Mollie Bryant Housing, News

In Oklahoma, there’s money for rental assistance to prevent evictions. Some landlords won’t take it.

During the pandemic, a federal ban kept evictions at bay. That measure expired during the weekend, prompting a shuffle in Oklahoma to protect potentially thousands of people from losing their homes.

But those efforts have hit a few snags. Some landlords refuse to accept rental assistance that would prevent their tenants’ evictions for a month or longer. And a legal aid attorney and two service providers told Big If True that some landlords never followed the rule in the first place and filed evictions in violation of the CARES Act, a relief package meant to help Americans during the pandemic.

A high rate of evictions is already in the DNA of the state’s two largest cities. Four years ago, Oklahoma City and Tulsa had some of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Tulsa had the 11th highest eviction rate, and Oklahoma City was ranked 20th.

Under the CARES Act, properties that receive federal assistance or have federally-backed mortgages were barred from evicting their tenants.

“The CARES Act protection really helped a lot of people, and as soon as it’s gone, we’re going to see those numbers go up in ways that we’ve never experienced,” said Becky Gligo, housing policy director for the city of Tulsa.

The CARES Act also added $600 to unemployment benefits each week. That supplement expired on Saturday.

A spokesperson for Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office said the governor remains opposed to creating a statewide ban on evictions during the pandemic.

Evictions are down, but the numbers obscure financial hardships – and illegal evictions

Tulsa and Oklahoma counties held off on evictions for several months this year before resuming them as courts reopened in May. But even after courthouses opened their doors, the number of evictions sat below last year’s despite record-breaking unemployment and disruption of the oil and gas industry that fuels Oklahoma’s economy.

According to court data, evictions filed this year in Oklahoma and Tulsa counties have both fallen about 40% from the same point last year.

Many suspect the current numbers mask the eviction crisis ahead. The cause of the deflated numbers, several service providers said, is the now-defunct federal ban.

“At no point did it release tenants from their rent, so all of the rent was due for all of those months of the moratorium, and so that big amount is going to come due for a lot of people, and there are a lot of families that are going to potentially become homeless as a result of that,” Restore Hope Ministries Executive Director Jeff Jaynes said.

According to a database from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the federal ban applied to at least about 600 multifamily buildings in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Gligo said the moratorium covered more than 30,000 rental units in Tulsa alone.

Despite the abnormally low eviction numbers, there are signs that financial struggles remain fresh for Oklahomans. Service providers with homelessness prevention programs are experiencing an increased demand. At Oklahoma City nonprofit Upward Transitions, a lot of clients have fallen behind on their rent, said CEO Periann Pulliam.

Ginny Bass Carl, executive director of resource center Community CARES Partners, compared low eviction numbers to misleadingly low reports of child abuse that have coincided with the pandemic. As schools shut down last semester, they removed kids from the watchful eyes of teachers and staff who are legally required to report abuse, likely preventing allegations of child abuse from being reported.

“Evictions are down because there’s been a moratorium, and when those false parameters are lifted, it will be a flood, without a doubt,” Bass Carl said. “We’re hearing it already.”

Community CARES Partners, which was set up to distribute CARES Act funds to prevent evictions, connects with clients through 211 and online. Since July 14, the center has received about 500 online applications.

Since mid-April, the 211 information system in Oklahoma City received about 7,500 calls and online requests seeking rental and mortgage assistance, an 82% increase from the same period last year.

The federal ban on evictions isn’t the only cause of the low eviction numbers, but other factors are impossible to calculate. Service providers and policy experts say that landlords may be working with tenants to avoid evicting them during the pandemic. On the flip side of that, some landlords may be skipping court entirely and forcing tenants out through illegal lockouts or by shutting off utilities.

Ryan Gentzler, director of Open Justice Oklahoma, said another reason for the low numbers is that courts have smaller eviction dockets than in the past because they’re enforcing social distancing requirements to avoid crowding courtrooms. That means the cases are being processed more slowly.

An Oklahoma Supreme Court order from May required landlords to disclose if their property was covered by the CARES Act. Courts, however, weren’t required to independently verify that what landlords said was true.

Michael G. Figgins, executive director of Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, said some landlords attempted to evict despite receiving federal funds, although at times they weren’t aware the ban applied to their property.

“If you’re dealing with a tenant who’s not going to show up, a tenant who’s going to default, and one of the tenants who does not have access to civil legal services because there’s just not enough legal aid lawyers, yeah, you can get away with it,” Figgins said.

On the horizon

Now that the federal eviction ban is over, landlords must give tenants 30 days’ notice before filing an eviction. Service providers expect landlords to give tenants notice of their plans immediately, as they may have tenants who are months behind on rent.

For the moment, evictions are expected to begin picking up late next month after the 30-day notice period is over.

“That’s when we’re going to start seeing this really snowball,” Pulliam said.

“It’s not a condition of poverty,” Figgins said of evictions. “It’s a cause of poverty. You have community instability. You’re going to have impact on children, impact on mental health, impact on employment, and who’s it impacting primarily? African American families, Latino families.”

Evictions become a part of people’s financial and rental histories, which can have consequences later in life. Pulliam said most landlords avoid renting to people with a history of being evicted, while those who are open to it may require tenants with previous evictions to pay higher deposits.

Gentzler described evictions as destabilizing events that can throw low-income families off of any financial progress they may have made.

“When we’re looking at that situation during the pandemic when we’re all being urged to stay at home, it just gets that much more dire,” he said.

Some advocacy groups, including the National Low Income Housing Coalition, argue that evictions could increase the spread of covid-19.

“It’s hard to say, but we would typically expect if people move around, it would be easy for them to get the virus,” Oklahoma City senior city planner Jerod Shadid said. “We haven’t seen a lot of that that we know of in the street homeless population yet, but we haven’t tested a lot of people either.”

When landlords won’t accept rental assistance

Community CARES Partners in Oklahoma City and Restore Hope Ministries in Tulsa both contracted with the state to distribute CARES Act funds to prevent evictions. The organizations will draw from a $10 million funding pool to provide rental assistance to people who lost income during the pandemic and have received an eviction summons.

Community CARES and Restore Hope also have had local programs to prevent evictions. Community CARES received $12.5 million from Oklahoma City for rent and utility assistance, with $6 million reserved for those who earn 80% or less of the area median income.

Even with the money in hand, it’s not always smooth sailing. Leaders of both organizations said that landlords sometimes won’t take rental assistance.

Oklahoma City property managers who work for out-of-state companies may feel they don’t have the authority to accept the assistance, Bass Carl said.

“That can make it difficult, and quite frankly, there’s also that landlord that just doesn’t care and says, ‘Forget it. You haven’t paid. I’m kicking you out,’ and I think that’s probably more common if they have properties that have higher turnover,” Bass Carl said. “That kind of becomes how they operate.”

Earlier this year, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Tulsa Community Foundation and Tulsa Area United Way gave Restore Hope funding to support a landlord-tenant mediation program.

For evictions filed before June 1, the program offered to pay back rent, plus the rent for June. In exchange, landlords agreed not to evict for the next 90 days, and tenants were required to follow their lease agreements, including paying the upcoming rent on time. If a dispute came up in the next three months, the landlord and tenant would go through mediation to find a solution.

Funding for the program was unlimited, so Restore Hope could have helped everyone who was eligible. Instead, the program helped about 60 families, Jaynes said.

Some tenants had already moved, and most landlords were repelled by the requirement not to evict for three months. Landlords saw that rule as putting their rent payments at risk, despite the requirement for tenants to cover rent outside of the assistance they received.

“It’s mind-boggling to me from either perspective why somebody wouldn’t be part of that program,” Jaynes said. “From an investment perspective, from a human perspective, from a moral perspective, from a straight-up money perspective, it doesn’t make sense to me why the landlords or the tenants wouldn’t be interested in that program.”

Moving forward

Pulliam tells clients to confirm evictions are official and contact legal aid for help before moving out.

“They want tenants who pay their rent, and they’re oftentimes willing to work with those tenants, so if you’re renting, talk to your landlord and see what you can work out,” she said.

Jaynes believes communitywide efforts are necessary to address Oklahoma’s eviction crisis, but also changes to the civil court system where evictions take place.

In eviction cases, tenants frequently don’t have attorneys, while landlords often are represented by a lawyer, creating a big gap in power and knowledge of the law. Tenants who are unrepresented are less likely to prevail, even if they have a good defense.

Tenants also may not show up for court dates, which essentially gives landlords an automatic win.

“There’s just a lot about that system that’s not who we are as Americans,” Jaynes said. “It’s not fair. It’s not intended to be that way.”

Resources

Contact Big If True editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Twitter.

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