Evictions Are Just a Shot Away by Chris Walker

NinaIllingworth May 13, 2021November 5, 2022 CA4, CDC, CDC eviction moratorium, Chris Walker, class war, coronavirus, Covid 19, Covid eugenics, Dabney Friedrich, DC Circuit Courts, disaster capitalism, District of Columbia, end stage capitalism, engineered crisis, eviction crisis, evictions, extraction, extraction of rents, Federal Court, FotB, Friends of the Blog, harassment by landlords, homelessness, Housing, housing bubble, housing crisis, housing shortage, institutional racism, IWW, JA5, Jacksonville, Justice, labor class solidarity, landlords, marginalized people, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, pandemic, pandemic profiteering, poverty, poverty kills people, racialized extraction, racialized outcomes, Racism, rental market, rentier class, ruling, Social Justice, solidarity, solidarity against the landlords, ST2, systemic poverty, systemic racism, tax cuts, Tenant unions, Trump judges, Walker, war on the poor, white supremacy

Editor’s note: as I mentioned in yesterday’s site update notice, today is a big day here on ninaillingworth.com. For the first time ever, we’re featuring a post by a new creator as we look to slowly ramp up the amount of always free-to-read content on this site.

In today’s article we look at the Orwellian numbers and class implications behind the biggest ticking time bomb in American society. Please give a warm welcome to Friend of the Blog, and Jacksonville IWW organizer, Chris Walker, as he talks us through the opening stages of the pandemic-induced eviction apocalypse; both in his hometown, and beyond.

Knives Out For Renters Nationwide

Landlords are extremely upset they can’t evict faster and harder during a pandemic, and last week, they struck a heavy blow: the CDC’s eviction moratorium was widely reported to be lifted, and Judge Dabney Friedrich wants this effective nationwide. In simple terms, Friedrich argues the CDC doesn’t have the power to prevent evictions at all. While the moratorium was set to expire June 30th, this is meant to prevent any future extensions. To quote the landlords’ lawyers, “the government has no authority against any landlord. Full stop.” A motto for the rentier class that holds up in any era.

Landlords, however, represent a completely unaccountable authority of their own, and their most recent attack will have lethal and widespread consequences. While this may at first glance only affect the District of Columbia, the DC Circuit Courts are seen as the closest among their kind to interpreting congressional intent, and this case is the first of its kind, making it the law of the land, effective immediately. Again, Judge Friedrich knew the order’s reach would be nationwide. This is hardly the first attack like it, and the problem is hardly exclusive to the United States.

Virtually everyone in power has blood on their hands. Politicians dragging their feet on a response to the pandemic, specific to evictions and utility cutoffs, are morally responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost through November 2020 in the US alone. The worst may still be on the horizon. Today, one in every seven renting households in the US are behind on their payments, and the US has more renting households than it has had at any time in the last 50 years. Over nine million households, containing a disproportionate number of the most marginalized among us, represents an order of magnitude increase in human suffering. The data observed from the housing bubble strongly suggests this is no accident, after all the money pumped into privileged hands led to a buying frenzy that froze everyone else out.

There is an expectation Friedrich’s ruling will not last, and some landlords may continue to be gun shy (if you will pardon the phrase) on more provocative forms of eviction, even if that’s due to their own struggles in understanding the legalese. Yet, in the time it takes other courts to issue competing rulings and appeals, the damage to the most vulnerable will be practically done. Removing the moratorium’s restraining effect on landlords has terrifying potential, even if there are already many other ways a landlord can harass you.

Shadows Over Duval

Examining effects on a local scale can provide desperately needed context for understanding this crisis. A social worker in Jacksonville, Florida requested they be quoted anonymously, explicitly prohibited from saying anything about their position without agency approval:

"The bigger issue I'm facing right now is the housing shortage. People weren't selling houses during the pandemic, so the inventory dropped. Prices have risen substantially, especially in lower tier housing (below $200K). Houses that would have listed a year ago in the high $100K range are now listing close to $300K. It affects the ability of first-time home buyers to purchase, which leaves them in rentals that are in the mid to high tier... which means the folks below them don't upgrade."

"Even the cheapest apartments have seen rent increases of 15 to 20 percent. Compounding the issue on the lower end of the rental market, landlords are gun shy about the eviction moratorium and requiring three times the rent in income to approve. So apartments that went for $800 a month are going for close to $1000, and they are requiring outrageous deposits."

"As a personal anecdote, one of my clients rented a studio in a really shitty apartment complex, and they advertise the studios at $580 a month. They charged him $665 and, even with a full-time job bringing in $1400 a month, they demanded a deposit of $1665 because his income wasn't three times the rent. For a single occupant studio, without our assistance, a person in his situation would have needed $2330 cash in hand just to walk in the door, nearly unattainable for a single person."

"I want to preface, for personal reasons, that this apartment complex is a shithole. The windows and stove were broken when he moved in, and when I showed him how to clean the filter in the window unit, a swarm of roaches poured out. The only reason they fixed the issues is because I went down there with copies of the statutes and a notarized letter, stating we wouldn't pay any more assistance if they didn't resolve the issue."

"The increases in rental prices and deposit requirements are going to disproportionately affect the poorest of renters and drive them into even more precarious housing situations, and put them at higher risk of homelessness than they were before. When the moratoriums expire and people start getting evicted, their ability to get back into stable housing is going to be much more difficult than it would have been two or three years ago."

Most renters don’t have a case manager willing to show up in person and threaten landlords with an attorney. For additional context, 17 percent of single family homes in Jacksonville are owned by investors, according to the social worker. While the locally reported numbers are naturally rosier, the cascading effects are not specific to Jacksonville, and are felt everywhere in America.

Fortunately, reliance on politicians for salvation is not the only path forward. Tenant unions have proven effective, along with the historical role collective rent strikes have played. In enough numbers, literally laying bodies in front of authorities to protect against evictions demonstrate an untapped and historically proven collective power to fight back against such wanton cruelty.

Insisting on “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a very convenient tactic for those in power, particularly landlords. Those responsible for the staggering body count represented by evictions have nothing to fear from individual action. Yet, when we protect each other from senseless cruelty, and insist on a truly direct kind of democracy, we may yet realize that the emperor has no clothes, that we have forgotten how much power we have collectively given away to the powerful people that abuse us. With any good fortune, we will decide to take that power back for the good of humanity.