Since being evicted from her apartment in New York’s Bronx neighborhood in September, Areletha McLain and her six young children have crammed into a two-bedroom apartment with five relatives. Their belongings are piled up in a corner and the kids sleep doubled-up in bunks scattered throughout the unit.
It is not her first eviction, and they have taken a toll on her children. “When they get comfortable [with a school] and start liking it, that’s when they get taken from it,” she said.
McLain’s situation is grimly familiar for an estimated 3 million Americans who face eviction each year. Yet unlike many of them, she has a fighting chance of getting back into her home.
Just 1% of New York City housing court defendants were represented by an attorney in 2013, compared with 95% of landlords, according to a recent city report. It is a situation that is echoed nationwide. But recently New York, which handles at least 150,000 eviction cases annually, became the first city in the United States to guarantee evicted tenants the use of an attorney.
In the Massachusetts city of Quincy, a pilot project to provide lawyers to tenants led to two-thirds of represented tenants staying in their homes, compared with one-third of unrepresented tenants. And those with lawyers received almost five times the financial benefit, such as damages and cancellation of past rent.
“In housing court, it makes a tremendous difference,” said John Pollock, a Baltimore attorney who leads the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. “When you introduce a defendant’s attorney to the process, it changes the expectations.”
McLain’s attorney, Carmine Annunziato, said more than 80% of his evicted clients have been able to return home. The difference between housing court defendants with and without attorneys is “night and day”, he said.
“People don’t know their rights,” he said. “They’ll sign anything.”
It’s easy to think of eviction as being simply the result of unpaid rent, and that is certainly true in some cases. But the issue is far more complex.
Some tenants refuse to pay rent because of unheeded repair requests, leading landlords to evict them rather than solving the problems. Others, including McLain, are caught up in the confusion of ownership changes – in McLain’s case, she says she paid a brokerage that dissolved, taking her money with it.
Speaking to a visitor about her situation, McLain tried in vain to keep the peace as her children played restlessly in the cramped space. A smoke alarm with a failing battery chirped incessantly.
She said she regretted some of the choices that led to her current situation.
“I was baptized when I was young and you’re not supposed to believe in abortion,” says McLain, who grew up in Brooklyn and works nights at a Manhattan gym, doing everything from cleaning toilets to working the front desk. “You had no choice but to have these children.”
They range from seven months to seven years old. Her longtime boyfriend, Barshai, is the father.
The constant housing grind has taken its toll on the family. The stress, she said, caused an argument between her and Barshai that led the city to bar him from homeless housing, and some of the children have had academic problems.
Evictions leave a red mark on someone’s housing history that can be seen by other landlords, and evictees face hefty fees and fines that compound their housing difficulties.
Black women tend to be most affected by gentrification and evictions in the US, according to experts. Mass incarceration of black men has put much of the financial and child-rearing burden on their partners, said Rasheedah Phillips, managing attorney for the housing unit at Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services, where nearly two-thirds of the clients are black women.
She quoted Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer-winning book, Evicted: “Black men are locked up and black women are locked out.”
New York started testing the initiative in 2014 and formally adopted it last August, despite opposition from landlords. Tenants’ lawyers could “serve merely to prolong the inevitable through frivolous delaying tactics, so that their client can remain with a roof over their head for as long as possible when there is no justification for their continued tenancy,” Mitchell Posilkin, general counsel for New York’s Rent Stabilization Association, a coalition of landlords, argued during a 2016 public hearing.
Other cities are considering similar solutions. San Francisco, Philadelphia and Baltimore all are testing or considering right-to-counsel programs, as are smaller cities such as Santa Rosa, California.
McLain expects to hear the results of her case this month. She had previously been evicted from a Staten Island apartment, leading to her family moving to the homeless shelter in early 2015. She didn’t even bother looking for a lawyer that time.
“I just wasn’t going to fight,” she said. “I just gave up.”
But not this time, she added.