Linh Do via Flickr
PHILADELPHIA – Eviction court during COVID-19 is boring, boring, boring, and then all of a sudden, BOOM! A door gets slammed, voices rise, and someone has to call the sheriff. That kind of case doesn’t happen often, but on a raw January morning in Philadelphia, it did.
The court encourages adversaries to resolve disputes before they reach a judge, so a landlord named Francine Jefferson and two women who’d been her tenants for eight years, Benita Cottman and Carol Grant, ducked out of the courtroom with their lawyers, into an area reserved for mediation. Their quarrel centered on issues that, even with dockets shortened due to the pandemic, the court hears every day. The landlord said the tenants hadn’t paid rent since August. Also they’d promised to move out but didn’t. The tenants said the landlord had allowed a small water leak to grow into a big problem. Also part of the stairs was broken. Also the landlord was a liar. The landlord said no, actually the tenants were liars. It escalated from there.
Their language was laced with the kind of viciousness more likely to come from the cheap seats when the Dallas Cowboys are in town than from three middle-aged women who’d known each other for years. Because Philadelphia Municipal Court’s sixth floor is built more like a Department of Motor Vehicles office than a vaunted temple of American justice, the sound of the fight bled through the wall and into Judge David H. Conroy’s Courtroom 3. You couldn’t tell exactly what Jefferson, Cottman, and Grant were saying, but you didn’t have to.
Bob Ivry
Philadelphia Municipal Court
By the time the deputy arrived to restore order, attorneys Jermaine D. Harris, for the landlord, and Vikram A. Patel, for the tenants, had separated their clients and were beginning the cooling-off process. An hour later, they had an agreement. The tenants would move out in three months and the landlord would forgive unpaid back rent.
EXPECT MORE SHOUTING in the coming months. The country’s eviction courts were a flaming mess before the pandemic, so imagine the chaos when tenant protections are lifted and an estimated ten million Americans face getting booted from their homes. The virus revealed the nation’s landlord-tenant system as such a reliable rubber stamp for property owners that only a full stop could keep people from dying. A national eviction moratorium and numerous local variations have saved more than 55,000 lives, approximately, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. That protection may be coming to an end soon. The current Centers for Disease Control eviction ban expires March 31.
Philadelphia, which not long ago had the fourth-highest eviction filing rate in the U.S., is a special case. It was able to construct a safety net that other jurisdictions, a year into the pandemic, still don’t have. But even Philly’s system has its quirks.
National programs to help tenants pay rent and keep landlords afloat have had mixed success. In March 2020, the CARES Act earmarked $12.4 billion in federal funds for rental assistance, but many eligible people never saw a dime. A further $25 billion effort passed in December has been even more frustrating to access. Arduous documentation requirements, overburdened staff, a confusing patchwork of state and local processes, and halting participation have slowed help to a trickle.
In Pennsylvania, lawmakers bungled the emergency response in especially slapstick fashion. They created impenetrable hoops for recipients to jump through, then found that getting the money to the right places required a system that didn’t exist. The commonwealth ended up spending only $54 million of the $150 million in federal money it received. Because the funding was use-it-or-lose-it, and no one likes writing a check to Washington, the legislature opted to dump the remaining funds into its prisons. One might be tempted to call that ironic.
Philadelphia, however, was able to move faster. The city, helped by existing relationships it had with nonprofit housing organizations, dispersed a total of $61.8 million in CARES Act rental assistance. It also started an Eviction Diversion Program that matches tenants with housing counselors, attorneys, and money to bridge rent payment gaps. City leaders hope the infrastructure they built to minimize evictions will survive the pandemic and create a model for others. “It’s absolutely harder now to get evicted in Philadelphia than it used to be,” says attorney David H. Denenberg, who represents both landlords and tenants. “What good is it to put tenants out on the street? We all end up paying for that.”
The virus revealed the nation’s landlord-tenant system as such a reliable rubber stamp for property owners that only a full stop could keep people from dying.
Around the country, states, counties, and cities—sometimes even different judges in the same towns—have followed their own interpretations of what constitutes an eviction moratorium. In most places, the ban shields tenants who can’t pay rent, provided they submit paperwork identifying COVID as the reason. Landlords can still bounce renters for things like criminal activity, property damage, or failure to complete the right documentation on time. Getting evicted might seem like a harsh punishment for not filling out the right forms, but the rule, written by the CDC during the Trump administration, lingers in the Biden era.
Philadelphia is a little different. The city council has ruled that no tenants can be locked out of their homes for any reason during the pandemic. The policy has kept thousands of people out of the virus’s path. It’s also enabled some epic apartment-trashing. But the effort has only slowed, not stopped, eviction filings. In Philadelphia before COVID, landlords petitioned for 1,500 evictions a month. This January, as cases and deaths spiked, the tally was still about 20 cases a day. The ongoing filings, and the ban on carrying out eviction orders, has created a ballooning backlog of cases for the time when court officers can get back to throwing tenants out of their homes. According to the Municipal Court, there are now more than 560 renters on Philly’s toss-out queue who, when the time comes, should expect a knock on the door.
IN OTHER U.S. CITIES, eviction courts are chugging along. Pre-pandemic, Baltimore had more eviction filings annually than it had rental units, according to the court—an astonishing 1,100 a day. A crowd of that size jamming into the courthouse for eviction hearings was impossible during COVID. Before shutting down for a second time late last year due to surging cases, Baltimore shrank its daily dockets to about 120. That’s still 2,300 a month. New York City landlords have filed for more than 40,000 evictions since March 15, 2020, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. In Houston, the number topped 25,000. In just the last week of February, Phoenix had 859 filings and Indianapolis 242.
America’s country cousins are doing their best to keep up. Last year, Iowa landlords filed in 95 of the state’s 99 counties. “It’s not uncommon in Iowa for someone to be on the street within two weeks of receiving their first notice,” says Alex Kornya of Iowa Legal Aid. Two parts of Michigan were among the Eviction Lab’s top five in rural evictions. In some areas of Idaho, landlords work with tenants on pre-court mediation. In others, they’re still issuing three-day “pay or quit” notices to delinquent tenants.
“Some tenants simply move out to avoid court,” says Ali Rabe, an Idaho state senator and executive director of Jesse Tree, an advocacy group for the homeless. Because a certain percentage of renters are known to treat the first notice they get from their landlords not as a warning or a summons to court, but as a threat that they’ll get kicked out unless they pack up and go, it can look in some places as if no moratoriums ever existed.
The volume of cases in more normal times overwhelmed courts to such an extent that verdicts proceeded on what seemed like assembly lines. The situation would have overwhelmed the courts if it weren’t for default judgments, which occur when one side fails to show up in court. That side is almost always the tenant.
In Philadelphia’s Courtroom 3, when there’s no tenant present, Judge Conroy, a solidly built, ginger-haired man in a black robe and matching face mask, glances at the wall clock and calculates how much time has passed since the hour the tenant was asked to appear. The proceedings are constantly behind schedule, so the judge will likely determine it’s late enough that waiting any longer would be fruitless. The gavel comes down. The whole thing takes a minute, tops. Default judgments make up one-third of Philadelphia’s eviction cases.
Though tenants seem to have a chronically hard time showing up, the landlord is almost never there either. That’s because an attorney usually handles the property owner’s case. Philadelphia landlords were represented by legal counsel in 82 percent of eviction cases from 2015 to 2020, according to a study by Community Legal Services. By contrast, only 10 percent of tenants had attorneys. And that’s an impressive rate of lawyering up compared with other cities. Only 4.4 percent of Detroit tenants in court had lawyers in 2017, according to financial advisory firm Stout Risius Ross. In Kansas City, 1.3 percent of tenants were represented from 2006 to 2016, while 84 percent of landlords had lawyers, according to the KC Eviction Project.
COURTESY VIKRAM PATEL
Vikram Patel serves as a Lawyer of the Day for low-income tenants in Philadelphia facing eviction. He usually has 20 minutes to devise a defense.
Say what you will about the legal profession, but it can be handy to have an attorney standing next to you when you’re facing a judge. Landlords won 99.7 percent of Kansas City eviction cases that made it to court in 2017. That’s not a typo.
Given this context, the number of default judgments makes more sense. “Eviction court has been a lopsided forum for so long that a lot of tenants feel like, what’s the point in showing up,” says Eric Dunn, director of litigation for the National Housing Law Project.
To help recalibrate the scales of justice, Philadelphia, like some other places, has made room for a handful of nonprofit organizations to provide free legal counsel to tenants whose incomes fall within a certain percentage of the federal poverty line. To make sure clients qualify, attorneys carry around a cheat sheet that does the math for them. Demand overwhelms resources, even with the COVID-reduced caseload. Community Legal Services, one of the lawyer groups, says it gets as many as 50 calls a day.
For tenants who come to court without first consulting counsel, the groups provide on-site representation they call Lawyer of the Day. There are usually two or three of them in court. The advocacy has to be instant, as the tenant usually has about 20 minutes to relate the particulars of the case and, with the attorney, devise a defense. No other legal proceeding in the U.S. with such dire consequences has this kind of supermarket-sweep frenzy. But just having professional support makes a difference.
“It’s very scary in the courtroom,” says Leslie Stokes, a nursing assistant and single mom of four who worked out her landlord issues with the help of a Lawyer of the Day. “I feel like they’re family.” Stokes’s attorney, Kadeem Morris of Community Legal Services, says about three-quarters of his cases end up being settled before they reach a judge. “Tenants come to court in crisis,” he says. “Landlords have something the tenants need, and there will always be an imbalance. I prefer to go in front of a judge only if my client can get a clear judgment in their favor.”
FOR TENANTS, EVICTIONS can be devastating. To be poor is a crime in this country, says one tenant advocate. Even if the court’s judgment goes their way, an eviction filing—just the filing—can show up on background checks for seven years, making it harder to rent again. That can be crucial when the alternative is a highway overpass. “It’s a lot cheaper to pay someone’s rent for a month than pay for a shelter stay,” says Nick DiNardo of the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati. A homeless shelter in New York City in 2018 cost $187 a night for a family and $117 for a single adult, according to data compiled by Baruch College.
Of course, not all evicted tenants find themselves homeless. But working 40 hours a week for Pennsylvania’s $7.25 minimum hourly wage will yield a monthly gross of $1,160, which after taxes would pay for a one-bedroom, as long as you don’t eat or turn on the heat that month. Forget about being able to come up with first, last, and security. In July, Philadelphia’s minimum wage goes up to $12 an hour, but it’s still a question whether the extra money compensates for the city’s higher rents. The answer might be a subsidized apartment, but landing one is like hitting the Powerball jackpot. Even with federal programs and thousands of housing agencies across the country catering to folks unable to pay rent at full market rates, only one in four qualifying American families get the housing help they need.
Skin color is the surest indicator that you may one day have all your earthly possessions sitting on the sidewalk in Hefty bags while your former landlord changes the locks. In Philadelphia, Black people occupy a little more than 40 percent of the city’s 280,000 rental units but are more than 60 percent of eviction defendants, according to the Eviction Lab. In 2019, the filing rate remained more than twice as high in Philadelphia’s Black neighborhoods than in predominately white ones, according to a report from the Reinvestment Fund, a policy research firm. The statistics are just as dismal in other American cities. Black women have it worst of all. As Matthew Desmond, a founder of the Eviction Lab and author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, put it: Poor Black men are locked up; poor Black women are locked out.
Some of the more optimistic housing advocates say the pandemic gives the country a chance to fix the eviction process and sketch out better ways to keep roofs over people’s heads. “The future depends entirely on what we do in the next few months,” says Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “If we were to have a system where housing assistance was available to all eligible people who needed it, we wouldn’t be in this crisis in the first place.”
Still, Philadelphia landlords say the city’s eviction restrictions go too far. They bemoan tenants who say they can’t pay rent because of COVID, but are still working and haven’t suffered any obvious financial pain. They complain about negotiating forbearance on their mortgages, and say they lie awake nights thinking about when they’ll have to double up on payments or face a balloon payment at the end of the term. They fret over property damage they can do little about, and they loathe the paperwork they have to complete for their tenants to get rental assistance that sometimes never comes. And they say they’re sick of policymakers determined to help tenants without taking them into account.
“We have a hard-left-leaning group of city councilpeople who really have it out for the landlords,” says Greg Wertman, president of the Homeowners Association of Philadelphia, a small-landlord advocacy group. “I’m not saying there aren’t good tenants out there. I’m saying why are we protecting the bad ones?”
Organizing nonprofit groups to help distribute rental assistance and putting together a diversion program to work out solutions helps landlords as well as tenants, says City Councilmember Helen Gym, whom Philadelphia Magazine called the most popular politician in town last year. “The pandemic needed bold and visionary action and I think Philadelphia is a model of that,” she says. “In a city where evictions were devastating, we’ve shown there’s a different path.”
But there’s no doubt smaller landlords have had a tough time. Nationally, 40 percent of rental units are owned by individual investors, according to a Brookings Institution study. Many of them bought property to supplement retirement income or to help pay their own mortgages. A month or more without collecting rent is enough to push many of them to the brink. Rental assistance, if it comes at all, can be too late.
Some advocates say they worry about the availability of low- and moderate-income housing if landlords get fed up and sell to bigger, out-of-town property owners, who have the deep pockets to accelerate gentrification. Even though tenant activists, such as Kaelin Mae Miller of the Pennsylvania Landlord Watchlist Project, show little mercy—“Evicting in a pandemic can happen under any landlord, big or small,” she says—many small landlords are in a different financial situation than corporate real estate managers. “The shape some of these folks are in is not that much better than their tenants,” says Kenneth L. Baritz, a longtime lawyer for landlords in Philadelphia.
COURTESY REBECCA GOINS
Rebecca Goins is a homeless landlord with a squatter tenant who refuses to leave her house.
Rebecca Goins, one of Baritz’s clients, is an extreme example. Goins, 34, became a foster kid at two, lost her birth mother at eight, and worked for years to save enough to buy a duplex in Northeast Philadelphia in December 2015. She rented the ground floor to a foster care agency that used the apartment for housing older teenagers ready to graduate from the foster system. She thought of it as giving back.
Goins lived on the second floor until March 2020, when she had back surgery and needed live-in help. She moved in with a friend. An old high school acquaintance begged her for a place to live. “He looked like he would cry when I told him he could move into my apartment,” Goins says. They agreed on a month-to-month lease. Goins planned to return home September 1, but her tenant refused to leave, she says, and stopped paying rent. She hired Baritz, whom she says she couldn’t really afford. Goins filed for eviction, but because she hadn’t registered as a landlord she couldn’t legally force him out. She now says she was duped and considers her former classmate a squatter.
“He’s sleeping in my bed,” she says. “He’s eating off my dishes.”
Attempts to reach the tenant were unsuccessful. The next hearing is in May.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Goins is a homeless landlord.
“I’ve been doing this for 45 years,” her lawyer says. “This situation is new.”
“There’s a lot of people screaming for the tenants,” Goins says. “Nobody is screaming for me.”
BACK IN COURTROOM 3, Marisol Santiago is fighting one of the city’s bigger landlords to stay in her apartment. Her flaming-pink hair and bright-yellow sweatshirt provide welcome color in a courtroom dominated by the dark blue of lawyers’ suits and the putty-hued walls.
The windows of the courtroom look out on Philadelphia City Hall, the city’s tallest building until 1986, resplendent in its acid-trip limestone statuary and its 37-foot bronze replica of William Penn at its zenith. Gazing at this psychedelic wonder of civic design, which took more than two decades at the turn of the 20th century to complete, it’s hard not to see the dingy Courtroom 3 as a wordless but eloquent comment on what the city thinks of the judicial proceedings that go on there, even if the stakes are high for tenants.
Santiago’s case takes less than a minute to come to a verdict. Her Lawyer of the Day, Vikram Patel of Community Legal Services, reveals that Santiago’s landlord never bothered to renew his rental license, annual fee of $56 per unit. For the first time all day, the tenant wins.
“It actually feels amazing,” Santiago says.
But there’s little time to celebrate. Santiago says her landlord has taken her to eviction court four times since 2016 and she knows he’ll try again. She’s had enough. She says she’ll have to move. The only alternative would be staying in her apartment and waiting for the knock on the door.
