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How is the eviction crisis impacting women specifically?

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How is the eviction crisis impacting women specifically?

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Above: Nawaal Walker embraces her daughter, Ca'leah Moore, 8, in their home in Durham, North Carolina, on Sunday, Dec. 6, 2020. Credit: Rachel Jessen for HuffPost
In March, Nawaal Walker was on track to finally save up enough money to move into her first house by July. It was going to be a hard-earned 40th birthday present to herself and five of her children who, along with Walker's son-in-law and two cats, were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Durham, North Carolina.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leaving Walker out of work and struggling to keep her apartment, much less move into a bigger place.

Walker, a single mother of seven, was laid off from her job as a counselor at a rehab center that month. She received a stimulus check and unemployment, which just barely covered her rent and some bills through June.

But COVID-19 unemployment and financial relief expired at the end of July, as did the federal government's initial moratorium on evictions. Walker could no longer pay the rent on the apartment, which also served as a learning space since the five kids were home from school. She struggled to put food on the table. She continually had to fight to get the internet and phone back on. She spent hours on the phone making sure her electricity wasn't turned off because she needed to be able to refrigerate her 15-year-old daughter's insulin and plug in her nebulizer for her asthma.

In July, her landlord sent her an eviction notice.

"Everything I've done to build myself up has now crumbled back down to the ground," Walker said. "I feel like nothing right now. I really do."

Walker was able to connect with an attorney who helped her get covered by a second federal eviction moratorium, implemented in September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That moratorium kicked in a month after the first one, included in the CARES Act, expired. The CDC moratorium has helped thousands, but it's set to expire on Dec. 31. Walker's next court date for her eviction is Jan. 7. If no government action is taken to extend the moratorium, she and her children will be homeless.

If a federal moratorium is not reinstated before Dec. 31, those Americans and their families will become homeless almost overnight, forcing many to live in crowded shelters or bunk up with family or friends ― situations that would likely increase the spread of COVID-19 and could have deadly consequences.

The stress of everything has led Walker to stop eating and sleeping, and the heart monitor she has in her chest due to a heart issue has begun to itch ― possibly, she said, because it was supposed to be replaced three years ago (she doesn't have insurance).

"The only word I can actually mutter is 'crushed,'" Walker said when asked how she's handling everything.

"I've struggled my whole life. I've worked hard my whole life. I'm a genuine person. I raised my children to be genuine people ― to have faith and love God and themselves and others," she said. "I can see the beauty in the ugliest of things. But this? This is ridiculous. I'm crushed."

COVID-19 Is Quickly Becoming A Women's Eviction Crisis

Princeton University's Eviction Lab found in forthcoming research that among renters in 39 states, 341,756 women were evicted annually compared to 294,908 men between 2012 and 2016. That's a 16% difference. The biggest disparity between genders was for Black renters: Nearly 37% more Black women than Black men were evicted between 2012 and 2016.

Overall, women face higher rates of poverty than men, they earn less due to the gender wage gap, and they experience higher rates of sexual harassment and domestic violence, which can impact finances . And during the COVID-19 pandemic, those disparities are even more pronounced . For example, of the nearly 1,800 eviction cases in one part of southeast Louisiana this year, 89% were families of color and 72% were female-headed households, according to data provided by Southeast Louisiana Legal Services , a free legal aid organization for low-income families.

At least 865,000 women left the workforce in September ― at least four times more than men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . A recent from the National Women's Law Center shows that a shocking percentage of women of color are behind on rent: Nearly 15% of Asian women, 20% of Latina women and 25% of Black women were unable to pay rent in October.

This could all get worse when the CDC eviction moratorium expires at the end of December, if officials do nothing. An eviction moratorium that is not extended through the pandemic simply creates "a financial cliff" for renters, Yentel said. When the moratorium expires, back rent is due and renters will most likely still be unable to pay.

"Being put out in the streets in the middle of winter, in the midst of a public health crisis and economic crisis, is a recipe for disaster for women of color," said Sarah Hassmer, senior counsel for NWLC's income security team.

SinToria Stringer says she cries herself to sleep some nights because she's so stressed. The 20-year-old single mom from Toledo, Ohio, is facing the very real possibility that she and her 6-month-old son may be evicted come January. Stringer was laid off this summer just four weeks after she gave birth to her son. Her son, who was born 15 weeks early, wasn't released from the hospital until October. He weighed just over 1 pound when he was delivered.

"Sometimes I didn't even want to go see my son in the hospital because I felt like I had failed him. I didn't want him to feel the pain and the hurt I was feeling," Stringer said. "So some days I would stay home and try to figure things out so he would actually have a home to come home to."

Stringer was able to connect with an attorney who filed a motion to get her eviction notice pushed to next year, under the CDC moratorium. But her court date is set for Jan. 1. If the moratorium does not get extended, Stringer and her son could be out on the streets.

Children Are Another Complication

Lynn Stock is a 57-year-old single mom living in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her 19-year-old daughter. Days before the pandemic caused a wave of shutdowns in March, Stock called city housing to report that there was mold growing in their apartment. Her daughter is allergic to mold so it needed to be fixed immediately, but her landlord was not helping.

Stock's landlord became angry that she reported him to the city and filed an eviction notice against her. She said six sheriffs officers showed up to escort her and her daughter out of their home in August, after the eviction proceedings finished.

"We took whatever we could, but we could only take a couple of things because we had nowhere to go," said Stock, who was already in government-subsidized housing and had recently lost her job of four years as a customer service representative due to COVID-19.

Stock hired an attorney and in just a few days she and her daughter were back in their house, covered by the federal eviction moratorium. She said the experience has had a lasting effect. "This pandemic, and with people losing their jobs, nobody should be evicted right now," she said. "You're just putting them out to make it even worse for them. I don't wish that on nobody."

Research suggests that the presence of children increases the likelihood of eviction, because kids can be loud or messy, or in Stock's case, are simply seen as another burden by unsympathetic property owners.

"When landlords start getting complaints or they have to fix things because kids have broken them, they may turn to eviction more quickly in those cases, and that affects a lot of single moms and their children," said Dr. Peter Hepburn, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and a researcher at the Princeton Eviction Lab.

Experts repeatedly emphasized the fact that women are more likely than men to be single parents as a reason women face higher rates of eviction. Children's well-being impacts parents' decisions in several ways, including when there are substandard housing conditions. Similar to Stock's situation, women are more likely to report inadequate living conditions than men are, which can lead to retaliation from landlords.

A 'Predictable And Preventable' Crisis

State and local governments created a patchwork of eviction moratoriums that varied widely in protections, and some expired when the CARES moratorium did. This left a one-month gap in coverage for some Americans facing eviction over the summer ― a time when there was a massive surge in COVID-19 cases across much of the U.S.

Housing advocates are calling for more emergency rental assistance, more resources such as expanded unemployment insurance and stimulus checks, and a uniform federal moratorium on rent for the duration of the pandemic. They say it's critical that Congress enacts a new COVID-19 relief bill that includes housing protections and, simultaneously, that the CDC extends the eviction moratorium that's in effect now. Advocates are also pushing mayors and governors to create protections on the state and local levels because it's likely that Congress will not act in time.

"If we don't see some combination of these actions, we're facing a very real possibility of tens of millions of people losing their homes in the dead of winter, during a spike in COVID-19," Yentel said. "The consequences of that would be catastrophic."

They'll also last long after the pandemic and eviction crisis dissipate. "That single eviction filing creates this spiraling down into poverty that can become very difficult for that family to climb out of," Yentel said.

For her part, Walker said she will continue to fight the eviction proceedings against her because she has no other choice ― her children depend on her. "All of the things that I've been through in my life, I did not come this far to fall down," she said. "I refuse to give up. I refuse to stay quiet."

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COVID-19's Looming Eviction Crisis Will Devastate Women

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Above: Nawaal Walker embraces her daughter, Ca'leah Moore, 8, in their home in Durham, North Carolina, on Sunday, Dec. 6, 2020. Credit: Rachel Jessen for HuffPost In March, Nawaal Walker was on track to finally save up enough money to move into her first house by July.

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What impact has the COVID-19 recession had on food and housing?

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What impact has the COVID-19 recession had on food and housing?

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How has COVID-19 affected the unemployment rate?

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How has COVID-19 affected the unemployment rate?

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How does the eviction crisis affect women and the black community?

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How does the eviction crisis affect women and the black community?

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What is an eviction moratorium and who does it effect? 

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What is an eviction moratorium and who does it effect? 

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Information on COVID-19-related resources, eviction moratoriums, and tenant protections.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the federal government, as well as many any states, cities, and counties, have taken steps to minimize the impact of the crisis on tenants. As of July 2022, there are no longer any statewide eviction bans in place. However, many states, cities, and counties have put various types of tenant protections (such as rental assistance and eviction diversion programs) in place. See the links in the table below to help locate resources where you live.

Federal Tenant Protections

The CDC's Eviction Ban Is No Longer in Place. The Alabama Association of Realtors, along with other plaintiffs, challenged the validity of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s August 3, 2021 Agency Order halting evictions in areas with high COVID-19 transmission rates (Order).

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (District Court) agreed with the plaintiffs that the Order was unlawful, but stayed (put on hold) its decision, leaving the Order in place.

The plaintiffs then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift (vacate) the District Court's stay of its decision, which would result in the eviction ban created by the Order ending. On August 26, 2021, the Supreme Court granted the plaintiffs' request to vacate the District Court's stay.

As a result of the Supreme Court's August 26, 2021 decision, the CDC's eviction ban is no longer in place.

There Might Still Be a State or Local Eviction Ban That Applies Where You Live

Even though the CDC's eviction ban has ended, states, counties, and cities can still ban evictions and enact other tenant protections. All states have ended their statewide eviction bans, but some cities and counties still have protections in place.

Contact your county or city government to find out if there is a local eviction ban or other tenant protections in place. To find the contact information for local government, search online or visit "How to Contact Your Elected Officials" on USA.gov.

Also, both tenants and landlords who are struggling can check the National Low Income Housing Coalition's Treasury Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) Dashboard to find local assistance programs.

FHFA Tenant Protections

The government-backed mortgage buyers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (FHFA) have prohibited landlords of multifamily properties with Freddie Mac- and Fannie Mae-backed mortgages from evicting tenants. For the most current details on the FHFA's tenant protections, see the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's information for renters in multifamily housing.

State Eviction Protection

The chart below attempts to capture the latest information on coronavirus-related tenant protections by state. Please note that this information changes frequently, and the chart might not reflect all current protections. For the best information about the status of evictions where you live, check your state's judicial system or governor's website. You can also contact a legal aid organization in your area.

In the chart, click on the state's name to be directed to its official COVID-19 website.

Other Resources:

Updated: December 19, 2022

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Emergency Bans on Evictions and Other Tenant Protections Related to Coronavirus

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Find out if there’s an eviction ban or utility shutoff moratorium where you live. Get the information and resources you need to protect your tenant rights.

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What does COVID-19 have to do with the housing crisis?

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What does COVID-19 have to do with the housing crisis?

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The Mothers Facing Eviction During COVID

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Quick Facts About the Gender Wage Gap

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) speaks during a press conference marking Equal Pay Day and celebrating the House passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, April 2, 2019. (Getty/Bill Clark)

For more on this topic, see: " Why Salary History Bans Matter To Securing Equal Pay "

Since the second half of the 20th century, women's labor force participation has grown significantly.¹ Women are working longer hours and pursuing higher education in greater numbers. However, despite this progress, significant wage gaps between men and women persist-particularly for women of color. So what exactly is the gender wage gap? What drives it? And what does it mean for women and their families? This fact sheet provides answers to these questions and more.

Act Now for Equal Pay

Tell your senators to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen existing equal pay protections, prohibit retaliation against workers who discuss their pay or challenge pay discrimination, and much more.

What is the gender wage gap?

The gender wage gap refers to the difference in earnings between women and men.² Experts have calculated this gap in a multitude of ways, but the varying calculations point to a consensus: Women consistently earn less than men, and the gap is wider for most women of color.

82 cents

amount women earn for every $1 earned by men

Analyzing the most recent Census Bureau data from 2018, women of all races earned, on average, just 82 cents for every $1 earned by men of all races.³ This calculation is the ratio of median annual earnings for women working full time, year round to those of their male counterparts, and it translates to a gender wage gap of 18 cents. When talking about the wage gap for women, it is important to highlight that there are significant differences by race and ethnicity. The wage gap is larger for most women of color. (see Figure 1)

What causes the gender wage gap?

These wage gap calculations reflect the ratio of earnings for women and men across all industries; they do not reflect a direct comparison of women and men doing identical work. This is purposeful. Calculating it this way allows experts to capture the multitude of factors driving the gender wage gap, which include but are not limited to:

Differences in industries or jobs worked. By calculating a wholistic wage gap, researchers can see effects of occupational segregation, or the funneling of women and men into different types of industries and jobs based on gender norms and expectations. So-called women's jobs, which are jobs that have historically had majority-female workforces, such as home health aides and child care workers, tend to offer lower pay and fewer benefits than so-called men's jobs, which are jobs that have had predominantly male workforces, including jobs in trades such as building and construction. These gendered differences are true across all industries and the vast majority of occupations, at all levels, from frontline workers to midlevel managers to senior leaders.⁸

Differences in years of experience. Women are disproportionately driven out of the workforce to accommodate caregiving and other unpaid obligations and thus tend to have less work experience than men. Access to paid family and medical leave makes women more likely to return to work-and more likely to return sooner. However, as of March 2019, only 19 percent of civilian workers had access to paid family leave through their employers and only 40 percent had access to short-term disability insurance benefits to deal with their own medical needs.⁹

Differences in hours worked. Because women tend to work fewer hours to accommodate caregiving and other unpaid obligations, they are also more likely to work part time, which means lower hourly wages and fewer benefits compared with full-time workers.¹⁰

Discrimination. Gender-based pay discrimination has been illegal¹¹ since 1963 but is still a frequent, widespread practice-particularly for women of color.¹² It can thrive especially in workplaces that discourage open discussion of wages and where employees fear retaliation. Beyond explicit decisions to pay women less than men, employers may discriminate in pay when they rely on prior salary history in hiring and compensation decisions; this can enable pay decisions that could have been influenced by discrimination to follow women from job to job.

These are just some of the major drivers of the gender wage gap. Other factors, meanwhile, help narrow the gap between women's and men's earnings. For example, increased educational attainment by women-particularly when women have more education than men-can help narrow the gap.¹³ Unionization can also help narrow the gap because workers collectively often have greater leverage to push for workplace changes, combat discriminatory practices targeting specific groups of workers, bargain for better working conditions and wages, and more.¹⁴ However, the cumulative effects of factors such as these are not large enough to close the gap entirely.¹⁵

The gender wage gap is more than just a few cents

What to do about the gender wage gap

The gender wage gap is not only complex and nuanced, but it is also stubborn. Without updated and comprehensive equal pay reform, the gender wage gap has only closed by 4 cents in more than a decade. At the current pace, women are not estimated to reach pay parity with men until 2059.²²

Conclusion

While women's and men's earnings may shift slightly each year with each new batch of Census Bureau data, the gender wage gap will not close anytime soon without concerted action. Efforts to close the wage gap must address the varying drivers of it as well as the multitude of biases that hold women-particularly women of color, LGBTQ women, and women with other diverse identities-and their families back. This is an issue of economic security and equality-and women and their families cannot afford to wait for either.
Robin Bleiweis is a research associate for Women's Economic Security for the Women's Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

See also

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. A full list of supporters is available here. American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

Robin Bleiweis

Research Associate, Women's Economic Security

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Quick Facts About the Gender Wage Gap For more on this topic, see: " Why Salary History Bans Matter To Securing Equal Pay " Since the second half of the 20th century, women's labor force participation has grown significantly.1 Women are working longer hours and pursuing higher education in greater numbers.

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What is the government doing to aid in the eviction crisis?

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What is the government doing to aid in the eviction crisis?

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Michigan Senator Discusses COVID-19 Surge and Preventing Eviction Crisis in Michigan

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Who is contributing to the eviction crisis?

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Who is contributing to the eviction crisis?

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Corporate landlords in cities like Milwaukee helped drive an evictions crisis during the pandemic.

Landlords have filed 272,612 evictions in 27 cities since last March. The national count is likely far higher.

Corporate landlords, which own almost 50% of rental properties, are more likely to evict, advocates say.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

During one week in June, as nationwide coronavirus deaths climbed steadily above 100,000, companies tied to Youssef "Joe" Berrada filed 225 evictions in Milwaukee. That made him responsible for over half of the city's evictions.

Berrada has long been synonymous with evictions in Milwaukee. In 2017, the millionaire mogul was responsible for more than one in 10 of the city's evictions, which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported alongside descriptions of his multiple palatial homes, luxury cars, 49-foot yacht, and the time he served his own ex-wife with eviction papers. One of his tenants, Ernestine Young, told the paper that after a Berrada company purchased her building, workers cleared out her storage area without telling her. She not only lost her family photographs but the urn that held her infant granddaughter's ashes.

But threatening thousands of residents with homelessness in the middle of a pandemic struck many in Milwaukee as a new level of villainy.

"It was obscene," said Colleen Foley, the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, a public interest law firm that provides free legal services, including to poor tenants facing an eviction. "That many evictions in one week? It was breathtaking and appalling and like, holy cow, things are out of control."
Do you have a story about a corporate landlord who has illegally or unfairly evicted tenants during the pandemic? Please send tips to EvictionTips@Insider.com
Foley's organization had tangled with Berrada before, but now Foley decided on a new tactic: she penned a scathing op-ed in the Sentinel, calling out Berrada, whose companies manage about 8,000 rental units in the greater Milwaukee area, directly.

Two days later, an email landed in her inbox: Berrada wanted to meet.

On July 22, Foley and two of her colleagues sat around a conference table at Berrada Properties headquarters in Milwaukee, masked and spaced 6-feet apart, with Berrada and his lawyer. It was the start of an unlikely alliance to solve Milwaukee's eviction crisis.

Foley explained that the eviction filings Berrada was handing out like candy would haunt tenants for years to come, making it close to impossible to find future housing. When she told Berrada that renters of color and the very poor were disproportionately impacted, she said that Berrada, who is Moroccan and came to Wisconsin as a foreign exchange high school student in the 1980s, seemed to recoil.

"We had some really thoughtful discussion that I think surprised everyone who expected the other side to be the devil," said Foley. "The interesting thing about the pandemic is that people who had drawn lines in the sand and had nothing to say to each other are suddenly willing to rethink things."

The group met three more times over the next weeks. Pressure meanwhile mounted from other directions. The Milwaukee Autonomous Tenants Union organized a protest outside of Berrada Properties demanding a halt to evictions. Bad press from the Sentinel, which has included drone footage of Berrada's 18-room mansion, was not letting up.

Finally, at the end of the summer, Berrada agreed to an eviction "hiatus." Immediately after, the city's eviction rate dropped by a breathtaking 36%.

Berrada declined to speak to Insider for this story but, through his lawyer, he said Berrada Property Management's hiatus doesn't necessarily reflect a change of heart.

"BPM has always recognized the potentially adverse impact a filed eviction may have on a tenant's ability to find suitable housing," they said over email. "Eviction is not, and has never been, BPM's first response to a tenant who is not paying rent. Truly, an eviction benefits neither the landlord nor the tenant, and BPM always attempts to find a solution to the situation before filing an eviction."

ONE BONANZA, AND NOW ANOTHER

Berrada was hardly alone in showing tenants the door during a pandemic. Landlords have filed 272,612 evictions since March-and that's just in the 27 cities that the Eviction Lab at Princeton University tracks.

Housing advocates fear that the worst is yet to come. Next week, the Center for Disease Control's eviction moratorium, which has stemmed evictions but not stopped them, is set to expire again. Even if it is extended, housing experts say that it will only be kicking an eviction tsunami down the line- not to mention ignoring the fundamental problems with housing in America. By January, almost 12 million renters owed an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities-an insurmountable sum in a country where before the pandemic 40% of the population didn't have $400 on hand in an emergency.

"It's just a wild historical aberration We've never seen anything like it before," says Peter Hepburn, an assistant professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and a research fellow at the Eviction Lab. "Catching up on that much back rent is going to be borderline impossible without emergency rental assistance."

The eviction crisis has been reported as a "both sides" proposition: when tenants can't pay rent, landlords can't pay their mortgages, putting both parties in a tough bind during a national cataclysm with no winners. But growing evidence shows that more and more evictions aren't driven by so-called "mom and pop" landlords struggling to balance their personal checkbooks.

What happened in Milwaukee last summer exposes an overlooked, but driving force of the evictions crisis: corporate landlords are becoming an increasingly dominant player in the U.S. rental market, and they are more likely to throw their tenants out onto the street.

Before the 2008 , corporate landlords owned 20% of rental properties; today, it's nearing a whopping 50%. The shift stems from a choice the U.S. government faced in the aftermath of the housing crisis when it absorbed hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes: put those properties back in the market slowly, with a focus on getting people back into their homes, or turn to private equity firms, who were the only players at the time with massive cash on hand. Between 2011 and 2013, private equity firms, buoyed by huge subsidies, snapped up about 350,000 homes from banks.

Since the Center for Disease Control's evictions moratorium took effect last September, evictions by corporate landlords have actually been steadily increasing. Research by the Private Equity Stakeholders Project (PESP), a research and advocacy organization, has tracked nearly 50,000 evictions by corporate landlords in select counties in six states since the beginning of September, and found that corporate landlords are responsible for the majority, and sometimes overwhelming majority, of evictions in some counties. In January and February alone, corporate landlords filed to evict more than 16,000 people - including over 850 eviction filings in Texas counties since they were hit by Winter Storm Shirley.

In Georgia's DeKalb County, where Atlanta is located, corporate landlords were responsible for 82% of the 764 evictions during a single week last December; 68% of the 1,341 evictions in Arizona's Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located; and 68% of the 964 evictions in Texas's Harris County, where Houston is located. Phoenix and Houston are the cities with the second and third highest numbers of evictions during the pandemic, according to Princeton's Eviction Lab.

For many corporate landlords, there is no system for understanding why a tenant might have missed a rent check- it's simply data plugged into a computer system that spits an eviction notice out after a set period of time.

The problem is almost certainly far bigger than we know. There is no national database of evictions, and evictions are only tracked at the level of the country's more than 3,000 counties. Since corporate landlords are often an umbrella for multiple limited liability companies and shell companies (often to take advantage of tax benefits), their names rarely appear directly on eviction filings. In Berrada's case, for example, it took dogged local journalism to track the 75 different firms linked to him and then painstaking work to cross-reference them with local eviction filings.

There's also the possibility of informal evictions, such as when tenants leave because of unattended repairs or unsafe conditions. In Milwaukee, informal evictions are twice as likely as a formal one.

Since the start of the pandemic, many of these companies have also been the recipients of substantial federal aid. According to a recent report by Jobs With Justice and PESP, 198 corporate landlords got almost $320 million in federal COVID subsidies and then went on to file at least 5,381 evictions between March 16 and October 13th. These COVID stimulus subsidies could have covered the nine months of rent due since the beginning of the pandemic for 24,394 families, Jobs with Justice calculated. Ventron Management, for example, received $3.5 million in government funds and has filed 1,017 evictions.

Housing experts warn the current crisis could trigger the kind of corporate consolidation of the housing market we saw in 2008-only this time at warp speed, as corporate entities lap up properties previously owned by "mom and pop" landlords driven out of business by the pandemic.

"They're sitting on huge amounts of cash like vultures, waiting for the bottom to fall out so they can scoop up even more," said Scott Klinger, a Senior Equitable Development Specialist at Jobs with Justice.

In April, the Wall Street Journal called it a "Potential Bonanza in Distressed Sales."

When the CEO of Blackstone Stephen A. Schwarzman was asked at the Goldman Sachs Conference at the beginning of December if the pandemic would be similar to the last financial crisis for investors, he gloated: "Blackstone was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis and I think something similar is going to happen now. About half of the firm's earnings are from a real estate business, just to give you some idea how this breaks: We picked the good neighborhoods, if you will."

Blackstone later noted in a comment to Insider that Schwarzman was referring primarily to logistics and warehouses, rather than the housing sector.
"WHERE WILL WE GO?"
Back in June, Alexis Pollard was 38 weeks pregnant and trying to get her 6-year old son through virtual school while also caring for her 5-year old son and two-year old twin girls. The 26-year old had lost her job at Macy's during the company's wave of layoffs when the pandemic started. As the sole provider for her kids, she quickly fell behind on rent.

Then, she received an eviction notice from her landlord, Joe Berrada.

"There was a lot of things going through my head: where will we go? What if my kids are taken from me? I was pregnant and about to have a baby; I wouldn't be able to go anywhere with a newborn," said Pollard.

When she opened Facebook, she saw people posting about Berrada's rampant evictions. When she turned on the television, she saw coverage of the same.

"I was very surprised. I'm like, oh my god, there are so many people. He's evicting everybody, where will we go, who will we rent from? He's already bought up everything in Milwaukee," she said.

She packed their belongings and rented a storage space, knowing that when the sheriffs came to kick them out they'd toss all their belongings onto the sidewalk. She scrounged together enough money for a couple nights at a hotel but had no idea where they'd go after that.

Eight million Americans have entered poverty during the pandemic. In the first week of November, almost 12% of adults in the U.S. - 26 million people - said there was not enough food for their household sometimes or often in the last 7 days.

In a normal year, four people are evicted every minute. When 14 million Americans lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic, housing experts predicted an "eviction apocalypse." In some states, like Wisconsin, the worst case scenario was kept at bay by a statewide moratorium. These moratoriums, however, were temporary. Wisconsin's only lasted for the first 60 days of the pandemic and when it expired, courts faced an onslaught of evictions.

"We were inundated," said Foley, "It was like we've never seen before."

An eviction filing functions as a stain on a tenant's record which can make it close to impossible to find future housing. While not all evictions result in a forcible removal, filings can trigger job loss, increased poverty, and serious mental health issues that include depression and suicidal ideation.

Evictions are also a stark reflection of the country's racial divide. Black women face eviction at twice the rate of white renters in 17 states, according to analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Black renters are just wildly, disproportionately affected by eviction," said Hepburn, the Rutgers sociologist. "That's true historically and it remains true during the pandemic."

Jacqueline Clark was evicted by a Berrada company before the pandemic, in 2017, and now she organizes with the Milwaukee Autonomous Tenants Union for better renter protections.

"You're dealing with a community that is poor and has low wages. It's like you just don't care about people," she said. "Everyone just wants a roof over their head, somewhere they can come inside and deal with life."

Clark's eviction came when she was in between jobs. She said the late payments were so steep that she soon owed the equivalent of two months of rent. It took her an entire year of applying to new apartment buildings before she found someone willing to rent to her.

"It was the most devastating experience; I had never been evicted, I had never been in such a situation," said Clark. "I couldn't talk to nobody, there's no one to connect with. It's just a cut and dry type of operation that he runs."

In the Covid era, housing courts across the country went virtual. Tenants are expected to attend via video conference, often an impossibility for those without smartphones or laptops. Tenants with government-issued phones with limited minutes can blow their entire month's allotment just waiting on hold for their case to be heard. Housing experts say that many cases have been decided in the landlord's favor when a tenant doesn't "show up" due to a technical glitch with video conferencing software.

"MUSICAL MANAGEMENT COMPANIES"

It wasn't always so hard to keep the roof over your head in America-in part because corporations didn't used to own so many people's homes. Over the last decade, over twenty cities have seen rent costs increase by over 50 percent in the same time period. These increases are partially driven by corporate landlords, who are more likely to increase rent- often by renovating a property after an eviction and jacking up the price.

At the same time, wages have stagnated dramatically. When adjusted for inflation, a 2018 hourly wage has about the same purchasing power as it did in 1978. In fact, the average 1973 hourly minimum wage (just over $4) would be equal to about a $24 average minimum wage today. Instead, today's federal minimum wage is just $7.25.

Meanwhile, housing the poor is a prosperous business, given that poor and relatively wealthy renters pay similar amounts of rent. While landlords renting to lower-income renters face greater risk of missed rent payment or sudden vacancies, they offload that risk onto tenants which means that landlords who rent to poor tenants make nearly twice as much profit as those renting to people of means.

Complicating things further for tenants is that private equity firms are regularly buying and selling properties among themselves. In some parts of Atlanta, for example, where corporations own at least one in five single-family rentals, tenants might not know who their landlord is until they receive an eviction notice

Erin Willoughby, an attorney at Legal Aid Atlanta calls the phenomenon playing "musical management companies." On multiple occasions, she has arrived at housing court, ready to defend a tenant, only to learn that the unit was sold the previous day or week.

The fact that the industry is so difficult to track is also a huge part of why there is so little accountability for corporations who are evicting people in the middle of a pandemic, despite the CDC moratorium.

"It's in such a striking contrast to the defendants of these cases, where I know their names and their addresses but I can't say much about who is evicting them" said Hepburn, the Rutgers sociologist. "That speaks to a real imbalance of power that is reified and reinforced by the court systems that grant levels of anonymity to landowners and landlords."

AN ALTERNATE PATH

In Milwaukee, publicly available information is the only reason Foley was able to direct her op-ed at the right person: Joe Berrada. Becoming the face of a city's eviction crisis, after all, makes the price of doing business a lot steeper.

Foley sees the relationship she's brokered with Berrada as a potential blueprint for the rest of the country; an alternate path that could keep people in their homes and reduce the hegemony of corporate landlords. Today, when Foley works with tenants who need housing but have past evictions on their record, she often refers them to Berrada, one of the only landlords in the area who will offer them a lease.

Foley's organization and another housing organization called Community Advocates have also worked with Berrada to obtain emergency rental assistance from government coffers. In the case of Pollard, the 26-year-old facing an eviction in June, the three entities worked together to buy her more time to move and then helped her move into a more affordable Berrada-owned apartment.

"I think everybody's been surprised by some areas of common ground and that advances a lot of good things for tenants," said Foley. "I think the pandemic makes it clear we have to go at this differently, this crisis makes it so glaringly apparently that the current formula does not work. We've got to do better."

All of this has helped rehabilitate Berrada's reputation in Milwaukee. It's also been good for business: when tenants get money, Berrada also gets money.

While many Berrada tenants have been relieved by the shift in tone, they're wary of what happens when the CDC moratorium is lifted and their plight falls off the news cycle.

"I'd be homeless if it weren't for Berrada," said 29-year old Tevin Buckner who Community Advocates helped with months of back rent owed to BPM through the new cooperative systems after he lost his job at the beginning of the pandemic. "Without him agreeing to it, we'd be screwed."

But like many Americans, Buckner is still unemployed and no more able to pay rent now than he was several months ago. He wonders whether Berrada is truly turning over a new leaf or whether it's a political stunt that will end when the cameras stop rolling.

"I won't lie to you and say my fear ain't there still. He's gonna evict, I don't have any doubt that he's gonna evict, because that's what he does," said Bucker. "And the governments gonna let him, the states gonna let him. But what can you do? They already allowed him to buy up all this property."
Do you have a story about a corporate landlord who has illegally or unfairly evicted tenants during the pandemic? Please send tips to EvictionTips@Insider.com

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One millionaire landlord was behind half of Milwaukee's evictions during Covid lockdowns last June. Here's the story of how corporate landlords helped drive the evictions crisis

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Corporate landlords in cities like Milwaukee helped drive an evictions crisis during the pandemic. Landlords have filed 272,612 evictions in 27 cities since last March. The national count is likely far higher. Corporate landlords, which own almost 50% of rental properties, are more likely to evict, advocates say.

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