Out of House and Home
Evictions increase the risks of homelessness and long-term residential instability—and they are growing.
TWO SIBLINGS SAT FORLORNLY in the parking lot of the apartment building that had been their home. They were surrounded by their family’s possessions, all in a jumbled pile on the concrete. The sofa was there; so were the mattresses, dishes, pots and pans, and family mementos. Their clothes were nearby in plastic garbage bags. Their mother had gone to fetch a rental truck and secure a storage unit. The tenth-grade girl and her sixth-grade brother knew that if they left, neighbors and strangers would rifle through the mound, taking what they wanted.
That is the image of eviction seared into the brain of Jennifer Jobson, executive director of Midtown Assistance Center (MAC), who rushed to the scene to deliver a rent check.
MAC is a nonprofit agency whose mission is to provide emergency assistance to low-income working Atlantans. “You hear about evictions,” Jobson said. “You see pictures of people’s possessions on the street, but seeing the kids out there left such an impression on me. When we prevent an eviction, that’s what we’re preventing.”
Atlanta and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quashed evictions for nonpayment of rent during the COVID-19 crisis, but even when the magistrates’ courts were not holding eviction hearings, some landlords filed notices, creating a backlog. Tenants’ advocates say delays only postpone the inevitable. They use words such as “tsunami” and “flood” to describe the barrage of eviction proceedings that will come when the orders expire. Atlanta lawyer and First Presbyterian Church member Jack Hardin, who has long worked to reduce homelessness, calls it a “looming disaster.”
“They just change the locks, board up the doors, and throw stuff out on the street. Or they pay people to come in and clear it out, and they get to keep the stuff—the nice stuff. It's more common than people think.”
MICHAEL LUCAS, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF ATLANTA VOLUNTEER LAWYERS FOUNDATION
In mid-2020, Hardin said, he woke up in the middle of the night with evictions on his mind. A founding partner of the law firm Rogers & Hardin, he led the team that created the Gateway Center, a central agency to connect people who are experiencing homelessness with the support they need. He was an original member of the Regional Commission on Homelessness and serves as its co-chair with former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. “Most of the time, I’m trying to put homeless people into houses,” he said. “Now I’m looking at people who have housing and are in danger of losing it.”
Keeping people in their homes makes more sense than trying to rehouse them, he said. “We can’t solve all their financial problems, but maybe we can solve enough of them so that they can stay in their households. It’s not to anybody’s benefit to have them put on the street—not theirs, not the landlord’s.”
Hardin started calling his contacts to gather support for a new effort called SOARR—Save Our Atlanta Region’s Residents. Hardin emphasizes that the new nonprofit will not be confined to the city itself but will work across metro area jurisdictions. Sponsors include the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, and other organizations. Entities in the private sector, including the Apartment Hunter’s Guide and RentPath, have also been helpful in creating an internet site or app that will let tenants file a single application for a range of suitable apartments that accept low-income vouchers.
Even as SOARR leaders worked to get their organizational structure in place, their potential caseload mounted. In October 2020 alone, property owners filed 6,813 eviction actions in the five-county close-in metro area; but that number, coming during the COVID-19 embargo on evictions, was roughly half the 13,463 filings in pre-pandemic January, according to the ARC’s eviction tracker.
Of course not all filings result in evictions, and not all evictions result in piles of possessions on the street. Some renters settle with their landlords and remain; some move out at the first notice; some go through the full legal process and then vacate. But many evictions are never counted because the landlords ignore the law, said Michael Lucas, deputy director of Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, the largest provider of free legal representation for low-income tenants in Fulton County. “They just change the locks, board up the doors, and throw stuff out on the street. Or they pay people to come in and clear it out, and they get to keep the stuff—the nice stuff. It’s more common than people think.”
Eugenia Jones, a former resident of First Presbyterian Church’s Women’s Transformation Center, knows how it feels to be evicted. When she fell behind on her rent, she fought the first eviction notice and was able to get an injunction that allowed her to stay in the apartment where she had lived for six years; but after the injunction expired, she was evicted. “They wouldn’t work with me,” she said. She remembers the day: March 12, 2018.
She moved in with her brother temporarily, but when tension built up between them, she went into the WTC at First Presbyterian. With assistance from the church and its partner agencies, she was able to save money and eventually move into her own apartment. She has gradually furnished the kitchen and bedroom and is working toward being able to buy a chair and sofa for the living room. Her new home represents much more than a place to lay her head at night. It is security. Of being homeless, she said, “I’m making sure I’m not ever going to be in that situation again.”
Sentiment abounds about home and hearth. Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder said, “Home is the nicest word there is.” Confucius said, “The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.” And aisles of a craft store offer up signs with sayings such as “Home is the starting place of love, hope, and dreams.”
Sentiment aside, home plays a significant role in overall health and quality of life. “Residential stability begets a kind of psychological stability,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond in his seminal 2016 book Evicted. “It begets school stability, which increases the chances that children will excel and graduate. And it begets community stability, which encourages neighbors to form strong bonds.”
Evictions, on the other hand, “cause large and persistent increases in risk of homelessness, elevate long-term residential instability,” and even increase emergency room use, according to a December 2018 study by New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.
Organizations that attempt to tally the numbers of people experiencing homelessness don’t count all evictees. The number of people who are making do with some kind of temporary shelter, such as a car, a motel room, or a relative’s spare couch, is “really hard to quantify,” Lucas said. Many evictees seem to disappear.
The annual Point in Time census of people experiencing homelessness, required by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), counts only “sheltered and unsheltered persons,” those living on the street and in homeless shelters. By HUD’s 2020 count, Atlanta’s homeless population was 3,240. But Atlanta Public Schools had almost that many children experiencing homelessness—3,088, or 6 percent of the total student body—enrolled in the 2015-2016 school year, the last for which a report was available, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In the strange distance learning fall of 2020, the system had 519 students “coded” homeless, “which means we have been notified they are persistently homeless,” said First Presbyterian member and Atlanta Board of Education at-large representative Cynthia Briscoe Brown. ”There are many more who are housing insecure; some we know about, and some we don’t. These are the ones that are hardest to pinpoint and serve.”
Many, but not all, evictions are caused by nonpayment of rent. If a family is living on the edge, a cutback in work hours, a broken-down car, an illness, or some other emergency can mean the difference between home and homeless. Once a rent payment is late, penalties start to accrue, making the debt grow. “Once people get into the cycle of being behind, they never get caught up,” Jobson of MAC said. “When people are working low-wage jobs, work hours are not always consistent. They can have little minicrises that wouldn’t be a big deal to many other people. Then they have to decide which bill to pay. And many landlords won’t accept a partial payment.”
Monica DeLancy is used to juggling bills. She lost her car to repossession in order to keep up with the rent on her south Cobb County apartment, and she fell behind on her rent as she paid for a car and insurance. With a monthly income of $1,500 as a part-time Cobb County school employee, plus a disability check for her seventeen-year-old developmentally disabled son, she managed to hold on to her $1,400-a-month apartment for four years—until mid-December 2019.
Her daughter had just come home from Bennett College—where she was on the dean’s list, DeLancy bragged—when sheriff’s employees came to execute an eviction. DeLancy argued that she hadn’t received proper notice, but people representing the apartment complex who had started moving her belongings to the curb wouldn’t be deterred. Out went her books, Bibles, the family’s clothes, paperwork from her job, and even the Christmas tree. “I had to throw away the furniture because it rained,” she said.
She moved her family into a motel until she found another apartment. By New Year’s Day, the family was settled in a new complex with less space and lower rent where DeLancy is now able to earn a stipend as the resident coordinator. “Cobb County was already wall-to-wall evictions before the pandemic,” she said. For struggling renters, “basically it’s a cycle of going in and out of eviction. Wages are not in step with the cost of rent.” In January through October of 2019, 18,356 notices were filed in Cobb County, according to the ARC.
While she admits that she was often late with her rent, DeLancy said she believes she was evicted because she is a well-known tenants’ advocate who founded a renters’ association for her area, called We Thrive in Riverside. “Mine was retaliation,” she said. Since her own eviction, she has started an eviction prevention committee in Cobb.
A Georgia law that took effect in July 2020 is supposed to prevent retaliatory evictions. But Lucas of Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers said people are displaced for many reasons. Some sort of self-evict. “Conditions can get so deplorable, and the landlord shows no willingness to make repairs, that people just leave because it’s making their kids sick,” he said.
In many cases, the landlord is holding on to the property as speculation on the land and has no incentive to repair or maintain housing, he said. “Conditions run the gamut—an entire wall that is black with mold, a basement filling up with sewage. Every couple of months, we see tenants from the same address. They tolerate it as long as they can as an alternative to being homeless.”
People try to live under appalling circumstances, Lucas said, because of a severe shortage of affordable housing in metro Atlanta.
Many geographic areas in metro Atlanta with low income and high eviction rates are overwhelmingly Black, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank. A southwest Atlanta census tract is an example—or was five years ago.
Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, a national database, showed that in 2016, the last year compiled, eviction notices were filed against more than half the households—55.99 percent—in a west-side tract south of I-20 and just inside I-285. One in five households—
22.3 percent—were actually evicted, according to Princeton. The 2.6-square-mile tract is 91.63 percent Black and 6.26 percent Hispanic/Latino.
The disproportionate impact of evictions on African American communities is no accident or coincidence but a holdover from a period of segregation enforced by infrastructure. Writing for the 1619 Project, the New York Times’ 2019 examination of the legacy of slavery in the United States, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse explained that the route of I-20, the east-west interstate highway through Atlanta, was intentionally set to serve as “the boundary between the white and Negro communities on the west side of town,” as then Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield described it. Kruse is the author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005).
The highway is but one of the structures, literal and social, constructed to separate the races in Atlanta. Newcomers wonder why so many streets change names as they cross major arteries. Briarcliff becomes Moreland when it crosses Ponce de Leon going south, for instance. Atlanta magazine explained in 2019 that many such changes were instituted by city officials to signal where the Black neighborhoods began.
Residential patterns have changed but only to some degree. Many areas of high poverty remain segregated, as evidenced by public school districts. Eight of twenty-one Atlanta high schools are more than 90 percent Black, as are eight of fifteen middle schools. Twenty-three elementary schools are classified as 100 percent Black; every one of those has a free or reduced lunch student population of 98 percent.
When driving around some census tracts from the 2016 report, poverty is now visible only in small pockets amid renovation and construction.
The tent city under the bridge at the I-85/I-20 interchange is a sign of homelessness. But so are the luxury apartments and new and refurbished houses selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars in neighborhoods where older but less expensive residences once stood.
The cloud to the silver lining of rejuvenation in some neighborhoods is displacement. Atlanta loses an average of 1,500 affordable housing units every year, according to the Georgia State University Urban Studies Institute. “The root of this shrinking can be traced to luxury conversions and high rent pressure, or foreclosures,” an institute report says.
As the BeltLine—the $4.8 billion, twenty-two-mile pedestrian and bike-friendly trail now under development—stretches onward, property nearby becomes more desirable, therefore more expensive.
Take the Chosewood Park neighborhood in south Atlanta. In late August, more than one hundred tenants of the Gladstone Apartments half a mile from the BeltLine were told they had to move to make way for a new development of apartments and condominiums selling for as much as $450,000. Although the complex offered financial incentives and relocation assistance, dozens of renters had difficulty finding apartments they could afford, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Developers promised to meet the city’s minimum requirement of 15 percent “affordable” units. Under the guidelines, that would mean rent on a one-bedroom apartment for a low-income tenant would not exceed $1,240 per month. A renter would have to work a full month of forty-hour weeks at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour just to pay the rent. Apartments in the buildings scheduled for demolition were available for less than $500 a month.
Real estate reports are full of news about commercial, residential, and mixed-use development on the west side. A $300 million mixed-use development to replace the aging Mall West End is one of the largest.
“It was inevitable that communities along the BeltLine would be impacted,” said Kimberly Scott, a real estate agent and chair of NPU-T, the Neighborhood Planning Unit that includes the Atlanta University complex. “Depending on who you talk to, the impact is positive or negative.”
“If there were more affordable housing, there wouldn’t be so many evictions, and so many people wouldn’t be living in slumlord conditions. That’s the real upstream issue that needs to be addressed.””
TERRY ROSS, FORMER NPU-T CHAIR
Some people welcome the change and call it revitalization. Others fear it and call it gentrification, a term coined in the 1960s by British sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the displacement of working-class Londoners by the “gentry.”
“Our working-class residents are being squeezed out,” said Terry Ross, former NPU-T chair. “Landlords are forced to raise their rent because of increases in taxes. Residents are forced to choose between medications and mortgage payments or property taxes. Pensions don’t increase.”
When more affluent people move in and upgrade property, all property values are increased, he said. “That’s a good thing, but it’s a complex issue. Increased property values increase property taxes, which creates a new set of challenges.”
Nick Hess, chairman of nearby NPU-S, owns a piece of rental property in southwest Atlanta. In the last two years, he said, tax escalated from $500 annually to $2,500. “That’s the kind of shock our area is going through,” he said. “That winds up leaving renters, a significant percentage of our folks, high and dry as landlords are under pressure to pass on costs.”
One option for lower-cost housing is to move farther from downtown. “We’re seeing people heading for Clayton County,” said Jobson of MAC, “but it’s hard for those people to get to their jobs.” Clayton County is not part of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) system, and it has its own eviction issues, with roughly twenty thousand filings in 2019, according to the ARC.
Nobody expects property owners to let renters stay indefinitely without making payments. “Rental property owners have numerous financial obligations, including mortgages, utilities, insurance, taxes and employee payroll,” Jim Fowler, president of the Atlanta Apartment Association, wrote in a September op-ed column. “When residents are unable to pay rent, owners are then at risk of falling short of their fiscal responsibilities.” The association represents the multifamily housing industry, whose members account for almost four hundred thousand apartment homes.
Intown neighborhood leaders say they are especially concerned about protecting their “legacy residents,” some of whom have lived in the area for decades.
In August, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that the city allocated $22 million from the Coronavirus Relief Fund, administered by the United Way of Greater Atlanta, to help keep renters in their homes—one of the latest in a series of efforts to prevent displacement. In 2018, Bottoms unveiled plans formulated with several local and federal agencies and supported with a $9 million investment to help low-income city residents avoid displacement.
Public/private/philanthropic coalitions, such as the Westside Future Fund, a nonprofit organization chaired by former Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum, have worked in specific communities. The fund, whose corporate investors include Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, Home Depot, and Truist Financial, is developing houses and apartments on the sites of vacant and blighted properties in the Vine City, English Avenue, Ashview Heights, and Just Us neighborhoods. The Future Fund plans to produce eight hundred housing units by 2025, aimed chiefly at families whose income is no more than 60 percent of the average median income for the area, which was $82,700 for a family of four for 2020, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
As well intentioned as efforts are, many have been piecemeal, failed to meet goals, or proved to be inadequate to keep up with rising costs and stagnant wages, neighborhood activists say.
“We’ve got to keep searching for innovative ideas and solutions,” said Ross of NPU-T.
Preventing evictions and temporarily housing people who are experiencing homelessness are valiant undertakings, said Lucas of Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers, but the real need is low-cost housing.
“As much as my job is making sure there’s more legal representation and emergency assistance, all of it points to the affordability
crisis,” Lucas said. “If there were more affordable housing, there wouldn’t be so many evictions, and so many people wouldn’t be living in slumlord conditions. That’s the real upstream issue that needs to be addressed.”
