“But without the feudal lord, there would be no land from which we could harvest the grain!”

When is success a failure? When is a victory a loss? In eviction proceedings. Consider this: “Tenants in Massachusetts who struggle to find housing due to a prior eviction may now get the chance to have those records sealed. The Legislature’s newly passed housing bond bill includes a provision that would allow tenants to petition a court to seal their eviction record in cases such as a no-fault eviction, a dismissed case, or a case the tenant won. Currently, there is no eviction sealing in Massachusetts.” Consider this: “Dayton Municipal Court has launched a new process to seal eviction case records …. Tenants can now submit applications to the Dayton Municipal Court to have their eviction cases sealed. Renters can file an application 60 days after their cases were dismissed or after the court made a judgment in their favor.”  People received an eviction notice, went to court, won or had the case dismissed, and the so-called Scarlet E of eviction still attaches to their names. People were evicted through no fault of their own, and the Scarlet E still attaches to their names. What’s the name for the system in which such abusive treatment is considered just, normal and acceptable? Feudalism.

While this situation has existed in the United States, and especially in the metropolitan areas, since the invention of the commodification of housing, in very recent years it has intensified and worsened considerably, thanks in large part to two phenomena: the entry of corporate investors and hedge funds into the rental real estate market and landlords’ increasing reliance on apps to determine a prospective tenant’s credit worthiness. Corporate investor and hedge fund landlords tend to file evictions much more readily than individual landlords, and most apps don’t distinguish between eviction filing and writs of eviction, or actual evictions. But then again, why would they, when the courts haven’t? Again, court records don’t distinguish between judgments against tenants and judgments for tenants. They’re all `evictions’.

Consider this, from a recent study of the collateral consequences of eviction court filings in Pennsylvania, “Eviction filings had far-reaching collateral costs for tenants and their families, often impacting their well-being and stability for years after the filing. Records stemming from eviction filings, even when tenants’ cases were resolved with a neutral or favorable outcome, negatively impacted the quality and trajectory of their lives …. Despite the court not formally evicting tenants, landlords still had the power to displace them. Though participants in this study did not receive eviction orders in court, the majority said they were forced to move after their eviction filing for reasons beyond their control …. Tenants with eviction records encountered punitive rental screening practices that prolonged housing instability and limited their housing options. 8 in 10 participants said that their eviction filing limited their future housing options. 65% of those who moved said a prospective landlord asked about their eviction record, and over half reported that a landlord explicitly denied their application because of their filing. Unsuccessful rental applications amounted to hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of dollars in excess costs to tenants.” Again, an eviction record is not a record of an eviction, it is a record of an eviction filing, irrespective of the outcome.

How does it make sense to turn renters’ success into failure, victory into loss, to brand ever more people with a Scarlet E that leaves them vulnerable to both super-exploitation and homelessness? Consider this, “In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and `unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.” That’s Karl Marx, in “Primitive Accumulation”, the final section of Capital, Volume One. The surge in eviction filings is no surprise nor is it merely a function of the dislocations of the pandemic nor of the earlier housing crisis. It’s part of the production of the new proletariat, a new proletariat that is disproportionately Black and Latina women.  When corporate investors and hedge funds entered into the rental real estate market, what happened, pretty much overnight? Mass expropriation, dislocation, removal and criminalization. Today as it was hundreds of years ago, it’s the basis of the whole process. Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your records.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Medium)

“The mainstream has never run clean, perhaps never can. Part of mainstream education involves learning to ignore this absolutely, with a sanctioned ignorance.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

 Across the United States and around the world, evictions are rising and residential rentals and home sales prices are skyrocketing. Predictably, this is accompanied by rising rates of eviction. While parts of the United Kingdom are experiencing rates of eviction they haven’t faced in almost twenty years, the United States is facing mortgage rates it also  hasn’t faced in over twenty years. But what exactly is an eviction, other than an existential crisis, a crisis that in the United States targets Black and Brown women? In the official discourse on housing, eviction has meant “the action or an instance of expelling a person by legal process from land, property, etc., occupied by him or her.” The key here, and the element of sanctioned ignorance, is “by legal process”. If eviction is only an action based on a legal process, what then do we call all those actions in which people are forced to move, but without any legal process involved?

Consider these stories from the last couple days.

In Sausalito, California, the owners of an apartment complex occupied mostly by elderly residents recently issued eviction notices to all the residents. The all-too-familiar story is a new owner came in a year or so ago, began letting maintenance go, never answered calls for repairs and then, again this week, decided the buildings needs “remodeling”. And so … people on fixed incomes in a hot rental market are out on the streets.

In Bakersfield, California, rents are going up as much as 40%, often in violation of the law. When Bakersfield Tenants Union Founder Wendell “J.R.” Wesley Jr. was issued a $100 rent increase, he knew that was illegal, and so went to the Leadership Counsel, a local advocacy group, got some help, and stopped the rent increase as well as the threat of eviction.

In Tucson, Oklahoma, a recent survey of unhoused people showed that the population of homeless elders is rising precipitously, and that the two leading causes of homelessness are eviction and skyrocketing rents.

These are just three stories from the last couple days, taken from a much longer list. They are stories of eviction, and familiar ones at that, but they hide as much as they show. What about all the elders living in apartments where the writing is on the wall, sometimes in the form of unattended mildew and mold? What about the elders who are harassed, directly or through `passive’ nonresponse and inaction, into `informal eviction’ or, even more ineptly, `self eviction’? Likewise, J.R. Wesley is an organizer who knows more than a thing or two about local and state housing laws. What about all those people who received a $100 increase in their rent, didn’t know it was illegal, didn’t know there are organizations and resources to help them, and moved before they lost everything and incurred today’s version of a Scarlet Letter, ie an eviction filing? Finally, it’s not only evictions leading to homelessness. It’s also rents rising so fast and so much they become unaffordable. People who have lived for years in an area that was affordable, if barely, are now forced to move through no action or fault of their own. What about them?

In Wisconsin, the Supreme Court will hear an argument to reduce the time eviction records are kept from 20 years to one year. In Wisconsin, the 20 years on file is for eviction filings, not evictions, and so the landlord has an extraordinarily menacing tool: “The vast majority of renters in eviction court are not evicted. According to the petition, there were 17,727 eviction filings in Wisconsin in just 2021. Just under ten percent of those eviction filings actually resulted in an eviction”. What about all those people who understand that an eviction filing is as damning as an actual eviction and decide to move?

That more attention is being given to eviction is good, but we need more and better attention. At this stage, there is still no national eviction data base. Last month, Virginia began collecting data on the number and locations of evictions that occur in any given year. That’s a good step. Across the country, many groups follow the model of Princeton’s Eviction Lab and collect data on eviction filings, also an important step in the right direction. But, again, those who are formally filed against, and even more those who go through the tragedy and existential crisis of eviction, are a minority of those who have been forcibly displaced. And we know, from history as well as from contemporary experience, that forcible displacement, while it may be experienced in deeply individual ways, is never a solitary event. Forced displacement is always already mass displacement. We cannot, in our research, advocacy, and organizing, create yet another mainstream moment, in which millions of people and communities are relegating to the status of ghosts, present and yet somehow not sufficiently enough to matter.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo: Iziko Slave Lodge)