"There's a really wide array of people who end up finding themselves homeless,” Leeor Schweitzer said.
Schweitzer is a member of Portland Tenants United’s organizing committee, and he says its members are seeing a spike in calls from tenants facing eviction.
“(Organizers) are talking to people who were newly homeless for the first time every single day,” Schweitzer said. “And almost every single one of them starts by saying, ‘I'm not like those other people, my situation is different.’ A lot of people who've never found themselves in that situation before, all of the support has been taken away and they've fallen through.”
Throughout the state, landlords are evicting people. Early in the year, pandemic protections — and assistance — began to dwindle.
Oregon already faced a housing shortage when investors stepped into a COVID-depressed housing market and started snapping up real estate. Housing demand — and sparse rent control — allowed landlords to jack up rents. Half of all Oregonians already spend at least 30% of their income on rent — putting them below the federal standard for affordability — and still, rents are rising.
Now, inflation, rising rents and lingering pandemic financial instability have led to a record number of people unable to pay rent.
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A temporary stay in evictions allowed many who could not pay rent to avoid eviction; but in that time, back rent still accumulated. Oregon Housing and Community Services dispersed more than $390 million in emergency rental support during the pandemic. Funding went to 60,829 households and OHCS estimated it kept 130,000 people in their homes during the pandemic.
Eventually, the bulk of protections and emergency funds expired. Many of those who already couldn't make rent earlier in the pandemic faced a backlog of rent they still couldn’t pay. Experts, advocates and policymakers predicted an eviction crisis loomed large on the horizon. — a wave of loss that would leave people displaced, destabilized and sometimes homeless.
In Oregon, it seems this wave has arrived.
Eviction rates rise. And rise.
In January 2022 — before pandemic rental assistance funds dried up and various eviction protections expired — there were 806 eviction filings. More than half of these were due to nonpayment of rent. In February, the number of evictions jumped. Since then, the rate of filings continue to rise every month.
In the first half of July there were 632 eviction. More than half— 417 —of these were from nonpayment. (At the time of publication, data was only available through July 15.)
Kim McCarty, executive director for the Community Alliance of Tenants, expects this trend will continue.
“We're in the middle of a crisis,” McCarty said. “Eviction rates are steadily increasing and there's every reason to believe that they will continue to go up, that we will return to historic levels of eviction.”
The federal moratorium on most evictions expired June 30, 2021. Around that time, in late June and early July 2021, Schweitzer estimates that Portland Tenants United received three times the usual number of calls, emails and messages from renters seeking to avoid eviction.
“A lot of those (calls) were about evictions,” Schweitzer said. “And a lot of those were about non-payment evictions for back rent that people were still trying to figure out how to manage, which is exactly what everybody expected would happen when we actually hit that deadline for paying the back rent.”
Since August 2021, more than half of all eviction filings resulted from nonpayment. In recent months, that number climbed as high as 68%.
“A lot of the people that we're talking with now are people who, at some point in this (owed) one or two months of rent, they maybe have a couple thousand or maybe even just a couple hundred that they're behind,” Schweitzer said. “And they're working with their landlords, with their work, with their family to see if they can cobble it together. Oftentimes, they can't. My guess is that a lot of those people who have those really high numbers feel like there's no option, so don't bother to go through the effort of contacting us.”
A historic level of need
While there are multiple factors at play, much of the current crisis is still tied to pandemic financial disruptions. Oregon was already facing rising poverty rates pre-pandemic. By 2021, 9% of Oregon households were in poverty and 26% relied, at least in part, on financial assistance.
“Now with COVID, we've had over two years of under-building,” McCarty said. “We have people who are not just houseless because of a small amount of rent that perhaps could be paid back in a month or so, we're talking about thousands of dollars of rent that are owed that a low income person will never be able to pay back. So the barriers or the circumstances that a person is put in now are different. They're in a different landscape.”
Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Portland rose 34% in the past year. At the same time, available housing shrank and alternatives for those who lose housing, such as shelters and temporary housing, haven’t expanded enough to meet the need.
While eviction numbers are high, they’re just the surface of a much bigger problem, McCarty said, because an untold number of evictions are never taken to court — tenants just move out, even if the eviction may not be legal.
“Eviction rates are steadily increasing and there's every reason to believe that they will continue to go up, that we will return to historic levels of eviction.”
— Kim McCarty, executive director for the Community Alliance of Tenants
“These are the hidden evictions,” McCarty said. “Evictions that landlords created by giving notices, or by implying that the rent was going to go up, or when tenants get a response from the state rejecting their applications for help. I think it's very obvious from the people that you see that evictions are a crisis.”
Many Oregonians are seeking support beyond housing to alleviate financial strain and meet basic needs.
“Compared to pre-COVID levels there is historic need,” Jake Sunderland, Oregon Department of Human Services press secretary, said.
Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Program (SNAP) has increased 27% since the onset of the pandemic, and 343,776 more people have enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan — a jump of 31.8 %.
Delia Hernandez, public information officer for Oregon Housing and Community Services, said a flood of people recently re-applied for rental assistance through the Oregon Emergency Rental Assistance Program, demonstrating “a rise in demand for additional rental assistance for families and individuals who had already applied for the program.”
These applicants, according to Hernandez, are mostly low-income households earning 50% or less of the average median income. OHCS will fully close the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which is already closed to new applicants, Aug. 12.
More evictions are on the horizon
In the midst of surging evictions, housing advocates anticipate eviction rates will keep rising.
“Evictions are steadily increasing toward the pre-pandemic level,” McCarty said. “At this rate, we anticipate two larger waves of evictions; one in October after all emergency eviction protections expire, and the second in January when landlords can increase rents. Rents are anticipated to increase to as high as 16%, which is beyond the capacity of many low income households.”
The deadline to qualify for Oregon’s Safe Harbor protection, which prevents eviction for renters who have applied for rental aid, ended July 1. For those who applied, protections will end Sept. 30. Tenants will also face shorter eviction windows when Oregon Senate Bill 892, which gives tenants 10 days to respond to an eviction notice, will expire, decreasing the time frame for response to just three days. Logistically, this makes it very difficult for tenants to get payments to landlords and avoid eviction, even when they have the money to pay them.
“Moving from a 10 day notice period to three day notice period … will accelerate the rate of eviction,” McCarty said. “Because even if I want to pay the day that you got your eviction notice, I may not be able to realistically get that money to you within 72 hours, even if I have it.”
McCarty said housing policies revert to pre-pandemic rules when protections expire, dropping low-income tenants into a more expensive and competitive housing market. Many such tenants shoulder debt accumulated throughout the pandemic.
“We're going back to old policy without acknowledgement that we're in a new place,” McCarty said.
Failing to enact stricter rental caps, undoing pandemic protections and increasing housing without ensuring it will be affordable will result in continued housing instability, according to McCarty.
For those who are evicted, Schweitzer said, recovery is likely to be a challenge. They will carry the trauma of losing housing — and an eviction on their records — into the search for a new home.
The need is so great, Schweitzer said, that not everyone gets the help they need.
“Unfortunately, at the point where we can't help them anymore, we oftentimes don't hear from them anymore,” Schweitzer said. “But what they tell us is that they're going to end up sleeping on the street, a lot of the time. Sometimes they do leave town, or they do have family members or friends where they're able to stay for a little bit of time while they figure things out. But I regularly see messages from people who say, ‘If I don't figure out a way to pay this off, I'm gonna be homeless in a week.’”
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