This post goes out to both free and paid subscribers, but if you are not already a paid subscriber and value this effort and our growing community, please consider upgrading to a paid membership. But wait, there’s a sale going on at The Poverty Trap! For all NEW yearly Suscribers and NEW founding members, you will get 20% off if you sign up today through February 29, 2024. Thanks in advance for your financial support of my work —it’s what allows me to keep researching and writing.

Upgrade To Paid

“About 40% of those facing eviction each year are children – some 2.9 million, according to a study co-authored by Nick Graetz at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, who said research shows wide-ranging impacts of housing turbulence and eviction on children’s mental health and development.” Christian Science Monitor, February 7, 2024

I’m still researching several longer posts that aren’t quite ready, but I wanted to keep in touch with a few articles I’ve been reading that discuss the convergence of rising rents and evictions, who is impacted the most and why it’s happening now.

— I’ll start with a recent Harvard University study everyone is writing about, titled “America’s Rental Housing 2024”. It finds that 50% of renters in the United States pay between 30% and 50% of their income for rent and utilities each month — approximately 22.4 million rental households. Although the rapid rise in the cost of rental housing has stalled, and in some markets declined starting in the third quarter of 2023, the number of “cost burdened” and “severely cost-burdened” renters has soared from pre-pandemic levels:

At last measure in 2022, a record-high 22.4 million renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. This is an increase of 2 million households over three years… Among cost-burdened households, 12.1 million had housing costs that consumed more than half of their income, an all-time high for severe burdens.

These additional articles provide interesting analyses of the Harvard study, the first from Business Insider and the second from The New York Times:

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/12-million-americans-spend-over-half-paycheck-rent-harvard-study-2024-1?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_Insider%20Today,%20January%2026,%202024

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/realestate/rent-prices-housing.html

The Times piece interviewed renters across the country and found their income simply wasn’t keeping pace with the rise in rent, and many had to take drastic measures, by any standards, to avoid eviction:

Struggling with rising food costs, renters skipped meals, drove less to save gas money or eliminated social activities. While some renters put basic expenses on their credit cards, others borrowed money from friends and family or tapped their retirement funds. While some renters were unemployed or relied on public assistance, most interviewed for this article held full-time jobs and held college or postgraduate degrees.

When you can’t afford to pay your rent, the natural consequence is eviction, and eviction rates are rising right along with rent prices.

— The Eviction Lab is a non-profit that tracks and documents eviction statistics in 10 select states and 34 cities across the country —there is no federal process to track and compile eviction statistics, and most states also do not have an eviction tracking system. Eviction records are embedded in county records and often difficult to obtain, according to The Eviction Lab. Here is a snapshot of the latest eviction statistics captured from the Lab’s home page:

1,068,524 evictions over the last 12 months;

82,800 evictions over the last month

— The Christian Science Monitor published a detailed piece a couple of weeks ago on rising eviction rates across the country and discussed a few reasons behind the increase, tying it to soaring rents since the pandemic, overall inflation and a “shortage of affordable housing” — all resulting in the recent rise in homelessness rates. If you’re evicted, you can maintain a roof over you head for a short while if you can move in with friends or family, or maybe live in a cheap motel, but how will you manage long-term? The article claims that lawmakers have now decided to make housing a priority:

After failing to make a significant dent in the problem over the last decade, state and federal lawmakers across the U.S. are making housing a priority in 2024 and throwing the kitchen sink at the issue – including proposals to enact eviction protections, institute zoning reforms, cap annual rent increases, and dedicate tens of billions of dollars toward building more housing.

— This opinion piece published just a few days ago by LZ Granderson, a columnist for the L.A. Times and one of the most interesting columnists writing today, explains the deeper reasons for today’s rising rents and evictions:

Unaffordable rent is a continuation of the wealth redistribution that accompanied the economic policies of President Reagan…This redistribution has continued on everyone’s watch. However, we are reaching a point where a lot of people are fed up with their hard work not paying off, and they’re going to take action. That’s why the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2023 “the year of the strike.” Workers saw the prosperity at the top and demanded their fair share.

Granderson also makes clear that using the same old approach to create affordable housing just makes the rich developers richer:

And now Congress is trying to solve the housing crisis by offering housing developers more tax credits. So much for the invisible hand of the free market, right? Although there is a desperate need for more affordable housing, developers apparently do not make enough money to want to do it, so government has to dangle a carrot to ensure that thriving corporations will thrive even more.

— CNN’s recent article on the eviction crisis focuses on children. It is children who are impacted the most frequently by eviction, although they are also hidden along with eviction statistics because they are not the leaseholder. And the increasing evictions of families with children may be linked to lack of affordable and accessible child care, according to CNN reporting.

Across America, we now know, children under five years old are the group most likely to be threatened with eviction. The eviction rate for households with children is about twice as high as for households without children present. In all, nearly 3 million kids are on the receiving end of eviction filings every year.

— Meanwhile, back at the ranch…thousands of single people and families with children in Columbus, Ohio, are waiting to receive their Section 8 Housing Vouchers, and some have been waiting for years. According to an article in The Columbus Dispatch published February 13, 2024:

There are 34,000 [Franklin] county residents on the waiting list, and the longest person has been on the list since Sept. 7, 2015, according to Aaron Schopp, a Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) spokesman.

The fact that someone has been on the waitlist for nearly nine years "highlights the significant demand for housing vouchers and the challenges in meeting this need due to limited resources," Schopp said.

Yes, there are “limited resources” to implement this program, but why?

I know from first-hand experience that the spokesperson for the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority isn’t just spinning to help their agency look semi-competent, but is dead wrong. The reason why it takes excruciatingly long to process these vouchers is because the housing authority and the private, for-profit company it outsourced the process to, are significantly understaffed and undertrained for one reason: to save money. And with each delay, they are playing with people’s sanity and their lives.

A Columbus Dispatch investigation published in February 2023 found a myriad of issues with CMHA's management of the federal voucher program after it outsourced administration of it to CGI Federal Inc., a multinational IT and business consulting corporation, in 2022.

CGI was terminating hundreds of vouchers, some erroneously, and there were long waits for apartments to be inspected by the corporation before voucher holders could move in, among other issues…

Donna Mayer, a staff attorney for Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio, said this month that the problems with CGI have persisted. Mayer told The Dispatch in 2023 that the housing voucher situation was the worst she had seen in 30 years. [But] CMHA said the problems have been resolved.

— Finally for this evening, if you’d like to read an important explanation on the current homeless crisis, this is a great post from Jeremy Ney who writes American Inequality

__________________________________________________________

I’d love to hear your thoughts on rising rents, rising evictions and the increasing homeless numbers in the last few years. Why not share your ideas in the Comment Section below and join the conversation!

Leave a comment

And if you are not already a subscriber, don’t forget to sign up for a free subscription to The Poverty Trap and/or upgrade to paid!