Three evictions, three stories. Why the Phoenix area eviction crisis is only getting worse
People are now getting eviction notices in Maricopa County at rates greater than the years immediately before COVID-19, and with rents soaring, thousands more will soon be out of a home.
Senior citizens. Veterans. Mothers and children. No one is exempt when an illness, a car repair or a newly raised rent makes it impossible to deliver the monthly payment.
The per capita eviction rate climbed to about 115 eviction filings per 10,000 metro Phoenix renter households in January, an Arizona Republic analysis shows.
In the five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the highest rate was about 105 filings per 10,000 renter households, in August and October 2019.
More than 67,000 eviction cases were filed in Maricopa County in 2022, according to records from the Maricopa County Justice Courts.
That's more cases than the population of the city of Maricopa, in Pinal County, which has slightly under 60,000 residents.
"It used to be family emergencies driving evictions, but now high rents are the family emergency," said Pamela Bridge, director of litigation and advocacy at Community Legal Services.
Properties are changing hands, and new corporate landlords are looking to raise rents to make a profit. Rental aid may be available, but it often can't reach those who need it in time. A fast eviction process and a cascade of fees make it difficult to catch up once a tenant falls behind.
A new law designed to protect those who have experienced evictions has a loophole, and renters have few other protections.
A county mediation program and a state council to craft a plan to end homelessness could be in the works.
But these longer-term approaches mean little to Judy Peck, Jesse Burk and Shatina Redden.
They've already been evicted.
A rent increase and a long hospital stay
Judy Peck, 71, and her brother Roderick King, 61, were evicted from a northwest Phoenix condo earlier this year after their rent was raised and she came back from a long hospital stay for renal failure.
"I can't even remember how long I was in the hospital and then in bed when I got home," said Peck, who is on a fixed income from Social Security. "We are really struggling, and a couple of hundred dollars more a month for rent was too much."
Metro Phoenix rents have increased much faster than incomes during the past few years. The average Valley rent climbed more than 31% from 2020 to hit $1,692 at the end of 2022, according to ABI Multifamily.
Higher rents are also driving judgment amounts entered against tenants to a record high, making it much harder for renters to catch up and stay in their homes.
In February, the average eviction judgment hit $3,504, according to the Justice Courts. That's up from $3,351 in 2022 and triple the average from 20 years ago.
A judgment includes past rent owed as well as legal and administrative fees.
The judgment against Peck and King is for almost $9,400.
The siblings were evicted in January, as metro Phoenix eviction filings soared past the artificially low levels when pandemic moratoriums were in place. Eviction filings in February set a new record for that month.
Peck and King applied for rental aid but didn't get it in time. The siblings slept in a car and borrowed money from friends to stay some nights in a budget hotel.
They lived in one of the Valley neighborhoods with the highest eviction rates in recent years — ZIP code 85029 in north Phoenix, bounded by Thunderbird and Peoria roads, Seventh Street and 43rd Avenue. In that area, landlords filed to evict tenants 2,592 times in 2021 and 2022, according to a Republic analysis.
Peck's rental condo was bought by an investor a few years ago. She and her brother, an electrician who wasn't able to work because his car broke down, were able to get help from state emergency aid after losing their home. They are in a budget studio and on a list for temporary housing.
An expensive car repair for a disabled veteran
Arizona law allows a landlord to initiate an eviction as soon as five days after a tenant misses rent. If renters can't come up with what they owe, they are typically locked out within three weeks.
For many evictees, affording higher rents is not the only problem. Often, tenants who have enough money to pay rent end up homeless because landlords won't lease to people with multiple evictions on their record.
Retired Sgt. Jesse Burk, 49, a disabled Air Force veteran, has four evictions on his record from a Mesa apartment complex he moved into in August 2020.
"Even without work, I make $5,000 in disabilities," he said. "I still cannot find someone to rent to me."
Each time his landlord filed to evict, except the last one, he settled up and didn’t have to move out. But last fall, he had an expensive car repair and fell behind again.
In December, an eviction judgment directed him to pay $4,347, along with court and late fees, which gradually grew to more than double that amount as he racked up more late charges.
While many people were preparing for Christmas, Burk and his two service dogs were moving into his 2017 Dodge Challenger, leaving behind everything that could not fit into the automobile. After physical therapy, his car has become the second most important thing to him.
He moved from motel to motel. During the Super Bowl, some motels charged the Air Force veteran as much as $300 a night.
While at the Extended Stay America in Mesa, where he lived briefly and paid about $630 per week, he found help from the Veteran Resource Center, which paid for him to live at a Motel 6 in Mesa for a month.
"We were like the 14th place he called for help," said Mark Young, president of Mesa United Way, which runs the center. "He called a lot of veterans service places but because it was vacation week, nobody called him back."
If Burk pays off his latest judgment, he can get that eviction sealed so it doesn't show up on his credit record.
That could help him find another rental.
No options, no home for a mom and her 4 kids
Shatina Redden, 43, and her four children were evicted last April after her rent was raised by $200 a month. She owed her landlord $1,400.
She found other apartments but couldn't afford them on her income as a cook at Denny's. Redden ended up with three fast evictions in 2022.
After losing her home, she quickly lost her car and then her job. Redden and her children, ages 4 through 18, became homeless.
Redden feels lucky to have a place for her family to stay at LaMesita Family Shelter in Mesa now.
Redden said every 30 days, when the shelter decides whether to keep occupants or not, she frets.
"The hardest thing is getting into a shelter with kids, and people look at you like you are a bum or on drugs because you can’t afford to pay rent," she said.
Eviction rate affects the number of unhoused people
During the first three months of 2022, about 18,700 evictions were filed against Phoenix-area tenants, according to the courts.
If the trend continues, the number of evictions for the year could approach 78,000, about the population of Flagstaff.
"Property owners all over Arizona continue to work with renters to keep people in their homes, whether it's identifying sources of assistance or collaborating on partial payment options," said Courtney LeVinus, CEO of the Arizona Multihousing Association, the statewide trade association for the apartment industry. "Evictions are a last resort when people don't pay their rent."
She said evictions are a symptom of the larger issues Arizona faces, like inflation and the rising cost of housing.
Evictions add pressure to the problem of homelessness in the state. Arizona saw a 23% jump in its homeless population between 2020 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Homelessness in the U.S. increased by less than 1% during the same period.
Law sealing judgments has a loophole
A new Arizona law designed to get people who have been evicted back into a rental has had some success.
The law requires eviction records to be sealed when a court dismisses the case before a judgment, if a judgment is entered in favor of a tenant, or if a tenant and landlord jointly agree in writing to set aside or seal the judgment.
"Research shows that a lot of the negative consequences of eviction occur in the year or long after the eviction occurs," said Carl Gershenson of Princeton University's Eviction Lab.
"That is, in large part, due to the mark on the tenant's records making it hard for them to find stable housing or having to live farther away from their job, their friend and family networks or live in much worse quality housing," Gershenson said.
Almost 7,000 eviction cases in Maricopa County have been sealed since the law went into effect in September 2022. But there's a loophole.
Maricopa County Justice Courts spokesman Scott Davis said since courts are legally obligated to make eviction records public, a record can go out to anyone who requests it before it's sealed.
That means sealing records may not help renters facing backlash from an eviction as much as tenant advocates would like.
Maxine Becker, an attorney and tenant advocate for Phoenix-based Wildfire, a poverty-relief nonprofit, worked to get the law to seal eviction records, and knows it's not perfect.
"We know companies can go in and get data before an eviction is sealed, but we had to do something to protect tenants and help them get into other rentals," she said.
Finding an affordable apartment is tough even without an eviction on your record. The Phoenix-area apartment vacancy rate recently hit a 50-year low.
And many of the areas hardest hit by rising rents and evictions have drawn out-of-state investors paying cash for properties.
"It is called re-tenanting," said Mad Bankson of the Private Equity Stakeholders Research Project, which studies how private equity dollars affect Americans. "Landlords move the old tenants out to get new ones who can pay a higher rent."
Advocate: 'We don’t see a way forward' without change
Besides sealing evictions, tenant advocates say more must be done to keep people in homes. And some efforts are underway.
"With the levels of rents and inflation, we don't see a way forward for people with low and even median incomes," Becker said. "Our system is built to evict people and not keep them housed."
Becker believes Arizona needs an eviction diversion program like one that can be found in more than 30 other states.
These eviction prevention programs vary but typically include free legal aid, people to help renters navigate the eviction process, required meetings between property owners and tenants and changes to the eviction process.
Pima is the only county in the state that has such a program, but that hasn't changed Arizona's eviction process. That would take a change in law and actions by the courts.
Maricopa County's Human Services Department is now working on a mediation program with landlords to find eviction alternatives for renters.
"With how quickly evictions are going, we need to get into the process early and create neutral ground between landlords and tenants," said Jacqueline Edwards, who is working on the mediation program. "We want to provide resources, including financial coaching for renters, and potentially rental assistance that helps both groups."
The Arizona Supreme Court has approved a Housing Stability Legal Advocate pilot program that will allow housing advocates to train to help tenants in court and with landlord negotiations. The University of Arizona College of Law is working on building a curriculum for the program.
Fewer than 5% of tenants getting evicted now have legal help in Arizona. More than 85% of landlords across the state hire lawyers to handle evictions.
Several states and cities, including Washington, Maryland, Connecticut, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore and Denver have laws that demand tenants get free legal help.
Some states have even more tenant protections. More than a dozen states and cities have "just cause" provisions to prohibit landlords from arbitrarily ending rental agreements with tenants at the end of a lease. Arizona doesn't have a just cause law.
Seven states have cities with rent controls, which aren't currently an option in Arizona because they violate state law.
One recent move to help with Arizona's growing eviction and homelessness problems was restarting the Governor's Interagency and Community Council on Homelessness and Housing, said Joan Serviss, Arizona Housing Department director.
Gov. Katie Hobbs' second executive order established the council and called on it to develop and implement a plan to prevent and end homelessness in Arizona.
A similar group was established in 2010, but it was abolished a few years ago.
Hobbs also wants to increase funding to the Arizona Housing Trust Fund. Her January budget proposal suggested depositing $150 million into the fund, which was swept during the recession. It received a one-time $60 million infusion last year.
"We need to study both short-term and long-term solutions for our housing crisis, and we need to make progress right away," Serviss said.
About the data analysis
It's impossible to track precisely the severity of Arizona's eviction problem. Maricopa County Justice Courts track eviction filings but aren't required to document how many people are actually locked out of their homes.
"Maricopa has a high eviction filing rate, but how many people are ultimately displaced from their homes is unknowable there," said Carl Gershenson of Princeton University's Eviction Lab.
Because an eviction applies to a whole household, The Arizona Republic weighed the number of Maricopa County eviction filings against the number of renter households in the county. This analysis makes the eviction filing rate comparable across years, even as the number of rental households changes because of population growth and apartment construction.
For each year from 2015 to 2021, The Republic found Maricopa County's estimated number of renter-occupied units in U.S. Census Bureau data. The Census Bureau has not yet released those numbers for 2022 and 2023, so for those years, total housing unit estimates from the Maricopa Association of Governments were used to roughly calculate the number of renter-occupied units.
Coverage of housing insecurity on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Eviction filings are on the rise in metro Phoenix. What can be done?
