Angela McCann never imagined her 4-year-old niece knocking over a dresser and chinchilla cage onto her brother could lead to getting evicted during a pandemic.
On Aug. 25, McCann appeared at the Multnomah County Courthouse, joining the tenants, landlords, lawyers and judges involved in the 219 eviction proceedings that resumed their way through the justice system on Aug. 10 after courts shut down in mid-March due to the governor’s stay-home orders.
In June, a survey of 100 legal aid and civil rights attorneys in 38 states by the National Housing Law Project revealed widespread concerns about illegal evictions during the pandemic and the looming “tsunami” of eviction cases that would follow the expiration of the moratoria.
McCann told Street Roots she paid her rent regularly, and she showed up to defend herself against what she alleges are complaints manufactured to remove her from her home.
While Oregon landlords are unable to evict tenants for nonpayment of rent or without cause during the moratorium, they can still move to evict tenants for myriad lease violations.
The chinchilla incident was one of three strikes that led to McCann’s eviction. When the cage fell, McCann’s brother, who is autistic, began yelling for help. The noise prompted a neighbor to complain to management. Another strike came because one of her guests got into a verbal altercation with another tenant over moving a car in the parking lot, and another said she knocked on a neighbor’s door and bothered them.
Unlike most residential tenants who end up in eviction court, McCann had managed to find a lawyer to represent her. And, unlike some cases that had been frozen for months, McCann and her landlord wouldn’t have to wait long before their trial will convene in early September, just after this article goes to press.
“I have people chasing their friends and neighbors through the trailer park with a baseball bat, and I have someone that did try to set fire to an apartment building, and those people are waiting,” Judge Mark Anderson said before denying a separate attorney’s motion to expedite a case.
McCann’s attorney, Vivien Lyon, told Street Roots that because landlords are currently unable to issue no-cause evictions, they have resorted to issuing for-cause notices instead — often accusing tenants of violating a laundry list of rules and regulations that they claim are “material violations” of the lease.
“That phrase is not clearly defined in the statutes, meaning that a clever landlord attorney can argue that almost anything is a ‘material violation.’ Meanwhile, most tenants are unrepresented and are frightened, overwhelmed, and easily bullied by well-paid landlord representatives,” Lyon said. “I have noticed a definite up-tick in for-cause notices, especially those based on de minimis rule violations, or allegations that seem laughable and/or impossible to defend against. Noise violations are notoriously difficult for tenants to dispute, as proving a negative is a logical impossibility. I foresee this issue worsening in the next six months or so, while tenants struggle to pay the full rent and also pay any back rent they have been unable to pay during the months of quarantine.”
Steven McNatt, who has lived in a mobile home in Fairview for the past 14 years, has only a few more days to find a new place where he and his 8-year-old son can live.
McNatt and his housemate, Donald Knight, withheld rent for seven months while waiting for the landlord to take care of a large hole in the roof, black mold on the windows and walls, and a front porch that was falling apart.
“Nobody has ever come out here to work on anything,” McNatt said.
Because McNatt signed an agreement to pay rent that was missed after his wife died a year ago and didn’t have any written proof that his landlord said he would fix the problems, the judge found McNatt in violation of the agreement and ordered him to vacate the property within 10 days.
Street Roots made multiple attempts to reach McNatt’s landlord that were unsuccessful, and the park’s property manager declined to speak on the record about McNatt’s case.
A crisis within a crisis
One in five Oregonians is currently at risk for eviction, according to the Aspen Institute’s COVID-19 Defense Project.
Oregon’s court system, chronically underfunded and still struggling to recover from the nation’s last financial crisis, was predicted to face more eviction filings in the next four months than it has in the prior four years combined, according to an estimate from the global, corporate financial advisory firm Stout.
That was before the Trump administration announced a nationwide moratorium on evictions on Tuesday that will extend to the end of the year. While these measures will quell the eviction storm, they won’t prevent it’s arrival once the pandemic subsides and all the state and federal eviction moratoria expire for the last time.
But before the federal moratorium was announced, some Oregon lawmakers were already hoping to extend the state’s moratorium past Sept. 30.
“My top priority for September is making sure we can extend the eviction and foreclosure protections for another six months,” said House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland) in an emailed statement prior to the Trump administration’s announcement. “Nothing is getting any easier, and people need to stay housed.”
One question that remains unanswered is where the money will come from to cover all the rents, mortgage payments, utility charges, taxes and other housing-related costs that remain unpaid.
County officials estimate approximately 22,000 households across Portland and Multnomah County missed their rent in June. That number is likely to increase following the expiration of extended unemployment benefits at the end of July and uncertainty about when additional federal relief will arrive.
“There is no way to know exactly what will happen in the coming months, but we know it will not be good,” Deborah Imse, executive director at Multifamily NW, told Street Roots in an email. Her association represents residential property managers and owners renting to tenants in Southern Washington and Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
“Prior to the pandemic, it was common to see about 2% on average for nonpayment of rent. Now most months, nonpayment of rent has increased to about 11% and in some cases close to 20% for lower-income housing across the state,” she said. “Our surveys show that across the state, residents are accruing about $100 million in total unpaid rent each month.”
Isme said House Bill 4213, Oregon’s eviction moratorium, has complicated matters for landlords.
“The message from Oregon’s leaders is that it’s OK to not pay your rent,” she said, “so many of our housing providers are struggling to contact residents right now who are behind on rent to make a plan.”
She said the moratorium also forces landlords “to provide at least six months’ free rent with zero accountability for the rare bad actors, and we’re seeing that being taken advantage of.”
From Multifamily NW’s perspective, housing relief policies coming out of Salem are dividing tenants and landlords. Isme said it’s been advocating since March for more robust emergency housing assistance — and for moratoria on evictions due to nonpayment of rent to be exclusively related to COVID-19 hardship.
She said the $65 million in state allocated rental assistance will cover only about 1% of what her organization is expecting in total unpaid rent across the state at the close of the moratorium.
“Most housing providers do not want to evict their residents unless they pose a serious threat to other residents or the property,” she said. “Evictions are messy, and everyone usually walks away unhappy.”
Isme also accused Multnomah County of withholding CARES Act dollars from tenants because it knows they don’t have to pay rent right now.
But the county says there isn’t enough assistance to avoid exacerbating problems related to the region’s affordable-housing shortage.
“Without more help, without help that congressional leaders have shown no willingness to provide, we’ll face a terrible crisis,” said Denis Theriault, Joint Office of Homeless Services’ communications coordinator. “And that crisis will fall disproportionately on people of color and people who’ve already been struggling to survive in a local and national housing market that’s left them behind.”
‘The economic tightrope’
During a July 20 call with national housing and legal advocates, Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden said, “Refusing to stop throwing people out of their homes during a pandemic” would be “a moral abomination.
“Today, as we meet, millions of people in every nook and cranny in this country are walking on an economic tightrope,” Wyden said. “If anything resembling an emergency comes along, off they go, they’re off the economic tightrope and they’ve just fallen into the abyss.”
Decades of stagnant wages for all but the highest income earners, an affordable-housing supply crunch, and rates of poverty that are rising faster than the county’s population mean a return to normalcy still leaves more than a third of Oregonians struggling to meet their basic needs.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that about 209,000 low-income renter households in Oregon received federal assistance or were in need of it in 2016. Of those, slightly more than one-quarter — 56,000 households — received assistance.
Two days after the state launched a $35 million emergency check program, all 70,000 of the $500 relief payments had already been allocated.
Governments in the Portland metro area have managed to pool together another $35 million in funding for rental assistance programs in the region, along with an additional $15 million that will be distributed through gift cards to cover utility bills and other household expenses.
“This is a drop in the bucket based on the need,” Portland Housing Bureau Director Shannon Callahan told Multnomah County’s Board of Commissioners during a board briefing Aug. 18.
Theriault said the funding is focused on eviction prevention and taking advantage of the current moratorium and grace period.
“We’re also prioritizing BIPOC communities who were already disproportionately facing housing insecurity and homelessness and now are disproportionately bearing the terrible public health costs of COVID-19,” he said.
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Access to justice
Because no state currently guarantees a categorical right to legal counsel in civil cases involving basic human needs like housing, the vast majority of Oregonians facing eviction are not be able to afford a lawyer, and a public defender will not be provided as they would in criminal cases.
“We have constitutional responsibilities we’re finding it hard to meet,” Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Martha Walters told Oregon Business in 2019. Walters noted that despite being one of the three branches of government, the judicial branch receives less than 3% of the state’s overall budget.
“(Lawmakers) know it’s important, but it’s hard to know what happens in the courts,” Walters said at the time. “We don’t want some sort of disaster to happen before we fix it.”
A study of unmet legal needs in Oregon published the same year found that 84% of low-income Oregonians who couldn’t afford legal assistance “did not receive legal help of any kind.”
“The bottom line is we’re turning away two out of every three people who need legal assistance or who qualify for assistance,” Sybil Hebb, Oregon Law Center’s director of public affairs and legislative advocacy, estimated during an interview with Street Roots in August. Hebb followed up later to note that the rate of people being turned away had increased even more. “The bottom line is that the need for legal aid outpaces resources,” she said.
McCann wasn’t immediately able to find legal assistance either, but she was persistent.
“Don’t just curl up in a ball and give up — ’cause that’s what I wanted to do,” McCann said. “You have to get up and do something. There’s always something you can do.”
After reaching out to a prominent landlord-tenant attorney who quoted her $400 an hour, McCann said she followed a tip from a Facebook group for renters that led her to a lawyer who agreed to take her case on a sliding scale.
“I’ve grown up poor my whole life,” McCann said. “When I see other people who are in this situation, I want to be like, ‘Here’s how I got help. Contact this person.’”
‘A cascading series of events’
A week after a record-setting 92,700 Oregonians filed new unemployment claims in one week, Portland’s City Council wrote state and federal officials requesting forgiveness of all residential and commercial rent and mortgage payments.
Trade groups representing landlords and banks have pushed for state intervention that would allow tenants to continue making payments, while tenant advocates and Portland City Council have called for rent and mortgage payment forgiveness to protect renters and encourage property owners to pursue relief directly.
One landlord who has not needed to seek relief is American Homes 4 Rent, one of the nation’s largest Wall Street residential real estate investors. It owns 269 single-family homes in Portland, according to the company’s most recent securities filings.
In an Aug. 7 earnings call, financial analyst Haendel St. Juste asked AH4R executives about their strategy to “push rent more aggressively and deeper into the year.”
In response to St. Juste’s question about whether the company could continue to increase rents, or “push rate,” and still keep people in their homes, AH4R Chief Operating Officer Bryan Smith replied that the pandemic created “a unique position” with “phenomenal momentum.”
“We’re seeing just phenomenal demand,” Smith said. “And we’re going to capitalize on that by maintaining high occupancy and pushing rate.”
Leilani Farha, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, has said that global housing crises are not a result of economic downturn but, instead, economic growth.
“Private developers and investors are dominating housing systems in an unprecedented fashion, often divorcing housing from its social function by treating it as a commodity for speculation,” she said.
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City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly told Oregon Public Broadcasting in April about concerns that Portland could end up facing an even stronger wave of financialization of housing than what occurred following the 2008 financial crisis.
“My fear is at the end of this, if we don’t work to protect renters, landlords, small businesses, then we are going to see another massive land grab by Wall Street,” she said.
While standing in the courthouse hallway after her hearing, McCann told Street Roots, “It pains me to be here and see so many people that obviously need help, not getting the help that they need. Or help that they can afford.”
When asked how to persuade Republican members of Congress to support investments to keep people housed, Wyden said it was important to emphasize that the funds needed aren’t just to protect livelihoods, but to protect lives.
“Very often in government, if somebody makes a mistake, people can come back and correct it,” Wyden said. “When you make the kinds of mistakes that stem from the fact that hungry people can’t maintain their health, that childhood development is stunted by hunger, that not having shelter puts people in danger … this can be a real matter of life and death.”