By Amber Randall | South Florida Sun Sentinel
It’s been two weeks since Sean Jeremy’s landlord raised his rent beyond what he could afford. For now, the only place he can afford to live is in his car.
Soaring rents in South Florida are putting others like Jeremy is a similar bind. With housing costs too high, concern is growing that more people will find themselves priced onto the streets.
By Caroline Glenn | May 13, 2021 | A Three-Part Orlando Sentinel Special Report
Jocelyn Bennett paints her daughters’ toenails, not bothered by the strong scent of nail polish filling the room at the HomeTown Studios in Orlando. The girls show off their pink toes, toddling around the small pay-by-the-week hotel room, one of many the Bennetts have called home since the pandemic began and they got evicted.
It’s just one room with a bathroom with not enough space to even open the front door all the way. But it’s got a stove and a fridge, and it’s better than living in their car or outside. There are two beds, one for mom and dad, and the other is shared by their five kids who are all under 6 years old.
These days, a bottle of Dollar Tree nail polish is one of the only luxuries Jocelyn Bennett can give them.
“That’s the worst feeling to have is I can’t provide for my kids. That’s probably the worst feeling you can have as a parent, not knowing what to do and calling 2-1-1 and them not knowing what to do,” Jocelyn, 26, said, referring to United Way’s emergency hotline.
In March 2020, Jocelyn lost her nursing assistant job at a senior living facility. Dexter, her husband, had been between jobs, finding work through a temp agency. They were already on food stamps. In April, they couldn’t cover the rent. Their landlord told them they needed to be out in 30 days. And the family became homeless in a matter of weeks.
“It was a downward spiral after that,” Dexter, 36, said. “Since COVID started, we’ve been living in hotels.”
For renters in Florida, this is what eviction can look like. It doesn’t always play out in a courtroom because many renters can’t get a court hearing, which results in their landlord automatically winning the case. Some people, like the Bennetts, leave without responding to an eviction notice because they don’t think they can fight it.
Housing experts argue Florida has some of the harshest eviction laws in the country, written so landlords can evict people as quickly as possible and without going to court. During the COVID-19 outbreak, those landlord-friendly laws, coupled with the state’s severe shortage of affordable homes, rising rents and years of stagnant wages, left thousands of suddenly jobless renters exposed. And even after the government ordered a halt to eviction proceedings and federal dollars were made available to help people pay rent, many tenants were not spared.
Black Floridians, who were already more likely to lose their job to the pandemic and die from COVID-19, were even more likely to be locked out of their homes. In a mostly Black part of downtown Orlando, for example, renters were about six times as likely to face eviction than in another mostly white part of downtown, according to new data compiled for the Orlando Sentinel by the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida.
Shimberg estimates more than 57,000 evictions were filed in Florida just from March 2020 to mid-December, pushing families like the Bennetts into homelessness at a time the government was ordering people to quarantine.
Central Florida renters, many of them the same low-wage workers who power the region’s tourism economy, were particularly vulnerable. Even before the pandemic and mass layoffs upended their lives, they lived paycheck to paycheck in a town where rent keeps climbing and wages don’t budge.
So when the bottom fell out of the tourism and service industries, there was no safety net for them, and Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature did nothing to help.
“They are the ones who face wrongful eviction, they are the ones who can’t get living wages, they are the ones who are struggling to find reliable public transportation. It’s all on them,” said state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat from Orlando. “And when we ignore these crises with affordable housing, eviction, wages, public transit — we’re doing it on the backs of working people.
“They are the ones who pay.”
Florida ranks among the states with the worst affordable rental housing shortages in the nation, data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition show. New housing has been added to try to keep up with the state’s population growth, but developers have largely ignored building places to live for low-income residents.
Over the past 20 years in Florida, nearly 200,000 rental units priced under $1,000 per month disappeared as landlords increased rents. At the same time, about 1 million units priced above $1,000 were added, the Shimberg Center found…
By Eva Rosen | The New York Times | Feb. 17, 2021
Dr. Rosen has been conducting in-person research on the housing market in poor neighborhoods in Baltimore for more than 10 years. Her book, “The Voucher Promise: ‘Section 8’ and the Fate of an American Neighborhood,” tells that story.
“Housing is a right in America,” President Biden said last month as he signed an executive order promising to address racial discrimination and inequality in housing. On Tuesday, the administration announced an extension of the federal foreclosure moratorium through the end of June.
While this temporary measure is a necessary Band-Aid on a gaping economic wound, housing is not yet a right in this country — far from it. Mr. Biden’s emphasis on redressing racial inequity in housing provides a welcome contrast, though, to the long history of the federal government’s housing policies, which created barriers to safe, affordable housing in all 50 states, especially for communities of color.
Of course, the American housing crisis long predated the pandemic, and the United States has never made the provision of housing a national priority. The crisis has only been compounded during the last year: Somewhere between 10 and 40 million people may be at risk of eviction in the coming months, in a time of deep racial inequity, volatile personal incomes, a surge in small business failures and diminished public access to many government benefits.
Mr. Biden’s speech points to a pathway out. In a moment of economic upheaval and fragility, there is an existing program that can help. Housing vouchers offer the potential for a solution to the residential instability and deep inequity in our country. Housing assistance can help stabilize communities that have been hard hit by generations of racially predatory practices like redlining and disinvestment. Expanding housing vouchers to everyone who needs them would be a key step toward recognizing the role that stable housing plays in life outcomes from health to employment and education.
Currently, the Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as “Section 8,” helps more than 2 million households keep a roof over their head. Funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, vouchers offer a ticket to safe, affordable housing, reducing homelessness and alleviating overcrowding. Yet they aren’t used as much as they could be: Only one-quarter of those who qualify for housing help get it. Marcia Fudge, the new secretary of HUD, knows that the logic is clear for scaling up vouchers with the goal of improving affordability.
Economists like Raj Chetty hold a secondary hope for the program: social mobility. Vouchers can offer the chance to move to new places — out of the disadvantaged neighborhoods to which subsidized renters have long been tethered. In theory, the private market can offer recipients homes in safer neighborhoods, with better schools and jobs, paving a pathway out of poverty. In this way, policymakers hope vouchers might even be able to remedy the concentrated poverty and segregation that previous policies helped create.
But like school vouchers — which conservatives have long championed as a preferred policy to promote choice and better educational outcomes, despite data that suggests otherwise — housing vouchers, as they currently operate, are based on a flawed premise: that given the option, people can and will make the “right” choice. The truth is that “right” choices are often unavailable.
Take Edie, whom I met during my fieldwork in Baltimore. For Edie (this is not her actual name; the terms of my research protocol prevent me from using even an initial to describe her), getting a housing voucher after years on the waiting list was like winning the lottery. Edie works as a shampooer at a hair salon in her neighborhood. Instead of handing over most of her meager paycheck to her landlord each month, she would now only…
By: Kriston Capps
December 10, 2020, 11:36 AM
Between past due rent, late fees and unpaid utility bills, Americans may collectively owe $70 billion by January, when the current federal eviction moratorium is set to expire.
Estimates for the nation’s total rent shortfall on Jan. 1 range in the tens of billions of dollars, potentially exceeding the amount of emergency rental assistance that Congress may or may not deliver over the next few weeks. If lawmakers fail to act, the New Year could trigger a long-feared disaster — an avalanche of evictions during… Read More
The Federal Housing Finance Agency has announced that single-family homeowners with mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be protected from foreclosure for at least another month.
The moratorium, previously set to expire on December 31, will instead last through January 31, if not later. The moratorium also applies to evictions. “This extension gives peace of mind to the more than 28 million homeowners with an enterprise-backed mortgage,” FHFA director Mark Calabria said in a statement, referring to the two government-sponsored enterprises.