The end came in a note taped to Cherrie Hakim’s door.
It may not be her door for much longer.
Hakim has lived in the southeast Kansas City home with her husband, a Korean War veteran, for the past 19 months. The foundation leaks, so much so that family photos stored in the basement have been destroyed from water damage and black mold has laid claim to surfaces.
Still, behind that door is a home. It’s where Hakim and her husband are helping to raise their three grandchildren.
Hakim, who has dealt with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for most of her life, spent a month in the hospital this summer. Then she and her husband had to buy a new car because the old one gave out — after they poured $2,000 into it trying to fix a number of issues, including the battery and starter. The setbacks exacerbated the Hakims’ already fragile financial footing.
Bills were piling up, and the couple fell a month and a half behind on rent.
They’d had housing issues before. Their last address had three floors, which was a struggle for her husband, Bilal Hakim, who served in the Marines and had one of his legs amputated. Cherrie Hakim spent much of her time helping him get from floor to floor so they could go to doctor’s appointments.
One of their homes before that caught fire.
When the pandemic hit and Cherrie Hakim’s hours at her part-time job were cut, they applied for protection through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium — which the Supreme Court ended in late August — but her husband’s retirement and Social Security income meant they didn’t qualify.
The notice on her door told Hakim they had 10 days to vacate. Her landlord had given her a first notice two days before. In the months since she came home to that second eviction notice, Hakim has been locked in a legal back and forth with her landlord that will determine her family’s housing future.
Hakim and her husband are among the hundreds of renters in Kansas City and the millions across the country who face eviction daily — the result of systems that often keep those scraping to get by out of safe and affordable housing, which activists regard as a basic right.
For landlords, evictions are often a way to get the most out of and to protect their investments — simply a business decision. Tenants’ rights activists see evictions as acts of violence.
Hakim has been trying to work with her landlord to get back on track, she said. She came up with nearly half of the rent they owed one month and said she asked for more time to catch up. But instead they received an eviction notice.
A crisis escalated by COVID
More than 3.5 million people, or 43% of those surveyed, said they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to be evicted from their home, according to a survey done in August by the Census Bureau.
In Missouri, 93,459 people were likely to be evicted — more than half of those surveyed.
This is not a new phenomenon. Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which has compiled data on evictions as far back as 2000, found that Missouri’s eviction rate — the number of evictions per 100 renter homes — peaked in 2010 at 3.98% compared to 2.95% nationwide after the Great Recession.
The specter of an eviction crisis in Kansas City and across the country has loomed for years.
In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic thrust a bigger strain on those already experiencing financial distress and housing instability, a group of tenants’ rights activists and renters struggling with some of the same issues founded KC Tenants. It’s a diverse multi-generational tenants’ activist group that’s been working to ensure affordable, safe and accessible housing.
The group was the driving force behind the city passing its first-ever tenants bill of rights in December 2019. KC Tenants leaders who championed the resolution and ordinance shared stories of evictions; one woman was forced to choose between paying medical bills and paying her rent — she was evicted.
Landlords at the time saw the bill as potentially damaging to business and creating a hostile environment in which to provide housing.
“I bought a house in Kansas City today. I actually just closed on it,” Robert Long, president of Landlords Inc., said at the time. “And I’ve never been so unexcited to purchase a home in my life.”
Three months later, Kansas City and Jackson County saw their first cases of COVID-19.
The region shut down in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Then, unemployment skyrocketed. By the end of March 2020, thousands had already lost their jobs: 42,207 Missourians filed initial unemployment claims for the week ending March 21, up from 3,976 the previous week and an increase of more than 961%.
The job losses disproportionately affected low-income workers, women and people of color, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Evictions occur for a number of reasons: tenants damaging property, violating the lease or simply falling behind on rent.
Not being able to pay rent is one of the most common reasons for an eviction filing. And with thousands out of work in the state at the beginning of the pandemic, fears of an eviction crisis increased.
Those fears in part led to the 120-day moratorium on evictions that was tied to the CARES Act, passed in March 2020. Research from the Urban Institute estimated the moratorium covered one in four rental units. The act also provided some emergency rental assistance.
In September 2020, the CDC, too, issued an eviction moratorium it hoped would slow the spread of COVID-19, saying in the order that the moratorium facilitates “self-isolation and self-quarantine by people who become ill or who are at risk of transmitting COVID-19.”
The moratoriums seemingly worked, putting in place a barrier to evictions during what was for some the most vulnerable time in their lives. It has its staunch critics, however, who argue it wasn’t enough. It didn’t, for example, prevent debt from accruing.
Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants, recently shared on Twitter the story of a young dad who noticed a “huge negative balance” in his bank account after his wages had been garnished to pay down his more than $12,500 eviction judgment. He’d already been evicted months ago.
One paycheck from disaster
When it comes to determinants leading tenants into a cycle of eviction notices and housing instability, nothing may be worse than not knowing where the next paycheck will come from.
Kirk McClure, professor emeritus of public affairs and administration at the University of Kansas, who has decades of experience in affordable housing, said income certainty has a big impact on someone’s ability to be securely housed. A widely fluctuating income is worse than a steady income at a lower rate, he said.
Gina Chiala, the executive director and staff attorney for the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, said that the majority of tenants are cost-burdened, which, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, refers to those households that spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
The root of the issue, she said, is in the workforce. Companies paying less than a living wage and not providing paid sick days or sustainable working conditions mean “the tenant is always just one mishap away from falling behind on their rent and being evicted.”
In many ways, the battle for sustainable housing is being waged on the front lines of the minimum wage war.
Stand Up KC, a worker advocacy organization, has organized local rallies in the Fight for $15, a labor group unionizing fast-food workers. McDonald’s has said its hourly wages will rise to $15 an hour by 2024.
The federal minimum wage has stayed stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, even as inflation has risen 24% and workers have had to work more hours to afford the same items.
The Kansas City Council has introduced a resolution to increase the minimum wage of all city employees to $15 an hour. Missouri’s minimum wage is $10.30 an hour. By 2023, it’s expected to rise to $12.
Despite increases, however, it’s still hardly enough for a single adult to get by — let alone if someone has children.
According to an MIT Living Wage Calculator, launched by Amy K. Glasmeier in 2004, a single adult in Kansas City would need to make at least $14.40 an hour to get by. That doesn’t account for disposable income for eating out, entertainment, savings or investments. Add one child into the mix, and the number doubles to $30.02. With a second child, it’s $36.64. Even with two adults working full-time and no children, the living wage would be $11.56. Add one child, and it jumps to $16.43 and then $20.25 with two children.
Hakim has seen her hours and income decrease over the years.
Working part-time for a home health care company, she spends about three to four hours during the day taking care of seniors. After helping her husband and grandchildren get their days started, she visits her clients to help them get out of bed, make breakfast and take medications.
Since her hours were cut, the strain of caring for her clients and her family has only increased.
Couple suffering through health issues and job loss now face eviction
Rents skyrocketing
Shanita Williams has lived in her current home with her bubbly 8-year-old daughter for two-and-a-half years.
She tries to keep her daughter sheltered from her own stress: “I don’t want her to experience homelessness.”
She received $8,000 in rental assistance that her landlord has refused to accept, she said, “because he didn’t want me as a tenant.”
She wants to leave her current living situation but has found it challenging to find a new place with the eviction already filed against her. Plus, she’s dealing with the rising cost of housing.
If she doesn’t find a place soon, she’ll have nowhere to go.
“I would literally be living in a tent somewhere in a park. … I would lose my job, because I work from home,” Williams said.
Kansas City, according to a recent report from Apartment Guide, saw rental rates skyrocket through the first full year of the pandemic.
The apartment finder’s April 2021 Rent Report, which was based on March 2021 data, listed Kansas City as having the largest increase in rent of the 100 largest cities in the nation for one-bedroom units. Rates jumped 33.5% since March of last year, according to the report.
The average rent in Kansas City for one-bedroom apartments was $1,435 as of March, according to Apartment Guide’s listings data. The average two-bedroom rate was $1,774.
Those rising rents are a challenge when it comes to finding a new place to live that’s affordable and accessible. Kansas City’s average rent for a one-bedroom is nearly $600 more than Hakim was paying each month for her house.
Brian Carberry, senior managing editor for Apartment Guide, said that in general, cities like Kansas City; Sacramento, California; St. Louis; and Boise, Idaho, are becoming more popular and more in demand for renters.
“As such, we’re seeing prices going up there because of very limited supply,” he told The Star when the April report was released. “Landlords have the ability to price things a little higher because they know there’s a strong rental market.”
Adding to that, the city has seen a good deal of new development, highlighting concerns of gentrification as people with higher incomes move into lower-income neighborhoods and price out their neighbors who have been there for years.
McClure said that a “certain amount of gentrification is a good thing” when it comes to turning around a neighborhood. What is harmful, he said, are corporations from out of state that purchase housing strictly as investments, turning homes into rentals and then selling them for a profit.
A high number of property owners with units in Kansas City live across the state line in Johnson County, Kansas. Those property owners also have the highest eviction rates across the metro.
In Kansas City, there have been 230,000 formal evictions and 350,000 filings since 1990, according to the KC Eviction Project.
What’s eye opening is that housing providers from outside Kansas City proper have caused 63% of the formal evictions during the pandemic, one KC Eviction Project researcher Jordan Ayala — also a researcher with the Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative — found in a separate parcel by parcel analysis. Just over half of rentals are owned by property owners outside of Kansas City.
A third of rentals have owners outside of the state entirely. They account for 53% of pandemic evictions.
“We need to refocus the conversation around these structural issues and we need to be talking about these structural issues,” Ayala said about the underlying causes of evictions.
‘We need to eat, too’
John Collura owns a duplex in the northeast area of Kansas City that helps fund his and his wife’s retirement. He told The Star that one of his tenants who is in his late 60s has had COVID-19 twice, spending almost two months in the hospital. Now on dialysis three times a week, his tenant lost his job as a school cafeteria manager. He got behind on rent payments.
The tenant has lived there for nearly 10 years, Collura said, and has been “as good as you could’ve asked for.” He said he could charge more for the rent but is happy to keep the tenant in place.
They’ve spent weeks trying to connect with the millions of rental assistance dollars meant to help people like his tenant.
“He can’t get anyone in this system that has millions of dollars sitting around to help people like him,” Collura said.
The federal government gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Kansas and Missouri to compensate landlords and to prevent evictions. President Joe Biden’s administration called on states and cities to speed up the distribution of Emergency Rental Assistance.
Last month, the Kansas City Council passed a resolution designed to do just that.
Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the landlord group KC Regional Housing Alliance, previously told The Star that the end of the moratorium meant things were “getting back to normal.” However, most property owners, she said, don’t want to evict tenants — it’s easier to keep them in place.
“We need to eat, too,” Johnson-Cosby said. “If we are not getting our business income that we use to pay our bills and feed our families, we’re in trouble, too.”
Landlords Inc. represents more than 400 housing providers across Kansas City. Most, Long said, are small business landlords living in the area who have really taken a hit during the pandemic, being asked to bear the cost burden of the eviction moratorium.
“It’s not the housing provider’s job to house the citizens for free,” Long said.
He said there are landlords in the metro who’ve gone nearly a year and a half without being paid all their rent while still having to pay property taxes and insurance. As a result, he said, some landlords have sold their properties because they could no longer afford their mortgage.
When landlords leave the market, he said, the domino effect is increased rents.
Lives turned upside-down
Evictions cause “extremely heavy-handed consequences for the tenants,” said Gina Chiala of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom.
A 2018 study of the impact of housing court cases on health, earnings, houselessness, employment and public assistance in New York City published through the New York University School of Law found that evictions result in an increase in the risk of houselessness and living stability, as well as an increase in trips to emergency rooms.
What’s more, once an eviction is on a tenant’s record, it’s difficult for them to find housing again.
Michelle Albano, a supervising attorney on the housing plus team for Legal Aid of Western Missouri, is among those who have been watching the looming eviction crisis for years.
In addition to the issues activists raise concerning the dearth of affordable housing, she said evictions are likely under the microscope now because people are coming to understand how drastically they can negatively affect somebody’s life.
“People’s lives are turned upside-down,” Chiala said. “They sink further into poverty and in a way that’s almost impossible to get out of.”
When an attorney represents a tenant, they usually fight to get an eviction dismissed or reach a settlement to satisfy both parties.
It takes two years, Chiala said, for a tenant to return to where they were in their lives before an eviction. People end up in housing shelters, on the streets, sleeping in cars and doubled up in homes. Kids can drop out of school. It causes mental and physical trauma, she said.
Diane Charity, a leader with KC Tenants who also works with Show Me KC Schools, said it’s been sad talking to people who don’t have a place to enroll their kids in school. Some weren’t sure what district they lived in.
“What we’re experiencing is people who because they’re housing insecure or just don’t have a place to live anymore — where are their children going to go to school, how will that happen when they’ve got to move to grandma’s house, to auntie’s house, to a friend’s house?” Charity said.
Kids are resilient, she added, but why even make them endure that?
Dozens of people spent a few months on the south lawn outside City Hall and on a median in Old Westport earlier this year in a protest designed to call attention to the needs of the houseless community.
The protest eventually led to the city helping a few hundred people stay in Kansas City hotels as part of a city housing initiative.
The Eviction Lab at Princeton found that in 2016, Kansas City ranked as the 65th most evicting city in the country, with 3,776 evictions, equaling 10.35 households every day and 4.19 out of 100 rental homes evicted every year.
Kansas City, Kansas, ranked 31st, with 5.6 in 100 renter homes evicted every year.
“It’s heartbreaking, it really is,” Charity said. “To hear the people that we’re talking to on our hotline not knowing what they’re going to do.”
Another KC Tenants leader, Charity said, applied for rental assistance seven months ago and never heard back. She was evicted and is now staying with friends.
“I might as well ask my cat to help,” Charity said. “And I don’t have a cat.”
Kansas City reopened its portal to apply for rental assistance this month.
What comes next?
KC Tenants has made strides in its push for a People’s Housing Trust Fund. That proposal would give tenants oversight, provide dedicated revenue and add innovative programs to the city’s Housing Trust Fund, which is meant to encourage developers to add affordable housing or rehabilitate current low-income housing.
”We’re just after places where people can live comfortably, safely and affordably,” Charity said.
McClure, the KU professor, said Kansas City doesn’t need to build more housing but instead should help lower-income people afford the city’s current housing stock.
He has recommended expanding the Housing Choice Voucher Program — a subsidy system that helps low-income families secure housing — and redesigning the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program, which gives state and local agencies the equivalent of approximately $8 billion in annual budget authority to issue tax credits for the acquisition, rehabilitation or new construction of rental housing targeted to lower-income households.
Kansas City created the Department of Housing and Community Development to focus on finding solutions for the unhoused, creating affordable housing and supporting tenant advocacy. The city has also created an Unhoused Task Force, whose goal is to develop long-term solutions.
Chiala said the city needs limits on how much rent housing providers can charge as well as subsidized housing programs.
“The eviction crisis is real. It’s not getting better,” Chiala said. “The only thing that’s going to cure it on a long-term basis is tenants organizing and winning affordable housing.”
As far as short-term solutions, Chiala wants tenants to be guaranteed counsel so they can be properly represented in court hearings.
Hakim is working with Legal Aid on her court case, she said.
When they first moved into the home they’re currently renting, their landlord was still in the process of moving out the last tenant, so they helped clean. Then they noticed the issues, which she said their landlord promised would be repaired; that never happened.
“They’re not working with me, but they expect me to keep paying,” Hakim said.
The family has to find something that can meet their needs. But with the increasing rent prices across the city and an eviction on her record, it’s nearly impossible.
Hakim and her husband on Thursday had a court hearing regarding their eviction. According to court records, Hakim’s case will go to a bench trial on Nov. 4. In the meantime, she’s still searching for a new place to live. She wants out.
“It’s just hectic to find a home nowadays,” Hakim said.
