Above Photo: Tyrone Turner / DCist/WAMU.
Washington D.C., – As the pandemic waned, Vivian Tatabod, a nurse in Prince George’s County, says she noticed many of her neighbors in her apartment building getting evicted.
“When people were going through so much,” she says. “Stuff outside, thrown out, families, struggling to find a place.”
Rent in her building, Takoma Towers, recently shot up — in Tatabod’s case, by $400 per month. She says she’s paid her rent while working on the front lines, treating elderly COVID-19 patients. Recently, she was contracted to work at DC Prep to help with COVID-19 testing. While working, she was also raising two children on her own.
But two months ago, that contract ended and she lost her job. Now, she too is facing eviction.
“I need shelter for me and my children,” Tatabod says. “Both my kids need to have a place to stay so they can go to school and have a normal life.”
She says she has lived in the U.S. for 20 years, and worked hard. An eviction will be “destabilizing” for her family.
“Where do we go from there? How do we start all over?” she says.
Tatabod was given 30 days to secure rental assistance money when she went to eviction court two weeks ago. That’s what she is counting on to stay housed. But the local rental assistance program has been backed up in part due to high demand, and Tatabod is worried the money she needs won’t come in on time.
In Prince George’s County and across the D.C. region, eviction numbers this year are the highest they have been since the COVID-19 pandemic began. That follows a significant slowdown in the first two years of the pandemic, when eviction moratoriums on failure to pay rent cases and rental assistance programs provided some relief to renters during the height of the pandemic.
Eviction numbers are mostly below what they were pre-COVID. In Virginia, however, filings appear to be catching up. Data from the Legal Services Corporation shows that statewide, monthly eviction filings as of September are at 87.5 percent of the “historical average.” Monthly eviction filings have also tripled since January, notes Jonathan Francis, the housing practice group chair for Legal Services of Northern Virginia.
“We may not be quite to the extremes of the highest numbers that we saw pre-COVID,” says Francis. “But we are getting very close.”
In Fairfax County, August’s numbers surpassed the “historical average” by about 20 percent, according to the Legal Services Corporation data. Cristin Bratt, communications director for Fairfax County Neighborhood & Community Services, says there has been an “unprecedented” increase in requests for rental assistance. Bratt says the county’s Coordinated Service Planning call center, which handles requests for assistance, has had double the call volume in the 2022 fiscal year that it did in the 2019 fiscal year.
In D.C., however, the annual numbers are still well below what they were before COVID, when there was an average of 32,000 eviction filings and 1,600 evictions every year, according to an eviction report by Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy. According to the report, households regularly received multiple eviction filings in a same year, so those 32,000 filings were for about 18,000 unique households.
By contrast, there were 5,543 evictions filed and 676 evictions scheduled from October 2021 to this past September.
Gabriella Lewis-White, the director of housing at the D.C. Bar’s Pro Bono Center, says the District’s eviction filings will continue to go up, in part because landlords are no longer required to give 60 days notice before filing evictions. That was an emergency measure that expired Oct. 7 — landlords are now required to give 30 days notice.
But Lewis-White says evictions in D.C. probably won’t be going up in a dramatic wave. And however much they go up, she says they will never catch up to pre-pandemic levels.
“There’s a big push around eviction diversion,” Lewis-White says. She noted that the D.C. court is hiring navigators to help renters stay housed. “As terrible as the pandemic was, there was a positive shift in awareness, around helping people get the services they need.”
For example, she says, the Landlord Tenant Legal Assistance Network, which consists of various local legal aid groups, formed in 2020. With the pandemic also came new emergency rental assistance programs and longer eviction processes, which have given renters more time to access legal help.
But the longevity of some of these eviction diversion strategies is uncertain. STAY DC, a program that provided millions of dollars in assistance for renters, has expired. Lewis-White says there needs to be a focus on building programs like STAY DC and providing ongoing emergency rental assistance post-pandemic.
She also wants to expand renters’ access to lawyers, noting that some landlords continue to take advantage of low-income tenants, often letting properties fall into disrepair.
Mary Opoku, who also lives in Takoma Towers and is a single mom of two, says there are cockroaches and rodents in her home and that management is not doing anything about it.
Opoku says management is also refusing to acknowledge that she got about $2,800 in emergency rental assistance money, even though she received a notice that the money had come through. The program she applied to does not send money directly to renters, but to landlords.
Recently, Opoku’s uncle died of a heart attack. She says the stress from dealing with management and the possibility of his niece getting evicted was too much for him.
“The government needs to do something for us. People are dying,” Opoku says. “I don’t want my kids to sleep outside.” Takoma Towers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Opoku and Vivian Tatabod are getting help from immigrant advocacy group CASA. Jorge Benitez-Perez, a lead organizer with the group, says while eviction numbers are down from before the pandemic, there are many who remain disproportionately affected.
“The ones that are feeling the heavier burden is working class folks, are immigrants,” he says. “They are the ones that know about assistances last or don’t know how to apply, or their landlords aren’t letting them know about it.”
Evictions are also going up because housing prices have soared. Benitez-Perez says in particular, corporate, out-of-state landlords are raising rents however much they want. He says Prince George’s shouldn’t wait for Maryland to enact statewide rent control legislation.
“We need our legislators to take action and pass rent stabilization at each level of government. And it starts here locally,” he says.
Significant rent hikes are also a pattern that Jonathan Francis has observed working at the Legal Services of Northern Virginia. Many of the group’s clients are being asked to enter new leases with increases as high as 30 to 40 percent of what they were originally.
“A lot of our clients, being low income, are in a position where they really can’t afford those increases,” Francis says. He and his colleagues are trying to gather statewide data to try and determine whether these rent hikes are primarily due to housing market prices going up, or whether there may be in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
Rob Wohl, an organizer with local tenant advocacy group Stomp Out Slumlords, says the rise in housing costs is “biting” and that rent control tenants got the largest rent increase ever this year due to high inflation.
“There needs to be a massive public investment to actually have enough housing for everybody and to make it genuinely affordable,” Wohl says. “If there’s no social guarantee of housing, then yeah, there’s going to be evictions. And that’s always going to be a crisis. It’s always going to be bad.”
He says there have been some positive changes for renters over the past two years — for example, based on what he’s heard from renters, it’s now easier to get a lawyer, though there is no legislation in D.C. guaranteeing that low-income renters can get an attorney. Wohl says that has helped drive down eviction numbers.
Overall, he says there is a greater sense of mobilization among tenants who are fighting to prevent evictions or for safer living conditions. Organizers, Wohl says, saw a lot of success keeping evictions at bay, pressuring governments to create rental assistance programs and create eviction moratoriums.
“The people who did that are continuing to organize,” Wohl says. “They saw that organizing works.”
But Wohl says some of the changes the pandemic brought, like emergency rental assistance programs, were more temporary.
“I think during the pandemic there was a recognition that there are millions of people who, through no fault of their own, are in a situation where they just don’t have income and they can’t pay, and so they shouldn’t be punished for that, they should be supported,” he said. “But that’s not a logic or an ethic that we apply to the various crises that people go through on a regular basis…if there’s a missed opportunity, that’s the missed opportunity.”