Eviction in Miami
By MA Neff
It’s not easy to separate the winding threads of poverty, social justice and inequality, even climate change from eviction law. It’s beyond Orwell’s doublespeak, DC Comics' or even Seinfeld’s Bizarro World, maybe not politics, though.
Some view evictions as both a cause of and an effect of poverty and by this thinking puts those evicted a step closer to homelessness. Those with no home to sleep in aren’t, of course, the cause of climate change, but still, if not the talismans, become costly risks to governments and taxpayers. In New York the usual eviction case is filed over $1,900 in unpaid rent, compared to $41,000 the city is said to spend for each homeless person per year (“Pushed Out”, The Economist, August 24, 2019).
One can’t help but wonder if this money couldn’t be put to better use by keeping people in their homes in the first place.
Miami-Dade and Broward Counties are home to the highest number of cost-burdened households in Florida. Translated, cost-burdened here means households that earn 30% to 60% of the Area Median Income (AMI), but who pay more than 40% of their income on monthly rent (2019 Rental Market Study, Shimberg Center for Housing Study).
Not nearly as popular as its luxury residential real estate market and waterfront hotels, Miami’s County Court fielded nearly 2,541 eviction filings in 2016, or about 23 a day according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. A city of contrasts, Miami’s obvious wealth is offset by a 19% poverty rate, on par with cities like Los Angeles and New York.
The lab is the brainchild of sociologist and author Matthew Desmond who once said in an NPR interview, “If we really want to understand the problem of eviction in this country, we have to embrace ambiguities and the complexities of it.” His 2015 book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, earned the Princeton professor a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Its publication also turned into a tipping point of sorts in attention being turned to rent regulation policy across the country.
Cost-burdened Renters in South Florida
The Eviction Lab lists Miami Gardens, one of Miami-Dade County’s municipalities, in the top 100 U.S. cities with the highest eviction rates. With a median household income hovering around $40,000, Miami Gardens whose black and African American residents make up about 71% of its total, falls well below the nation’s $53,284 median income. Income illustrates the spin inequality puts on eviction and its aftereffects on vulnerable communities.
Contrary to popular sentiments, the problem of “safe and stable” shelter, as one person aptly labeled it at a recent Miami-Dade county budget hearing, is not entirely because of a lack of government sanctioned affordable rental housing.
What is evident from the 2019 Rental Market Study is that the number of cost-burdened renters (households earning between 30% and 60% of AMI (area median income) but paying more than 40% of income on monthly rent, has more than doubled in the past nine years. The main takeaway is that the trend is happening across the nation’s cities and is not going to reverse itself.
In Desmond’s research in typical low-income cases households end up spending “60, 70, 80 percent of their income and living unassisted in the private rental market.” If accurate, it’s not clear who exactly public and subsidized housing is helping.
Is Subsidized Housing the Panacea or the Problem?
Miami is one of the third least affordable cities in the country by Miami Herald reckoning, which explains why at an early September budget hearing, the most repeated opening comment was “affordable for who?”.
When advocates of nonprofit Miami Homes for All spoke during the public hearing about the 2020 county budget which included $645 million for affordable housing, each one repeatedly called for an additional $60 million for 130,000 affordable homes. Just as many individual residents stepped up to the microphone and repeatedly asked “what is affordable housing?” or “affordable for who?”
As one county commissioner explained, “It’s not just the money on paper, but actually spending the money to build housing.” But city, state and federal budgets aside, in reality only 1 in 4 families who qualify for housing assistance get any help. Although their percentages seem high, truly low income families who rent in the private sector are hardly accounted for in the larger housing solution conversation.
Stagnant Wages
One college student at the hearing said bluntly, “Our salaries don’t match the rents.” She’d just moved from Washington, D.C. and claimed the rents were much higher in Miami.
A single disabled father along with several women gave specifics. One woman from Overtown, an historic black neighborhood said people pay $500 and the affordable housing is $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
“People can’t afford that,” the woman continued. “They’re afraid to speak out because they don’t want to get kicked out.”
Another woman said, “I have $900 and rent is $800 and I can’t afford it.”
[Watch video recording of September 5 public hearing]
More Renters and Rising Rents
While homeowners who default on their mortgages and are forced into foreclosure can be evicted, here we are focusing on families who rent, especially those who do not earn enough to buy a home or apartment.
Since 1995 median asking rents in the U.S. increased by 70 percent, adjusting for inflation according to NPR. After the 2008 subprime financial collapse, home ownership dove to a 50-year low. Over the next nine years in Miami, the number of homeowners dropped significantly from almost 56% to less than 44%.
Conversely, the percentage of renters in Miami increased from 33.7% to 41.7%. In the last nine years the 2019 Rental Market Study Florida reports that 674,000 rental units were added, but of the 55,000 that were lost, 44,000 or 80% of these were rentals in the $1,000 per month or less range.
Further complicating the picture in Florida, as elsewhere, is the economics of the real estate market and gentrification. In Miami, the art and design worlds sprouted in Wynwood, spread to the Design District, MiMo and, most recently, Little Haiti. Older homes and structures get torn down and replaced with new business offices, showrooms, galleries, retail shops and restaurants. We hear little about people whose families are displaced and whose homes are razed.
Eviction Law Disparities vs. Tenant Rights
Eviction laws are contained in Chapter 83 the Florida State Statutes and drafted by the legislature in Tallahassee, largely at the persuasion of the property owner lobby for the benefit of not only owners, but also real estate developers and investors.
Tenants, specifically those with lower incomes, people of color and many of these women with children who often don’t have a second breadwinner to count on, are not part of the equation. Subsequently, their neighborhoods are “dis-invested” to use the lingo. To put the crisis in numbers, 1 in 5 women of color compared with 1 in 15 white women are impacted.
While the social and economic disparity resulting from evictions continues to spill over into communities causing job loss, health repercussions, especially mental problems and hardships for children growing up and getting through school, there are some emerging trends in other places that are falling back on past rent control regulation with uneven consequences.
Florida, on the other hand, hasn't jumped on the tenant rights train. It ranks as the second worst state according to a study by Attorney Jeffrey Hearne, who was honored with the 2018 Florida Bar Consumer Protection Lawyer of the Year Award for his commitment to tenants’ rights and advocacy and who has been working with the Housing Unit of Legal Services of Greater Miami for 17 years. He teaches at University of Miami Law School and trains students how to help low income tenants deal with eviction troubles.
There is little in Florida law to avert unfair eviction tactics or enforcement and certainly no right to free legal counsel for those facing eviction proceedings. Those who don’t bother to show up for their court date or who lose their case end up with their names in public eviction databases which landlords use to prevent them from renting again.
Judges tend to side with the landlord or property owner if a case goes to court, even if tenants have a record of paying rent and good behavior because of the way the law is written, writes Alexandra Martinez (“Know your rights as a renter in Miami”, The New Tropic, September 21, 2016).
Free Legal Counsel and Fewer Evictions in New York
New York City has begun guaranteeing a right to free legal counsel in eviction proceedings, the first place to do so says The Economist (“Pushed Out”, August 24, 2019). The author attributes (without explaining) that the city’s re-imagined emergency rental assistance program and “right to shelter”, led to the number of evictions falling by over 60% in the five years between 2013 and 2018 to 18,152 from 28,849.
This year tenant advocates have successfully pressured lawmakers in New York, Oregon and California into enacting rental protections laws, where in the past such so-called rent controls applied to very few buildings in even fewer locations across the country.
Considering the fact that half of the people in New York are renters, it makes sense that tenants have a long history of getting things done. The idea of rent control took hold in the 1960s and ‘70s in New York City. Little by little over the last few decades at the urgings of developers and landlords, the state legislature in Albany chipped away at tenants’ rights and as a result,152,000 regulated units disappeared from the rental market.
Then the housing crisis spun out of control following the 2008 subprime financial meltdown leading to mounting evictions and homelessness. Eventually the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance began touting universal rent control, including protections against arbitrary evictions well chronicled by Jimmy Tobias (In the Heart of Real-Estate Power, a Housing Movement Nears Victory, The Nation, June 17-24, 2019).
NY, Oregon and California’s New Tenants’ Protection Laws
New York passed the Housing Stability and Tenants Protection Act (S6458) in June. Four months earlier in February, Oregon passed its own tenants bill (SB608). Okay, so smaller is faster: Oregon has roughly 4 million and New York almost 20 million residents.
Precisely because it is the largest state with a population of over 40 million, California’s legislature in Sacramento, alongside major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, grapple with some of the meanest commutes, exacerbating carbon emissions that are in large part caused by the steepest housing prices in the nation.
Even as California attempts to fund affordable housing initiatives to the tune of several billion, homeless populations seem only to spill over into further reaches. A bill in the state legislature (<a href+"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB1482>AB1482</a>) limiting annual rent increases for tenants in buildings more than 15 years old to 7% plus inflation, was signed earlier this month, despite voters having defeated a statewide referendum on universal rent control in November 2018.
AB 1482 does not include means testing, so the state’s wealthiest residents will be eligible for a price ceiling on rentals, while renters most in need will get no assurances of assistance.
To jump back up the rabbit hole or through the looking glass, the bill still does not address the crux of California’s housing crisis, which the California Apartment Association (CAA) views as the housing shortfall. What is needed, in their opinion, is to build more housing.
Like Ouroboros, the ancient Greek serpent eating its own tail, or Alice in Wonderland, we’re right back where we started, if as the CAA claims, the rent cap creates a disincentive for investors to build new housing or to renovate existing housing.
These new rental laws limit rent increases somewhere between 5 to 7 percent plus cost of living or inflation. But when was the last year anyone saw a pay increase like this? And as the private citizens at Miami’s budget hearings asked, Affordable for who?
