Rental Evictions Rising

Rental Evictions Rising; Affordable Housing Not Meeting Demand

Charlotte voters will be asked in November to more than triple the city’s Housing Trust Fund, to $50 million. It’s part of a plan to increase affordable housing. City officials say there’s a 34,000-unit shortfall.

And eviction notices are going up again, after several years of decline following the recession of a decade ago.  In the fiscal year that ended June 30, landlords filed more than 30,000 eviction notices in Mecklenburg County, according to the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts. That’s an increase of about 1,000 from the previous year.

Find North Carolina Eviction Help for Landlords and Tenants on NationalEvictions.com

In 2010, rental housing in Charlotte averaged about $800 a month, according to the U.S. Census. Today, the average is around $1,100, a nearly 40 percent increase. Ashley Clark of UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute says there are consequences.

“Renting costs have increased and wages haven’t kept pace, and that creates challenges for people looking for housing,” Clark said.

And challenges in holding on to housing. Clark co-authored a report on evictions in Mecklenburg County, released in March. Although the median household income in the county increased by 14 percent since 2010, when adjusted for inflation, the report says the increase is only about 2 percent.

The Urban Institute’s analysis of 2016 court records found about 25 evictions take place every day in the county, mostly for nonpayment. The average amount owed was $850.

“We found that areas with higher percentages of low-income families, African-American families, had higher rates of evictions in those communities,” Clark said.

Those communities are in the northeast, east, west and southwest parts of the county.

Rents are lower in many of those communities, but the median household income for residents there is between $26,000 and $42,000, according to the Urban Institute report. It’s nearly $63,000 for the county.

“They’re one crisis, one paycheck away from eviction,” said Courtney Morton, a Mecklenburg housing and homeless research coordinator. “Which underscores for us the need for more affordable housing.”

A few months ago, Jean Compas did not meet the tenth of the month deadline to pay his rent, the day before landlords typically file eviction notices.

“On the eleventh day I offered to pay that month and they wouldn’t take it unless I paid for the following month, including court fees, which brought me to this problem here,” Compas said.

Compas and his landlord’s attorney came to an agreement. Compas won’t be evicted if he pays all of the back rent, more than $2200, by the end of the month.

“My kids, I’m raising and I don’t want to have, there’s a lot of stuff to move. I’ll make it but it’s a struggle,” Compas said.

Nearly 45 percent of residents in the city and county are renters—about the same as Seattle, Indianapolis and Raleigh. Charlotte’s population has increased by 17 percent since 2010. To accommodate that growth, developers are building or plan to build 27,000 apartments, according to RealData. Twenty thousand have been built in the past five years, with rents on the new units averaging $1,400.  At the same time, lots of older, more affordable rental complexes and homes are being razed to make way for new construction as neighborhoods become gentrified.

Ashley Clark says more low- and middle-income people are left with the choices of moving farther away from their jobs in the city or into less safe neighborhoods. But some are opting for the more expensive units that they can barely afford.

“We know that between 2010 and 2014, 46 percent of renters here were spending more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, so by HUD’s definition that would be cost burdened and points to that there is a mismatch between affordable housing stock and what people are earning,” Clark said.

From the landlord’s point of view, Tim Szymanski, executive director of the Greater Charlotte Apartment Association, says many are willing to work with tenants before seeking evictions.

“Evictions are last resort,” Szymanski said. “Housing providers hate to do it but eventually you need to control your asset that you borrowed money on with the humanitarian side. Some are more humanitarian than others. Some are quite, and some are not particularly that way.”

The Urban Institute found that 92 percent of eviction filings are made by corporations. Szymanski says 10 years ago corporations were a small part of his organization’s membership. Now 70 percent of the group’s members who own rental properties are out-of-state corporations.

“When you don’t have locally based companies with roots in the community there may not be as much a sensitivity of working with delinquent people behind on their rent,” Szymanski said. “(There) may be some more leniency with local companies that have an understanding and roots in the community. But those companies can’t do that forever, that’s detrimental to their business.”

City officials hope an increase in the Housing Trust Fund, which finances affordable housing, will result in more rentals that low- and middle-income people can afford. But no one expects the $50 million city officials are asking for to solve the problem.

North Charleston’s eviction rate is the highest in the country

North Charleston’s eviction rate is the highest in the country

In a digital drop of Knowlesian proportions, a team of researchers at Princeton University has released the most detailed portrait of American evictions thus far and has come to a stunning conclusion: North Charleston’s eviction rate more than tripled from 2015 to 2016, making it the highest eviction market in the country.

Beginning in 2017, the team at Eviction Lab — led by sociologist, professor, and author Matthew Desmond — pored over 83 million eviction records dating back to the year 2000. The data, released earlier this month, is mostly based on available court records, but it provides the most accurate glimpse into an insidious facet of the national and regional housing crisis.

North Charleston averaged a whopping 10 evictions a day in 2016.

Sixteen-and-a-half percent of renters in the 104,000-person city were officially ordered to leave their homes by a judge.

What’s more: North Charleston had an eviction filing rate of 35.62 percent, meaning that almost 36 eviction proceedings were started per every 100 renters in the city in 2016.

The second city with the most evictions per renters was Richmond, Va. There, 17 people a day enter the painful and disorienting reality of eviction based on the most recently compiled data, but the percentage of evictees as it relates to the population — which is more than double that of North Charleston — is lower. Columbia was the eighth worst city on the list, with an eviction judgment rate of 8.2 percent, amounting to six eviction per day in 2016.

Matt Billinglsey is a Charleston-based eviction attorney for South Carolina Legal Services, a non-profit providing free legal aid to low-income South Carolinians in civil cases.

Though more than 86,000 evictions were filed in South Carolina in 2016, S.C. Legal Services had the resources to represent tenants in only 458 cases. For comparison, more than 41,000 South Carolinians were eventually ordered to pack their belongings and start anew elsewhere in 2016.

The figures compiled by Eviction Lab reveal an interesting trend. Though the number of eviction filings in North Charleston actually decreased from 2015 to 2016, the number of people who were ordered out of their homes by a judge more than tripled, going from 1,148 in 2015 to 3,660 in 2016.

Billingsley acknowledges the spike in eviction judgments in North Charleston, but says he hasn’t noticed anything suspicious in the process delivering these catastrophic results.

“The judges here are pretty good,” he says. “I didn’t see anything that would draw some red flags as far as the court system goes.”

Experts agree that South Carolina has fairly middle-of-the-road housing laws. The causes of the high eviction rates in the area are more directly tied to evergreen issues: housing segregation, poverty, and lack of legal information. The New York Times noted that, in Richmond’s case, the city houses many poor African-American communities in low-quality housing with little chances for upward mobility.

Four of the top five cities with the highest eviction judgments are more than 48 percent African-American, according to U.S. Census estimates.

In Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties — the three jurisdictions comprising North Charleston — the filing fee for an eviction is $40, and a writ of ejectment with the help of a constable or a county deputy costs an additional $10. All in all, it only costs landlords $50 to get a tenant out of their property in most of South Carolina for something as simple as being 5 days late on rent after a written notice, as allowed by state law.

The cost to aggravated landlords is higher in states like Minnesota ($287 in district court) or Massachusetts ($120 in housing court).

“One thing that’s a little bit peculiar to South Carolina is that our evictions, compared to other states, are very cheap,” says S.C. Legal Services housing unit director Adam Protheroe. “A lot of landlords aren’t very reluctant to file, and they also use evictions as a rent collection technique. You’ll see serial filings, and it suggests that landlords are using that for rent collection.”

This misuse of the judicial system may even be inflating the city’s eviction rates — and it caused a headache for Princeton’s researchers.

James Hendrickson, a researcher at Eviction Lab, says that the team also noticed a pattern of serial evictions against the same tenants in South Carolina’s court records.

“Even though the data indicates that an eviction or judgment was issued, that person shows up a month later,” Hendrickson says. “From that, we can tell they haven’t left the property. We do our best to count them one time, rather than multiple times.”

Hendrickson and his colleagues are still in the process of interpreting their own numbers through meeting with legal aid centers, housing advocates, and experts throughout the country. One thing that stuck out to him is the income disparity between North Charleston and its wealthier neighbor.

“The median cost of rent [in North Charleston] was about $900 dollars, and in Charleston it was $1000,” he says. “But in comparison to median household income, it looks like [the difference is] about $15,000 a year. It’s an interesting question in the interplay between income and rent.”

Though the amount of people who actually vacate their properties following an eviction order is up in the air, it’s also unclear how many renters simply leave their properties when asked by their landlords without involvement from the courts.

There are three reasons why landlords can file for eviction under the state’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Act: nonpayment of rent, end of lease, or a violation of the terms of the lease. That first reason is responsible for the vast majority of the state’s filings, according to Protheroe.

“Cost burden is what it comes down to,” Protheroe says. “We see a lot of people who are paying 50, 60, 70 percent of their income just on rent, not on food or utilities. A high light bill will do it, a sick kid would do it.”

The Eviction Lab methodology puts part of the blame on wage stagnation and rising rents.

“In recent years, renters’ housing costs have far outpaced their incomes, driving a nationwide affordability crisis,” according to the report. “Current data from the American Housing Survey show that most poor renting families spend at least 50 percent of their income on housing costs. Under these conditions, millions of Americans today are at risk of losing their homes through eviction.”

Evictions in the area are so common that the three Magistrate Courts handling cases in North Charleston have resorted to what are commonly referred to as “cattle calls” to deal with the cases. In these mass hearings, multiple defendants are called up to the podium one by one to explain their case, often without representation.

“You just watch tenant after tenant get evicted,” Protheroe says. “They don’t know there is a defense, or they don’t know how to argue it. It’s difficult to watch sometimes, but there are rules that prevent us from trying to snatch clients in situations like that.”

Kendra Stewart, a professor at the College of Charleston and director of the Riley Center for Livable Communities, says multiple factors have created a “perfect storm” raining down evictions upon North Charleston’s tenants.

“First, we have seen tremendous growth in the region,” Stewart wrote via e-mail. “This of course creates a strain on the housing market and has led the cost of housing (both home ownership and rent) to increase at a greater rate than wages.

“Add to this three years of record flooding that has hit the most vulnerable neighborhoods the hardest. Often landlords don’t repair flood damage in lower-rent homes or apartments for various reasons, leaving tenants to either stop paying rent or use their rent money to make repairs rather than paying the rent. Either case leaves them vulnerable to eviction.”

A spokesman for the City of North Charleston did not respond to a request for comment, but he deferred responsibility for the city’s eviction crisis to the courts when speaking to The Post & Courier.

“Evictions are wholly a function of the county judiciary,” city spokesman Ryan Johnson told the Charleston newspaper.

By Adam Manno