Evicted

A legal aid attorney who represents families facing eviction unpacks the eviction epidemic, a conversation with the curator of the “Evicted” exhibit at the National Building Museum, and the news of the week In Case You Missed It. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Last week, Ben Carson, President Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, unveiled a proposal to triple rents for the poorest families and take housing assistance away from unemployed and underemployed workers. This announcement comes amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis: In no state in the U.S. can a minimum wage worker earning $7.25 afford even a one-bedroom apartment at market rent.

Meanwhile, just 1 in 5 eligible low-income families receive help from the nation’s already massively underfunded housing assistance programs, leaving others paying 50, 60, 70 percent of their incomes on rent — while they languish on years, sometimes decades-long waitlists for housing aid. Many end up facing eviction.

A new dataset produced by sociologist and Evicted author Matthew Desmond and his team at the Eviction Lab shines staggering new light on the scale and scope of the eviction epidemic. In cities such as Richmond, Virginia, as many as 1 in 9 households faced eviction in 2016. Meanwhile, an exhibit at the National Building Museum based on Desmond’s book brings the issue to life.

This week on Off-Kilter, to help Ben Carson — and the rest of us — get up to speed on the reality of America’s affordable housing crisis, which his proposal would put on steroids, Rebecca speaks with two people working to fight the eviction epidemic in very different ways.

This week’s guests:

• Pat Levy-Lavelle, an attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Richmond, Virginia, who represents low-income families facing eviction
• Sarah Leavitt, curator of the “Evicted” exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

But first, the tax cuts Republicans just gave to the richest 1% cost more than the entire SNAP program — which they are now trying to slash. Jeremy Slevin, aka The Slevinator, returns — still loopy from his brush with the bubonic plague (in fairness, Rebecca’s pretty loopy too, for entirely different reasons)— with this and other news of the week, In Case You Missed It.

For more on this week’s topics:

• Check out the Eviction Lab’s sweeping new dataset unpacking the eviction epidemic and the NYT Upshot’s look at Richmond, Virginia, which has one of the highest eviction rates in the country.
• Find out more about the “Evicted” exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., which runs through May 19, 2019 — and check out CityLab’s feature on how Sarah Leavitt turned Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book into a museum exhibit.
• May 1–8 is the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s national housing week of action. Get involved and find an event near you at Our Homes Our Voices.

For more on our ICYMI topics:

• The Hill on the Trump admin’s waffling on whether to permit lifetime limits in Medicaid;
• Seth Hanlon pulls together Republicans’ sudden truth-telling about the #GOPTaxScam
• new CAP analysis finding the tax cuts for the richest 1% cost more than the entire SNAP program
• new CAPAF analysis finding the tax cuts these Republican lawmakers gave themselves could pay for 10 million meals through SNAP

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, in the wake of last week’s unveiling by Ben Carson, President Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development of a proposal to triple rents for the poorest families and take housing assistance away from unemployed and underemployed workers, I dig into the affordable housing crisis and the eviction epidemic with a legal aid attorney who represents low-income families facing eviction and the curator of this “Evicted” exhibit, currently underway at the National Building Museum. The “Evicted” exhibit is based on Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book by the same name. But first, because we’ve all missed him so much, Jeremy Slevin, the Slevinator is back from the bubonic plague which had him out for about a week.

JEREMY SLEVIN: Yes, yes, sorry to all the people suffering from the bubonic plague out there but I am back and back from the plague.

VALLAS: Well Jeremy, we missed you and I know our listeners missed you and I know this episode, I can’t even speak, this show isn’t the same without you. So thank you for coming back even when you’re still on the mend but you brought some stuff with you.

SLEVIN: I did.

VALLAS: You’ve been out.

SLEVIN: I bought some news.

VALLAS: You’ve been out but you still didn’t miss anything.

SLEVIN: Yeah.

VALLAS: Is what I think I’m saying.

SLEVIN: You couldn’t have missed it because I wasn’t here.

VALLAS: Well I’m saying you didn’t miss it.

SLEVIN: Right, right.

VALLAS: Which is amazing.

SLEVIN: I’ve just been on the hunt for the best in case you missed it story in my whole time home sick.

VALLAS: That’s what you were actually doing.

SLEVIN: Yeah.

VALLAS: So you came with some good news, some bad news, some news to do with truth telling. Why don’t start with —

SLEVIN: Actually there’s no direct bad news this week. I wish had sound effects so we could play trumpets but in looking at this there’s nothing that’s like this happened that is really bad for people, that hasn’t already happen.

VALLAS: I think that’s just not in this segment.

SLEVIN: Honestly a lot of stuff in the world happened but I’m saying it’s cheerful we have only news that isn’t entirely bad.

VALLAS: Which you handpicked so that’s the kind of mood you’re in.

SLEVIN: I’m congratulating myself.

VALLAS: And there we are. So kick us off.

SLEVIN: I’ll start with the good news not to give too much credit to this administration ever but they pulled back from a previously awful policy to set lifetime limits on people receiving Medicaid. And it was initially a policy that the Department of Health and Human Services said states could go through much like the so-called work requirements for Medicaid. Kansas requested a waiver for this and it was rejected by the administration in a surprise announcement and they said we’re trying to think about all of the nuances here. This is Seema Verma the head of CMS which runs Medicaid and Medicare. We understand that people’s circumstances change over time and that they may actually get into a job and then maybe something happens in a few years. Which is exactly what all of the advocates left and right have been saying. So some rare good news, walking back a previously awful policy.

VALLAS: Now I feel like you’re going to get upset because I’m going to take almost all the wind out of your sails right now. I think yes, let’s celebrate a momentary absence of bad news in this one particular space because the hits just keep on coming when it comes to all the backdoor attacks on Medicaid that this administration continues to lob because they failed to dismantle it through legislation last year, but I think in this case what I’m sensing the way that this decision was handed down and some of the news reporting, the news reporting that’s not a phrase.

SLEVIN: Quoting in the news.

VALLAS: Thank you for that, for throwing me a bone at my low brain function moment in this week. But I think one of the things that’s been reported is that there appears to be ongoing consideration by the administration of doing this. So it’s not like they said yo, we are totally sure we’re never going to do this, they just rejected Kansas’s permission slip basically to do this and that was a surprise but there’s ongoing conversations about whether they do want to try and do this in some states and if there’s a way to do it.

SLEVIN: There’s also a question whether it’s currently legal which I think they’re grappling with and we were speculating a little bit before who in the Trump administration was like whoa, whoa whoa. After all the things they’ve done this is a bridge too far because lifetime limits are pretty, pretty extreme, people need to access healthcare.

VALLAS: Some legal advocates are saying and they’ve said for a long time that work requirements in Medicaid, so taking away Medicaid from someone who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job, we’ve discussed this topic substantially on this show, that is something that legal advocates also say violates the statute. But legal advocates are also saying and yes that’s a bridge too far but if that’s a bridge too far this like ten bridges too far because lifetime limits so clearly —

SLEVIN: This is like a super highway too far.

VALLAS: A super highway too far because lifetime limits so clearly violate the law. So maybe that’s something that the administration is grappling with and trying to figure out.

SLEVIN: Maybe they’re grappling with the law.

VALLAS: Would be the first time. So ok, so maybe some good news to see there at least for the mean time but we’ve got vigilance I think continuing to be the name of the game when this, when Medicaid is the thing we’re talking about. So keep us going through the things we missed this week, Jeremy.

SLEVIN: So some new news on the, new news that’s worse than news reporters.

VALLAS: We’ve got to start a drinking game with this, the number of things we’re saying that aren’t things is high here.

SLEVIN: So there were some accidental I think the saying is a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth and that happened this week on the tax law.

VALLAS: And boy did it happen.

SLEVIN: Both Marco Rubio and Tom Price the former head of HHS, Health and Human Services, both admitted to deep flaws in the tax bill that our colleagues Seth Hanlon helpfully compiled so I’ll walk through them here. First of all, Tom Price, this is Tom Price who resigned in disgrace after controversy over his first class plane tickets I believe, said the tax bill’s repeal of the individual mandate from the health care law which is part of the tax bill, he’s not a big fan. He says it will harm the pool in the exchange markets and drive up costs. This is the man, by the way, who was put in charge of trying the repeal the full health care law including the individual mandate and now that he’s out speaking in front of the world congress, now he’s admitting that this policy is a disaster for health care, something that non-partisan experts said at the time it would cause costs to skyrocket and indirectly cause people, millions of people to lose their health care. Now Tom Price has the gall to say yeah, it will drive up costs and hurts the insurance markets.

VALLAS: So accidental truth telling by Tom Price but also part of what’s amazing about this, it’s like he was only in a position to tell the truth once he was out of the administration.

SLEVIN: Exactly.

VALLAS: When he was in, he had to deny that the sky was blue and deny that I don’t know, I literally am out of things to say that —

SLEVIN: That are not true.

VALLAS: Deny that the pope is Catholic, help me out Jeremy here.

SLEVIN: Grass is green.

VALLAS: Thank you.

SLEVIN: Roses are red.

VALLAS: That this show is awesome because we’re clearing really good at the speaking of the things.

SLEVIN: True things that exist.

VALLAS: But he literally in office, in that position had both hands tied behind his back and was not in a position where he could even admit basic facts.

SLEVIN: Or did he?

VALLAS: Is what it appears to be and he’s on the other side now and is making observations that are consistent with facts.

SLEVIN: Right.

VALLAS: That clearly we all knew all along and everyone in the administration knew all along.

SLEVIN: I’m actually shocked that Tom Price, I did some quick googling, he has not yet as far as I know accepted his lobbying gig. I’m sure he’s still mulling over the offers and trying to sound reasonable in speeches while he mulls over those offers. But I think part of that is the nature of this sick political game. Now that he’s in private life and trying to appeal to K street again or trying to give public speeches he has to sound somewhat reasonable is my totally baseless but somewhat, knowing Tom Price, speculation that he can’t just make up stuff.

VALLAS: He has to have credibility and to have credibility even in this environment, you have to —

SLEVIN: And insurance companies know that it’s going to drive up prices. Pharmaceutical companies, like anyone who works in health care or anything related knows the effect of removing the individual mandate, it’s basic A leads to B.

VALLAS: So the good Doctor Price was not the only person to tell the truth this week in a surprising turn of events when it comes to talking taxes. Who else was on the gaffe list?

SLEVIN: So here is what Marco Rubio told The Economist magazine this week. Quote, “There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers. In fact, they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.” Like this could have come out of Americans for Tax Fairness’s talking points.

VALLAS: It does make me wonder if he got hacked briefly.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: His mainframe started to malfunction just like it did in the Republican debate.

VALLAS: Yeah and then he reached for some water with a shaking hand and he put the water to his lips and all the sudden he stopped talking about taxes and why —

SLEVIN: — was hacking into the Marco Rubio mainframe.

VALLAS: I mean it does raise questions. But OK, again, telling truth but in this case Rubio’s still in office, right, so what’s going on here?

SLEVIN: Right and voted for the tax law.

VALLAS: Right.

SLEVIN: So what Rubio was referring to was his proposal to double the Child Tax Credit, to expand the Child Tax Credit, something which we have talked about and advocated for for a while which is a good policy. And he’s basically saying that yeah, the bill, just the corporate tax cuts don’t help working families. So this is basically, he is genuinely agreeing with us. Now, he voted for the tax bill so he’s a complete hypocrite and that shouldn’t be forgotten and if he really cared about working class and middle class families and making sure they actually got relief, he could have held out. He had leverage on the tax bill, it’s cold comfort. It’s much like Bob Corker who after he voted for the tax bill said it was the worst vote he’s taken in his life. It’s like well then don’t vote for it, it was a month ago, what are you a different —

VALLAS: I can’t even get into Bob Corker because my brain is going to overheat and I might start to sound like Marco Rubio being hacked into. But I think what’s so craven and cynical about all of this, there’s many things but is the predictability of this. So we’ve got Rubio who all of a sudden, funny what time of year it is, oh we’re headed into the midterms and he is suddenly aware that this bill, excuse me I always call it a bill because of wishful thinking, this law is in the toilet back in the toilet when it comes to popularity despite the Koch brothers pouring million upon millions of dollars into ads trying to boost its popularity. People are realizing what it’s actually doing, who it’s actually helping, who it’s not helping, who’s getting the crumbs that Paul Ryan is telling them that they should be grateful and we’re going to start to see, I think we always knew people who voted for it start to try to distance themselves in ways that restore their image for their voters.

SLEVIN: And I think another important piece of context that I left out is that this interview was part of Rubio’s unveiling of a new quote, ‘reform conservative agenda’. So it’s clearly Rubio positioning himself for some sort of higher office bid and I would not be surprised if it’s him positioning himself for 2020, if not 2024 so I think it’s part of, exactly as you said, Rubio trying to sound like the reasonable person in the room who cares about working class and poor families even though he voted for the tax law.

VALLAS: And a quick shoutout to Seth Hanlon who did a fabulous twitter thread pulling together a bunch of the times that we’ve seen Republicans accidently or maybe not accidentally but strategically and cravenly and cynically tell the truth when it comes to what this tax law does and what it doesn’t do. Check out our nerdy syllabus page for a link to that tweet thread. But Jeremy, that’s not the only thing going on this week when it comes to taxes, there’s also, Will what are you doing? Why are you distracting Jeremy when I’m trying to get him to focus on the news of the week. Will is making all kinds of hand signals.

SLEVIN: Does that mean we have four minutes left?

VALLAS: I feel like he’s stealing signs from the Nationals and that’s what’s happening. You wouldn’t get that though because you don’t watch sportsball do you Jeremy?

SLEVIN: Sportsball, I didn’t know that’s a new sport.

VALLAS: It’s not.

SLEVIN: OK. [LAUGHTER] Are we still talking about taxes?

VALLAS: I hope so. I don’t know that you know enough about sports to talk about anything that’s not taxes.

SLEVIN: Please, anything, more taxes.

VALLAS: So more taxes.

SLEVIN: So as many of our listeners know, the house is considering a new farm bill which drastically cuts food assistance for millions of families. By one estimate, two million people would lose SNAP under the, SNAP which is the nutrition assistance program. Under this farm bill, so our dear colleagues at CAP, we actually have a couple products looking at how the tax bill could help fund nutrition assistance. And it turns out the tax cuts for the one percent in the tax bill alone cost more than the entire Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

VALLAS: We have to pause there and just that sink in, right, the entire Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which helps about 40 million families in any given, or excuse me 40 million individuals in any given month put food on the table. That’s what we’re talking about here, the scale.

SLEVIN: Yes. That’s just the top one percent. And so if you did take the money the tax cuts for the top one percent, it could feed 57 million people, which is more than all of the people who get food stamps in the country. And our great colleagues Galen Hendricks and Alex Rowell broke that out by every state. In almost every single state in the country, I’m looking at it now, the tax cut for the one percent exceeds the funding for SNAP in that state.

VALLAS: So we talk often on this show about priorities and where we see evidence of where policymakers’ priorities are but it really doesn’t get much more stark in terms of contrasts than what you just laid out. But that’s not the only analysis that happened this week to do with taxes and food stamps.

SLEVIN: Right, we went a step further our brilliant colleagues Melissa Boteach and Rachel West took the actual tax cuts that members themselves are getting, which we had looked into previously and calculated how many meals that could fund through the food stamp program.

VALLAS: These aren’t just tax cuts that individual members of congress, I’m sorry to belabor the point and since we just name dropped Seth Hanlon he would be very upset if we didn’t say the following which is that these aren’t just tax cuts that just fell out of the sky to enrich these members of congress, these are of course, tax cuts that they designed on purpose to enrich themselves.

SLEVIN: Right, this is a loophole that benefits so called ‘pass through businesses’ that was tweaked at the last minute to be more generous to certain members of congress.

VALLAS: But I interrupted you because that’s what I do.

SLEVIN: So the tax cuts that lawmakers themselves gave themselves for that provision, could fund ten million meals.

VALLAS: Through SNAP.

SLEVIN: Through SNAP, through SNAP.

VALLAS: Just that one provision.

SLEVIN: Just that one provision of the 40 or so members, we have the tax cuts for. So example, Trey Hollingsworth from Indiana’s 9th district, he gave himself a $4.5 million dollar tax cut through his pass through business that could pay for 3.2 million meals in his district. So overall they gave themselves $14 million in tax cuts and they could fund about 10 million meals.

VALLAS: And that’s something I hope members of congress are thinking about in the coming weeks as they continue to debate and potential take to the floor a farm bill in the house that would cause one to two million Americans to lose food assistance and many, many more to see reductions in already incredibly meager nutrition assistance. We’re talking about a program that provides $1.40 per person, per meal, not something folks are living high on the hog on but which is already incredibly inadequate because you can’t really live on $1.40 per person per meal. That’s not quite enough to actually keep you going through the month. So Jeremy, thank you for not missing anything while you were out with the plague.

SLEVIN: I covered it all, it was all good news.

VALLAS: Apparently and bizarrely —

SLEVIN: It’s what got me out of the plague

VALLAS: I would hold you to greater accountability if you weren’t on the mend and I’m sure there are bad news pieces that you’ve missed this week but don’t go away, next up a look inside the affordable housing crisis and the eviction epidemic.

[MUSIC]

Those were the voices of Rachel Robinson and Daisy Franklin, two housing activists who recently attended the low income housing coalition’s National Conference in Washington, D.C. Last week Ben Carson, President Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development unveiled a proposal to triple rents for the poorest families and take housing assistance away from unemployed and underemployed workers. This announcement comes amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis. In no state in the United States can a minimum wage worker earning $7.25 [an hour] afford even a one bedroom apartment at market rent. Meanwhile, just one in five eligible low income families are lucky enough to receive help from the nation’s already massively underfunded housing assistance programs leaving others paying 50%, 60%, 70% or even more of their incomes on rent while they languish on years, sometimes decades long waitlists waiting for assistance. Many end up facing eviction. I should note Ben Carson’s proposal which in keeping with the Trump administration’s ever Orwellian talking points, he claims is about promoting self-sufficiency requires legislation that congress would need to pass before it can take effect.

But this week on Off Kilter to help Ben Carson and the rest of us get up to speed on the reality of the affordable housing crisis in this country which Ben Carson’s proposal would put on steroids, I speak with two people working to fight eviction in very different ways. A new data set produced by Matthew Desmond and his team at the Eviction Lab revealed that Richmond is a hotspot for evictions, ranking second in the country with one in nine Richmond households facing eviction in 2016 so I talk with Pat Levy-Lavelle, an attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Richmond, Virginia who represents low income families facing eviction. Pat, thanks so much for joining the show. So just to kick things off, we’re talking about the affordable housing crisis, we’re talking about the eviction epidemic, what is the relationship between the affordable housing crisis and evictions?

PAT LEVY-LAVELLE: Sure, well it’s not totally intuitive but the idea of a connection between those two things is that when there’s a shortage of affordable housing the price of any given rental housing unit on the market due to laws of supply and demand tend to go up and when folks are forced to stretch financially to have a roof over their heads they’re then at greater risk of falling behind and when they fall behind, of course, they are at least of greater risk of being evicted. Moreover, when there’s more competition for any given housing unit and the landlord knows that other tenants in the wings and available, they may be quicker to decide to go ahead and pull the plug with somebody and get them out for eviction rather than trying to work with them.

VALLAS: A new data set that we’ve been talking a little bit about already that was produced by Matthew Desmond and his team at the eviction lab revealed that Richmond is a hot spot for evictions, it ranks second nationwide with one in nine Richmond households facing eviction in 2016. What is making Richmond such a hot spot for evictions?

LEVY-LAVELLE: I think several factors go into that and there’s certainly more unpacking that I and fellow advocates need to do in the days ahead but we have some idea about what’s happening. One is that Virginia law itself is very landlord friendly. It’s fairly easy and fairly inexpensive to start unlawful detainer actions against tenants and an unlawful detainer is the legal-ese that is essentially an eviction action. And there are certain basic landlord tenant protections that tenants have in some other states like being able to withhold rent for bad housing conditions that simply don’t exist in Virginia and can get tenants in trouble. Another thing that goes into the eviction crisis in Virginia and Richmond specifically is that there’s an affordable housing crisis here in Richmond. In March 2015 the national low income housing coalition published a study showing that actually Richmond was number one in the country among metropolitan areas in the increase in the shortage of affordable housing units. And as I mentioned earlier when folks are forced out of the necessity of the market to stretch farther to get a roof over their heads, they’re certainly at risk for eviction.

Certainly moreover, in the sales market and a derivative of that in the rental market, gentrification is certainly happening in certain areas of Richmond like Church Hill, neighborhoods that were once affordable aren’t affordable anymore and that can certainly have an impact on rental housing markets. At the same time we’ve got the federal government receding from it’s own commitment, historic commitments to affordable housing so agencies like the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority no longer have access to money to build new housing units, or even to fully maintain the existing ones and so as a result of that they’re looking to reduce their stock of affordable housing that they own and managing by for example, demolishing some of those units or selling them off. Moreover, in Richmond, one of the poorest areas in Virginia with low wages and high rates of poverty, and then I think an important piece of the puzzle is one thing that can make a difference jurisdiction to jurisdiction is the policies and practices of individual landlords. What I mean by that for example is the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority based on a recent analysis by The Richmond Times-Dispatch found actually that they were one of the landlords in the state that most went to eviction as a recourse for disputes with tenants whereas by contrast, for example Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority adopted an anti-eviction policy in 2015 that emphasis working with tenants rather than going through the eviction process and resulted in an estimated 91% reduction in evictions.

VALLAS: I want to get back to that in just a minute because I certainly don’t want to only talk about the problem, I want to talk about solutions as well and to think and hear about what’s actually working at not just the state level but also the local level but before we get there, backing up just a little bit for folks who haven’t experienced eviction walk us through, what is the eviction process like if you’re an individual who’s struggling to pay your rent and you end up on the ropes.

LEVY-LAVELLE: Sure well the eviction process in Virginia unfortunately is somewhat complicated and for the average person on the ground facing hard times and trying to figure out what to do, it’s filled with legal-ese and uncertainty and essentially a lack of understandable information. Let’s talk about, for example, an alleged unpaid rent situation, which is a fairly typical fact pattern that can lead to eviction. The first step in the process would be for the landlord to deliver to the tenant what’s called a pay or quit notice. And a pay or quit notice has a bunch of information on it and it’s not always clearly described in clear and plain English but essentially what the pay or quit notice is intended to do is tell the tenant that they have a certain amount of time to pay the charges that are listed on the pay or quit notice or the landlord could take them to court. Now maybe because they’re written by attorneys, maybe because they’re trying to comply with state law, that very simple message often becomes several paragraphs with lots of imposing language and language that is not clear.

But if the tenant doesn’t pay the amount of the bill within a certain period of time which in Virginia is typically 5 days, the landlord can then take the next step which is to file a piece of court paperwork called a summons for unlawful detainer, another legalistic term that essentially means eviction court case. That piece of paperwork is delivered either into the tenants hand or a member of the tenants household or otherwise posted on the tenants door and mailed to the tenant, it’s a court form that has a lot of information on it but one of the most important pieces is that it lists the first date and time that the tenant is supposed to show up in court. Now again, I mentioned that’s a very complicated form that has a lot of information on it and a lot of tenants when they see that don’t know what to do, what to think or maybe they think my gosh, I owe some amount of money, the rest is history but the fact is that there are often things that are or can be done in the eviction process.

And one of the most important things is for tenants to show up at that return date which is a madhouse especially in some of the bigger urban Virginia jurisdictions where one judge will find within a very limited period of time to triage potentially dozens if not as many as a couple hundred cases very briefly by a docket, calling person after person, many of whom aren’t showing up either because they’re intimidated or scared or they think the conclusion of the case is a certainty that they’ll lose and again the judge is trying to triage all these cases and figure out what to do with them. The judges are often asking the rent cases, for example, simply if the tenant owes the landlord money as opposed to going through a more extensive series of questions that would reveal potential deficiencies with the landlords case and then if the tenant puts up a credible short explanation as to why there is some sort of meaningful dispute, those cases are typically set for trial on a different day where the tenant is expected to return, the landlord is expected to return and the trial itself happens.

The trials themselves are fairly typically fairly short, fairly rough with limited procedures and as a result at the conclusion of the trial a judge will almost always make a decision from the bench then and there as to whether the tenant gets to stay or go, whether the tenant owes money or doesn’t owe money and who wins the case. If the landlord wins the case then a typical part of the judgment is a judgment for possession. That’s distinguished from the piece of a case that might involve money but a judgment for possession, again is another legalistic term that essentially means the landlord has the right to evict somebody. The landlord typically has to wait several days before filing another legalistic piece of paperwork called a request for right of possession, essentially that means them triggering the process to actually get somebody out. And that is delivered to the sheriff and then from the sheriff to the tenant listing an actual date and time for eviction at least 72 hours after the notice is granted and over to the tenant and then at that date and time there’ll be someone from the sheriff’s office actually there, typically with somebody from the landlord’s office and the locks are being changed the person is being told to leave if they’re still there. And property may remain in it for a limited period before being removed by the tenant or otherwise moved to the curb or put in a storage unit.

There’s definitely several steps in the process but for folks who don’t know this and for folks who are on the ground facing hard times it’s complicated, it’s messy, there’s a lot of uncertainty and it’s intimidating.

VALLAS: And you’re describing a really complicated process with lots of forms, lots of legalese, something that landlords who maybe have gone through this a number of times because of the volume of folks that they provide housing to and collect rent from. They might be really accustomed to it whereas someone who is going through this process on the other side as a tenant might be incredibly confused and lost navigating this process. You’re a lawyer who helps people understand this, helps them enforce their rights and represents people in these cases among other types of cases that you work on at legal aid in Virginia. But a lot of folks going through this process don’t end up having lawyers because they don’t actually have a right to a lawyer because these are civil cases.

LEVY-LAVELLE: That’s right. Folks across the country are talking about how significant eviction cases are to individual tenants and their families trying to keep a roof over their head. There was a Supreme Court case from many years ago that said in certain types of criminal proceeding, in a case called Gideon that folks did have a right to court appointed attorneys but that right doesn’t exist again, almost anywhere in the country in civil cases including really, really important ones like eviction cases and when folks don’t have an attorney and they’re left to navigate the process on their own, unless they’ve been through it before or have seen it extensively which is almost no one, they’re left really to try to figure out as they simultaneously deal with the onus and feel of losing their housing.

VALLAS: So you described in great detail what the eviction process can be like and I should note, what you described when it comes to a lot of the different legal pieces is specific to Virginia and is different in lots of different states, there can be lots of different variations on the theme you describe but the overall architecture you described I think gives folks a sense of what this actually looks like on the ground but what happens after a person gets evicted?

LEVY-LAVELLE: Sure, well every situation is different but a lot of folks that we see don’t necessarily have another good place to go. Some folks will have family members or friends with whom they can move into on a temporary basis but other folks are essentially looking for emergency shelter that’s provided by maybe a locality or group, most folks don’t literally end up on the streets but a lot of folks are left in the margins without good options. And that obviously creates problems not only for those families but for localities that are having to spend money on emergency housing and for school districts that are forced to pay more moneys to work with families that are experiencing homelessness or housing instability. It’s a problem for landlords who are trying to turn over units and moving money in the process of doing that, which is something that’s maybe not talked about enough. And it’s certainly a problem for those families themselves.

Whether it’s potentially losses from work and job loss, whether it’s their kids missing days from school or having to switch schools, whether it’s them potentially losing housing or having a harder time keeping up with medical assignments or even just the reality of an eviction judgment on their credit report and that being essentially a mark against them when they’re applying for other housing and trying to find another place to go.

VALLAS: And that’s one of the things that I think was probably least well understood, certainly before Matthew Desmond’s book “Evicted” shown a light on the fact that eviction is not just a consequence of poverty but that it’s actually a cause of poverty because of some of the long lasting consequences that can stem for having a scarlet ‘A’ on your chest from having been evicted.

LEVY-LAVELLE: That’s right, that’s right I don’t think folks talk enough about the problem, the ripple that comes out of an eviction. I think a lot of people think of evictions as sort of a truism that happens automatically when somebody falls behind in rent or there’s some sort of problem and they really don’t have to be that way. There’s things that can be done before evictions happen and there’s reasons why all parties should be interesting in seeking to reduce this epidemic because it hurts all parties including landlords.

VALLAS: So getting back to what you were bringing up earlier, when it comes to alternatives to this eviction machine that’s chewing people up and spitting them out and leaving them with these eviction records that can make it harder for them to find housing down the road while also gumming up the works for the courts, for the housing supply component of the situation. What model, tell us more about the model before you were describing that has actually managed to drastically reduce the eviction rate.

LEVY-LAVELLE: Sure, well there’s different models happening different places in the country. One thing that some of my colleagues worked on, the Public Housing Residence Association and Public Housing Authority in Charlottesville several years back was looking at the problem of evictions there and think how there could be a win win solution to reduce evictions. And the housing authority there had extensive consultations with the residents, with community allies and activists and attorneys at Legal Aid Justice Center and organizers at Legal Aid Justice Center and what they came up with was a new eviction policy that went into effect in early 2015 that essentially had four main pieces to it. One was that there was some sort of dispute that would traditionally lead to an eviction case being filed, the housing authority would instead first offer a one on one meeting with the tenant to have an opportunity to come in and talk with housing authority staff about the concern and figuring out whether there are ways to work with. The second piece was that when the dispute was essentially just about money or allegedly unpaid money the housing authority would offer repayment plans to try to get people back on their feet rather than moving ahead with the eviction process. The third piece was that there was a focus from reforming the lease termination notice so it was a clear common sense explanation about what tenants could do to resolve the problem in the situations where that was possible. And then the fourth thing, again focusing on unpaid money cases, the housing authority set a threshold of $50 basically a minimum threshold so amounts less than that wouldn’t lead to an eviction case being filed. In [INAUDIBLE] they had already started to implement that policy, in the period of 2011 through 2014 and over that time period the staff showed that evictions by the housing authority decreased by 91% which is of course just a seismic change that helps the housing authority by reducing it’s turnover costs and increasing its rent. And in fact those stats did happen and it also benefitted a lot of tenants by not putting them through the process and by keeping a roof over their heads.

VALLAS: In the last minute or so that I have with you if folks are listening right now and they’re themselves on the edge facing housing precarity, perhaps even being threatened with eviction what should folks know about what their rights are and where they can go for help?

LEVY-LAVELLE: Sure, I would start by saying that each state’s laws regarding eviction are different and so it’s important to know what the laws are where they live. When I say ‘know what the laws are’ every legal system as a certain degree of complexity and there’s certain wrinkles in the law so I don’t mean to suggest that folks should try to figure out the law on their own and represent themselves. If at all possible, there’s allies and activists and advocates across the country, legal aid organizations, tenant community groups, local non-profit housing providers and non-attorney housing advocates and sometimes cities or counties who themselves have informational programs for tenants. And so folks as early as possible when they think that there is or there might be a dispute with their landlord, it’s always good to talk with somebody who knows the lay of the land. Because tenants going through this process typically as you mentioned have a lot less knowledge and information about the process than landlords and certainly seeking help early is the best opportunity to try to keep your housing and when folks contact us, for example, early they stand a much better chance of keeping roofs over their head than if they contact us at the last minute.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Pat Levy-Lavelle, he’s an attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Richmond, Virginia who represents low income families facing eviction and other types of civil matters. Pat, thank you so much for taking the time to join the show.

LEVY-LAVELLE: Great, thanks for having me.

VALLAS: Next up, to continue the conversation on the affordable housing crisis and the eviction epidemic, I’m joined by Sarah Leavitt, the curator of the “Evicted” exhibit currently underway at the National Building Museum. The exhibit is based on Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book by the same name and showcases the faces and stories of people who have faced eviction in communities across the U.S. Sarah Leavitt, thanks so much for joining the show.

SARAH LEAVITT: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: Just to kick it off, what’s the story behind how this book became an exhibit at the National Building Museum?

LEAVITT: Well, I actually picked up Matt Desmond’s book at the bookstore a couple years ago, I actually I’m from Wisconsin, I noticed it was about Milwaukee, that’s what caught my eye so it was just a little bit random that I picked it up but it really, I don’t know, I just like to say it changed the way that I was thinking about home in such a profound way. I have in my career been writing about home and thinking about home, the ideology of home, wrote a whole book about domestic fantasy, about the history of domesticity, I’ve been thinking so much about home and I hadn’t really addressed at all the idea of what home means when it’s ripped away. And I certainly hadn’t dealt with low income renter eviction at all in any of my work. And I really felt that I needed to do something after reading the book. I think a lot of people feel that after they read that book. You put it down but you can’t put it down. It stays with you in a way. So I’d read the book and I was just in my house giving myself some space, I don’t know if grief is the right word but just that kind of a terror after reading such a thing and then I remembered I work at a museum. We talked about the book’s environment, we talk about the impact on housing on people’s lives, these are issues that we deal with everyday at the Building Museum and maybe I did have the opportunity to try to tell the story to a different kind of audience. So I reached out the Desmond on his website and he called me back within the hour and we started talking about what an exhibition would look like.

VALLAS: So for folks who haven’t seen the exhibit, if you’re in DC if you’re in the DC area, if you’re not but maybe you’re coming here, it is absolutely worth going and seeing. You can find more information on the nerdy syllabus page for Off Kilter about how you can go and how long it’s running. For folks who haven’t seen it and as they’re listening to this conversation need a little bit more to get a sense of what it looks like, what it feels like, what did you end up doing to help capture a book and make it into a museum exhibit?

LEAVITT: Well, yeah that was quite a process and we had a wonderful creative team that we worked with and we had an architecture and design firm MATTER Architecture Practice out of New York, in Brooklyn and then a radio producer we worked with to do some of the sound pieces, the audio pieces. We really thought about first, how do you do an exhibition when you’re not looking at objects or primary documents, there’s nothing in a case, there’s nothing valuable or precious really but you want to evoke a feeling, we want people to come into the show, we do it when we start thinking about a show is what do we want the visitor to learn, what’s the big idea, but then also how do you want them to feel as they walk through the exhibition.

And our designers had some really neat ideas about how to look at, how to build a couple structures that would be like home but there’s something wrong with them. One of the designers ended up choosing the word ‘uncanny’, this uncanny vista of the house. So what you’re seeing is structures but they’re not right. The wallpaper, for example is on the outside, the electrical outlets, there are hooks, there are other things that are on the outside of the walls instead of inside and so you see right away there’s something uncomfortable about it. There’s something about it being home but not home, it’s not working as a home should. So as you walk through the show you get that feeling of a little discomfort, a little alteration in how you’re seeing what’s happening in front of you. And we used common household objects to stand in for the graphics in some of the, to convey some of the information. So for example, we have a map right when you come in showing eviction filings, the numbers of eviction filings from 2016, that’s all based on Desmond and his colleagues have put together a brand new database that just came out a couple weeks ago in April of 2018 and so it’s pretty new data and we wanted to share but instead of just presenting here’s the numbers, what we did was use moving boxes in various sizes to portray the various numbers of eviction filings in every state. So it’s more evictions per state, the larger the moving box.

When you think about a moving box, it’s just an inert thing, there’s nothing happy or sad about it, it’s just a box. But it carries a lot of weight, the idea of a moving box, especially if you’re moving not because of your choice, forced displacement, a moving box kind of carries a different ideology to it. We also used house keys. If you think about the symbol of a house key as being something sacred, something that is demonstrating the protectiveness of the house gives you, but we used the house keys instead to show an ugly statistic about eviction rates by race in Milwaukee, one of Desmond’s studies. So we use a couple of other examples like doorknobs and other things to get that across that these are common household objects but they’re being used in the wrong way.

VALLAS: You also made some really intentional choices, not just on what you were displaying and how you were displaying it but in some cases how much you even spent on components of the exhibit and you were trying to make some points with some of those prices tags.

LEAVITT: Yeah, absolutely. We used the more readily available materials, for example, the wallpaper that I mentioned that’s on the outside of the houses is just off the shelf from Home Depot, same with a lot of the other materials, the structures themselves, they’re built with a fairly affordable cheap material including the homasote, I think it’s less than $600 of homasote that was purchased at Home Depot. So to try to make that point, that it seemed that the exhibition was calling for when you’re talking about people losing their homes.

VALLAS: One of the things that you talk about in discussing the work that you do and the importance of it but also some of the challenges of it is it can be really hard to build an exhibit around an idea rather than around an object or multiple objects. Say a little bit more about what you mean by that.

LEAVITT: Yeah well usually in my curatorial practice you have a series of objects that are going to help tell your story and you help put them in a case and wear white gloves when you touch them. Actually I’m not usually allowed to touch them. [LAUGHTER] And those can help visitors make connections with the story that you’re telling as you move through time. And in this show we didn’t have that opportunity. We do have some of the only objects that are in the show at all are some household belongings that are on a palette and then shrink wrapped as if they’re being put in storage. Those are actually household belongings that will be donated back to a local charity, a Wider Circl that gives things to people who are finding new homes for the first time and have lost all of their stuff. So that is I guess you could consider that an object but it’s not on loan from a museum or anything like that. So our task was really to make people feel something, learn something, see something, experience something without having those touchstones of historical objects that we usually would work with.

VALLAS: I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about why you think that museums and art more broader have a role in social justice work.

LEAVITT: Yeah, that’s something I have been coming to more and more. I certainly my whole life I’ve spent a lot of time in museums, as a little kid my parents took me to museums all the time and I certainly always believed that museums had the power to take you to a different place to teach you something that you didn’t know before to tell you these stories that you wouldn’t have access to but I think it’s been a little more recent that I’ve been thinking about museums and their role in social justice movements and just looking this week with the opening of the lynching memorial in Montgomery, unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to get down there yet but I hope to very soon. I think a lot of designers and museum people are thinking a little bit more broadly about how important and vital the role of the museum can be, because we reach schoolchildren because we have new generations in, old generations in our spaces together who can have conversations. I think it’s really exciting to see places like the Baltimore Museum of Art I believe that is looking into selling some of their, decommissioning some of their art, white men art and looking to purchase art from people of color and that’s going to come from museums that have that role in the marketplace and then can change the way that we understand the world that we live in. because if all we ever see are stories about good design in our case, or good celebratory history in the case of other places in our museum as well, you’re missing out on an opportunity to help change the way people think about our place in the world, I think.

VALLAS: How is the exhibit being received by people, not just critics, not just reporters who are writing about it and covering it but by people who are experiencing it and moving through it. I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on what people are taking away from this exhibit.

LEAVITT: I actually had a pretty incredible experience yesterday. I had the opportunity to take through a group of low income tenant activists from New York City who came down on a bus from New York yesterday just to see the exhibit and just to talk about how they have spent the last three years in the battle for the right to council in New York, the idea being that in housing court, in landlord tenant court most tenants don’t have representation. We don’t have a right to representation in civil cases as we do in criminal cases. Anyway, so they have worked for three years to finally pass that law which is now the only city, although Newark, New Jersey is fast on the tails to have that law. And they came to the show yesterday and I didn’t know how that would go. These are people who have literally spent years of their life working in this space and they have a lot of them if not all of them have experienced eviction themselves in their own lives or in people that they’re close to. I have never been more moved by watching people walk through an exhibition in my 30 years working in museums. It was pretty overwhelming, they came out and talked to me about their thoughts about the exhibition afterwards, we had the opportunity to talk with them and most of them couldn’t even talk about what they had just see without crying. And then once they could talk about it they were saying things like this made me want to fight harder. These are people, again, who have really dedicated their lives to this and just the idea that we could inspire them is almost a little overwhelming. I think we have a lot of people, well we certainly have a lot of people visit the show that have never been to the museum before, a lot of housing advocates, a lot of advocates for homelessness, in DC, it’s been very moving I guess is the only word to watch them see themselves and their work in the museum for the first time and really think about who they want to bring, that’s what a lot of people have said, oh I’m going to bring everybody, I’ve going to bring everybody I know, I’m going to bring everybody in my office, a lot of lawyers come through the DC Pro-bono Law Center that helps law firms in town work with low income tenants and talking to them about bringing their colleagues, their summer associates all these people who work in the space and I think it’s really gratifying.

VALLAS: Have there been people coming through who maybe don’t already know so much about the issue and that you find are learning for the first time about the human consequences of the housing crisis?

LEAVITT: Yes, definitely and those are, that’s a really important audience for me too of course and in a way those are the people that I had in my mind while I was creating the exhibition are people who maybe are our more regular visitors who don’t know how pervasive this problem is. And most of those people who I’ve talked to as they’re down there, they just keep saying, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. I haven’t seen this before, I didn’t know. And I feel like that’s why we’re hear. That’s great, a lot of people have talk about either seeing evicted people’s belongings on the street, a lot of people will say things like even in my neighborhood, heard that a lot and relaying stories about the way even for middle or upper income folks that earlier parts of their life, when they were living a little more close rent check to rent check this was something that was looming but as they see the folks in our show they realize they had a different kind of safety net than a lot of people have.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Sarah Leavitt, she’s the curator of the “Evicted” exhibit, currently underway at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. If you haven’t caught the exhibit yet, don’t worry you have plenty of time, it runs at the National Building Museum through May 19, 2019. More information about the exhibit and how you can find it and what you can do to virtual experience it if you’re not able to make your way there is on our nerdy syllabus page on Medium. Sarah, thanks so much for this work and for taking the time to come on the show.

LEAVITT: Thanks so much for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.