American Heritage: Evictions

Six years ago yesterday, when I arrived at the Heritage House Apartments after work, it looked like the building was being turned inside out. Garbage and people’s belongings lay all around the foundation where they had been dropped out the windows onto the ground below.

Pickup trucks were backed up to every entrance to the building and men, women, and children were hauling plastic laundry baskets packed with radios, stuffed animals, food, and clothing out the doors. As I pulled in, three elderly folks in motorized wheelchairs rode off across the parking lot with gas cans to refill a car — the Buick LeSabre appeared to be packed with their belongings but unmoveable. An elderly gentleman told me his wife was disabled, and that they hoped to find a place to move that night. He was calling all their family and everyone he knew at church. It was already 8:30 PM.

Heritage House was an old hotel-turned condo/apartment complex on the east side of my town. Some people owned the units they lived in, but many more were units owned by out-of-state or even out-of-country landlords who rented the apartments to low-income families. A number of the units were Section 8, meaning that folks paid a percentage of their income towards the rent and the government program made up the rest. Some of these Section 8 landlords were charging three times what I pay for my house for these tiny, rundown units. They were, basically, making bank.

Heritage House had always been a hard place for people to live, but this night it was no place to live at all. The next day, the city would condemn the entire building due to numerous health and safety violations and because of a $50,000 overdue water bill owed by the condo association (notably, this was not owed by the people who lived there). Sheriffs were going to move through the building floor by floor to make sure people were out.

I had long been worried about the conditions of Heritage House and knew it needed to be condemned, but the whole situation brought to light an even bigger problem: Most folks had no place to go. At the time, I was working at a day shelter and we were hustling to turn our operation into a 24 hour emergency shelter. We had no idea for how long. The people leaving Heritage house ended up suspended between a condemned building and the reality of our city having no available affordable housing for anyone to move into.

Last night government bureaucracy, failed policy, and — if we are being honest — our nations’ deep ambivalence to poor folks, let another deadline pass when the national eviction moratorium lapsed. This move — or more accurately lack of movement- will cause months, or even years, of dangerous hardship and will cripple communities like mine.

Because Congress and the Biden Administration let the eviction moratorium expire, 11.4 million households that are behind on their rent due to COVID could now face eviction across the country. While it lasted, the moratorium prevented households from being evicted for nonpayment, but it didn’t erase back rent owned. I have a neighbor up the street from me that owes over $5,000 in back rent that is coming due today. Most of us have never had that kind of money in our lives.

Courts are expecting eviction filings to start en masse tomorrow when offices open and neighborhoods like mine are going to start seeing sheriffs arrive, paperwork in hand, in the next thirty days.

At Heritage House that night, I talked to a woman standing guard over a shopping cart of her belongings who said she was waiting for a friend to come to get her. She said she wanted to get out that night and not the next day, because “everyone’s going crazy in there.” She said that landlords had been coming in all day, ripping out cabinets and appliances and anything salvageable before the city boarded the building up. Her landlord had taken all the doors out of her apartment.

There were less than 200 units in Heritage House. If I remember correctly, about a quarter of the people living there ended up in our emergency shelter, some for a few days, some for weeks. Now, we are about to see a Heritage House disaster on a national scale — Not only are people going to be kicked out, but they are going to have no place to go.

This is not an acute disaster or even really a COVID-specific disaster. It’s been decades in making and if lawmakers are paying any attention, the arbitrary deadline of July 31st shouldn’t have snuck up on them. This crisis has rolled out like the water in a wide, swollen river. It has been folding families up under its floodwaters a long, long time.

Democrats have failed to distribute the earmarked money from the American Rescue Plan and meet deadlines, and Republicans can absolutely be blamed for obstruction, but the truth is if we continue to have people in office who have never had their water cut off or a shut out notice tacked to their doors, then we can expect disaster after disaster roll out on top of us.

I remember one mother that night at Heritage House in particular. She was holding her six-year-old son on her lap as she balanced on top of a stack of plastic tubs. Behind her was a lamp and a mattress propped against the wall. I asked her where she was going. “I have no idea,” she said. “It’s not like we wanted to live here, but we wanted to live somewhere.”

I don’t know where she and her son ended up six years ago. I didn’t see them arrive at our shelter. I wonder sometimes what happened to her, and I wonder today where she is living and if she is safe from this latest round of government malpractice? I have no idea. All I can say is this is some goddamn heritage we are making.