Eviction

Leaks, excessive debris, a lack of heat and hot water, broken front doors – rent-stabilized tenants in Greenpoint say their landlord is trying to push them out of their homes with constant construction projects that have resulted in poor and unsafe living conditions.

The construction-related issues at 97 and 99 Clay St., a cluster of four buildings with a combined 25 apartments, have prompted a mass exodus of tenants, according to George Manatos. Now, only five tenants remain.

The outstanding rent Keilani Luxmore owed on her Seattle apartment for the month of December wouldn’t buy you a cup of coffee, a gallon of gasoline or even bus fare in this city.

But Luxmore’s failure to pay $2 last month means she is facing eviction from the home she shares with her three young children, in addition to the possible loss of the federal Section 8 voucher that covers most of her rent.

It could also result in a return to a homeless shelter for Luxmore and her children, ages 3 and under.

On a brisk morning in mid-December, Valencia Hicks was running late to the Fulton County courthouse in hopes of avoiding eviction.

The 43-year-old mother had been forced out of her home the year before, a process that had uprooted her family from their apartment in East Point, Georgia. At her new brick split-level, Hicks decided not to pay her $995 monthly rent because her landlord hadn’t adequately fixed broken appliances, preventing the family from enjoying affordable home-cooked meals. The landlord, in turn, filed for eviction.

Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the US housing market is anything but fair. In stark contrast to the racially and economically integrated neighborhoods envisioned by 1960s-era reformers, the United States housing market today is characterized by striking inequality: precipitously rising rents accompanied by high rates of eviction and homelessness in US cities, along with exploding luxury construction marketed to the wealthy.

Beginning in January, landlords who rent three or more units in unincorporated Marin will be required to have a “just cause” for evicting tenants.

The Marin County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to adopt an ordinance that creates the new requirement. Supervisors did so after years of lobbying by housing advocates who called for them to take more effective action to address the critical shortage of affordable housing in Marin.

“I am supportive of the ordinance as drafted; I think it’s been very carefully crafted,” said Supervisor Katie Rice.

A planned tenant housing relief measure was put on hold by city officials Tuesday in the face of potential litigation.

The Santa Cruz City Council had scheduled a special meeting with two items on its agenda this week, scrambling to fit in some final legislative acts prior to the term expiration for three of seven members this month. Both a proposed 90-day minimum eviction notice requirement from landlords and lengthier decision on rules to ease development of homeowners’ secondary granny flats, however, were taken off the agenda after brief public comment for each.

A settlement agreement is expected as soon as next month in a years-long legal dispute over a landlord’s attempt to evict tenants living illegally in units designated for office space, the San Francisco Examiner has learned.

Residents living at 1049 Market St. received eviction notices in 2013 from the building’s owner, who had received a notice of violation for allowing tenants to live in units designated as commercial space only, as had been the practice for years.

Since the publication of his book Evicted in 2016, sociologist Matthew Desmond has become the best-known chronicler of a quiet epidemic sweeping the United States today: eviction. Drawing on the book’s fine-grained account of how eviction plays out in Milwaukee, the country’s most segregated city, he has since sought to assemble a more panoramic, national picture of this crisis as the founder of the Eviction Lab, based at Princeton University.

“Philadelphia needs to treat its people who live here so much better. You know, I never liked speaking in front of people, but everything I’ve been through, living here for thirty years, I think it’s my right to speak for other families and other people who are going through what I’m going through. […] Y’all have six thousand children in foster care a year and asking for three hundred more families. But what about the three hundred families those children belong to who probably was wrongfully evicted from their homes? So I think y’all should think about that.”— Ricci Rawls