process, it’s difficult to understand. They get a termination notice and then a court complaint that says they only have a certain amount of days to respond. And actually recently a new law was passed this year that limited the time to respond to eviction court complaint to five days. The eviction report, it was 10 days in that now it’s five days. So they have five days to figure out what they need to do to contact us, maybe for us to advise them. And if they’re able to have a lawyer there, we can complete it for them. They can try to work on other issues they might be having.

Well, knowing that someone has their back in dealing with this eviction and often even before the complaints’ filed a termination notice, kind of helping them understand the likelihood of an eviction, what their rights are, if it’s even a valid reason for eviction, which in a lot of cases it might not be, and trying to step in and negotiate, which is something we do a lot here. Having an attorney negotiate with a landlord or a landlord’s attorney is hugely helpful. The landlord might and a landlord’s attorney might essentially steamroll a tenant, say things that either just aren’t true or scare them into moving or paying something and having an attorney, they know their rights and we advise them on the best thing moving forward. And even if we’re not able to keep them in the house, we often can come to an agreement where they get a few more months in to look for another place and to avoid that eviction judgment, which like we’ve is just really hurts their ability to find future housing.

Ron Flagg:

Yeah, the report also touches on eviction diversion programs. Can you talk about those for a moment?

Bill Hooks:

We’ve got a program, you mentioned acronyms at the start Ron, I’m going to default into an acronym. We have our Montana eviction intervention program. We’ve referred to it as MEEP for so long that I will fall into that habit. But early on during the pandemic, we took a look in part with the information that we were getting and it’s really been confirmed and bolstered by the report. It has stayed as big as Montana and as far flu as the people are and given the magnitude of the issue, we are unable to help everybody just within the availability of staff and case and orders within Montana Legal Services. So we created a program working with private attorneys and we are able to refer eviction cases and clients spacing, housing insecurity to the panel of private attorneys and the attorneys are able to provide advice to those clients. In some cases, they’re able to take on the representation of those tenants facing eviction so we can provide attorneys in court. So we have a format where it’s kind of a modest means or low bono rate where we’re paying the attorneys to take these cases on a referral and it really has expanded our ability to reach people who were in this crisis throughout Montana.

Ron Flagg:

As we’ve discussed, some of the increased risk of evictions were associated with the economic dislocation of COVID. Could you talk about some of the other temporary covid relief efforts that impacted evictions during that 2020 to 2022 period? Did any of those policies have an effect on evictions during that period?

Bill Hooks:

The moratoria that were in place at various times certainly did have an impact limiting people from being unhoused. We had the federal moratorium and then our governor portion of this time had a statewide moratorium. And so there was a break during which people were not being evicted, but that led to an array of other issues and challenges. And when the MORATORIA terminated, the floodgates opened up again. So there was some brief periods of time, relatively brief where things were different than they are now.

Ron Flagg:

What effect did the emergency Rental Assistance program have?

Bill Hooks:

We, in addition to our work with attorneys for a period of time we worked with the Montana Department of Commerce using CARES Act ARPA funding. But in conjunction we’ve been able to provide rental assistance initially to tenants. It’s now been expanded. We are providing rental assistance for future rent and back rent to both landlords and tenants. And I think that that’s had a significant impact on keeping people housed. It’s not unlimited, so we have to be thoughtful in how we’re applying factors to determine eligibility and determine within regulations and within the guidelines how we’re administering the rental assistance. But I think from our perspective, it’s been a critical tool to keep people housed. Daniel, would you agree?

Daniel Webster:

Yeah, it definitely has. And we have had a great staff at MLSA who the attorneys work with to process Mira, and it really helps come to settlement agreements where often the client can stay in the unit and even get a little reprieve and save up some money and nonpayment of rent. There’s not a lot of good defenses to that unfortunately. And that’s probably the biggest portion of eviction cases we see. And this has allowed so many people to stay housed that otherwise would’ve gone through the eviction process, been evicted and likely and housed, and it just incentivizes the landlords to settle to keep the tenants in their units. And in Montana, it’s a three day notice to pay rent or vacate, and often we can step in. We can’t get the money rental assistance in that time, but we can tell the landlord, Hey, this tenant’s applied for our services. We’re working with it to process Mara, and you’ll get your rent soon.

Ron Flagg:

Ransom. What kind of resources and support do you think are most needed by low-income families experiencing housing insecurity or facing eviction? What from a practical standpoint would be most helpful?

Ransom Wydner:

I think it’s a great question. I’ll add the caveat. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a policy expert. My expertise is just my own experience. But organizations like Montana Legal Services, the data backs up what I’m saying. My neighbor, Saskia, she works for Salt Lake County a few weeks ago, she said something that stuck with me. I was talking about, I was getting a little overwhelmed talking about housing insecurity and homelessness and it was a big topic of the mayoral election here in Salt Lake City, and I think it’s kind of easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed when you think about all the factors of homelessness and housing, insecurity, poverty, mental illness, addiction, communities that have been left behind by globalization. These are some of the biggest problems facing civilization since the dawn of civilization, and it can feel like in order to move the at all on homelessness and on housing insecurity and on eviction, we need to solve these giant societal problems.

But what Saskia said, and something that made me feel a lot better is that it is very complicated. These are all things we need to consider, but it also is very simple. It often comes down to supply of affordable housing. So if you compare two communities who have the exact same problems, they have the same problems with crime, with addiction, with health across the board, but one community has a higher supply of affordable housing. That community will also have a lower rate of homelessness and housing instability. So big picture, the main thing that we can do to affect homelessness, eviction housing insecurity, is a greater supply of affordable housing and different places will do that different ways, but that needs to be one of our goals. Additionally, there are a lot of things we can do right away without increasing the supply of housing is a big project.

Tenants facing eviction also need access to information about their rights and about their options, and they need people who can help them understand those options and make informed decisions. I love that The MLSA report talked about right to Counsel. Bill and Daniel just were talking about how important it is to be able to talk to an attorney. Poor families are at a huge disadvantage in housing court. This is something that LSC talks a lot about the access to justice crisis in the context of eviction, you’ve got 3% on average of evicted people who have an attorney and more than 80% of landlords who have an attorney. Then you look at a city like New York where people have a right to Counsel, over 80% of them are able to avoid eviction and stay in their homes and other cities have a right to Counsel for eviction, have similar rates.

But LSC pointed out earlier this year, it would cost about $4 billion to provide Counsel to every person facing eviction in the United States. And that would be great. It’d be an amazing thing, but that’s many times more than what we spend as a country on all legal aid. So in the meantime, we need other solutions. I think technology is very promising. The company I work for six 50, we have a tool called Hello Landlord. It helps renters to communicate with their landlords, hopefully helping them to avoid eviction. We are building more tools like that. There are a ton of great tools being built all over the country. Some of them are ai, some are more traditional document automation. I think all of those are really important. Hopefully they can help reduce the burden on legal aid so that attorneys can help people with the kinds of things that really only attorneys can help them with.

On top of that, I think everyone could agree that families facing eviction, they need a little more time to get on their feet. They need emergency funds to make ends meet. Another great part of the MLSA report that I found interesting was on eviction that we were talking about on emergency rental. We saw a big experiment as a country on emergency rental and eviction diversion and eviction moratoria during covid. I hope that we can take what worked from those programs and expand on it. These programs, obviously they can be very expensive, but dealing with the fallout of eviction crises is more expensive, and I think that there’s data that bears that out. The last thing I’ll say on sort of what we need, the solutions we need, my little brother Kirk, he was the newborn kind of from that first eviction story. He’s a speech therapist now, and we were talking about eviction, about our childhoods, about our own experience, and he was saying through the lens of what he knows about psychology and children, it’s very important for children to feel safe.

And when we introduce unpredictability and instability into that place, they should feel safe, some kind of feeling of home. It can fundamentally damage the way that they see and interact with the world. So before we can do anything, we need more compassion. He was talking about, we might see eviction. The average person might look at eviction as this is a legal thing. This has to do with money, but there are young hearts as he put it on the other side of these locked doors, and we need compassion to see through their eyes. I think before we can do anything else, before we can solve anything, we need more compassion. That’s why I wrote my op-ed. That’s the one thing we need before anything is we need to see these people who are facing eviction as people who need help, people who deserve help, people that we care about. We need some kind of compassion for our fellow people. And the largest number of people facing eviction in the United States is children under five. I think when you say that, hopefully that helps people feel more compassionate about this problem.

Ron Flagg:

I think that’s a good note on which to end. Housing insecurity is the most pervasive problem facing low income Americans today. Ransom, Bill and Daniel, thank you for illuminating the topic so well and so personally, and thank you to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Stay well.

Speaker 2:

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