Homeless, Helpless, Hopeless

From the duplex on the west side of town, they cart out an empty bird cage, a rusted exercise bike, a mattress, a dictionary. From the yellow house with green trim emerges a broken dresser and some hangers. The Victorian house with the turret yields a sofa bed, a recliner, a table.

On it goes, all day, every day. One home after another is emptied onto frozen lawns, furniture and flannel shirts piled helter-skelter at the curb. Movers do the heavy lifting. Court bailiffs supervise, then post a notice on the door: “Your property and effects were moved into the street.”

This is the eviction circuit--and it’s busier than ever.

“Evictions reflect the conditions in society as a whole,” Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka likes to say. In other words, as a recession squeezes, people lose their homes.

This recession has begun to squeeze hard.

Record numbers of homeless people are seeking emergency shelter in Boston, New York, Milwaukee and other cities gripped by winter cold. In Cleveland, evictions have surged to an all-time high. In Las Vegas, only charity has kept thousands of laid-off casino workers in their homes. The constable there who handles evictions fears a crush of new cases this month as the handouts dwindle.

In city after city, social workers and tenant advocates report frantic calls from the newly jobless, desperate to get out of leases they no longer can afford. Pleas for food, for help paying utility bills and, above all, for shelter are soaring. The Catholic Charities basic-needs hotline here logged 82% more calls in 2001 than the year before. Nearly three-quarters were from people with housing emergencies--some of them still employed.

“We are going to see some people who never dreamed of being homeless, homeless or living in their cars. Or desperate,” said J. Thomas Mullen, president of Catholic Charities for the Cleveland diocese.

Mary Etchison is one. She’s 51 and single, lives alone and, for the last five years, has cleaned rooms in a downtown Cleveland hotel. She’d worked her way up to earning $8 an hour, plus benefits. She was in control. Then came Sept. 11. The hotel’s business collapsed. Etchison was laid off.

She hopes to get unemployment benefits. But the bureaucracy has been maddeningly slow. To buy groceries, she has sold her belongings, everything she can spare. The video “Wild Wild West” brought in $3 the other day, enough for a few meals of macaroni and cheese. Not enough, however, to pay her rent, $115 due every two weeks.

So Etchison stood before Magistrate Ruben E. Pope III one recent morning in the Cleveland Justice Center, Courtroom 3A. The landlord presented his case. Etchison, her voice barely a whisper, affirmed that she had not paid the rent since Nov. 26. She admitted she could not pay it now.

“You have 10 days to vacate the premises,” the magistrate said.

Etchison stood there a moment, face taut, then left the courtroom. It was packed with other landlords, other tenants; they filled every bench and lined the sides of the room, jostling their baby strollers or leaning on their canes, gripping folders crammed with the rumpled records of their despair.

Etchison walked past them. Her eyes were beyond tears, clouded with shock. She took a breath. She planned her next move. “I’m going to have to get a lot of quarters,” she decided. “I’m going to have to call a lot of shelters.” The tears surged back and her voice again dropped to a ragged whisper. “I don’t know what else I can do.”

Her desperation echoes loud these days. Any number of statistics can track it.

There’s the national unemployment rate, which stood in December at 5.8%, the highest in nearly seven years.

There are the swelling counts of homeless people in nearly every urban area--a record 29,800 in New York City alone, more than half of them children. Shelters everywhere are overflowing, their directors setting cots in the hallways and mats on the floor and still turning people away. A recent survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found a huge jump in the need for shelter in two dozen major cities. Requests for shelter beds this winter were up 26% in Trenton, N.J., 25% in Kansas City, Mo., 20% in Denver and New Orleans. Los Angeles showed a 6% increase in requests for emergency shelter.

In Boston, the crisis is so acute that officials have taken to putting up the homeless in suburban hotels, 30 miles from downtown, because there is no more space in the city--save the streets. In Minneapolis, several shelter directors hold nightly lotteries to determine who will get bunks.

In Cleveland, the last-resort shelter for families is so crowded that guests are allowed to bring only one trash bag of belongings. Even then, the thin floor mats are packed so tight that there’s barely an inch of space between them. That means there’s no room for 8-year-old Jada Gray to escape the fights that break out too often. Jada tells of split lips, of wild cussing. “It’s real, real, real loud,” she said. Her brother, 12-year-old Rashawn, shrugs. “We just pretend it’s music,” he said.

Telling too is the surge in court-ordered evictions.

While the number in Los Angeles has remained fairly steady, and the bump has been minimal in other urban areas such as Seattle, court officials in Cleveland supervised a record number of evictions last year, up 24% over 2000. In central Florida, the recession helped drive evictions to their highest level in years even before the full effect of the terrorist strikes hit: up 15% through October.

Even in cities that have seen little change in the eviction rate, tenant advocates are noticing a shift in the tenor of calls they receive.

A year ago, crisis counselors in Austin, Texas, Chicago, Northern California and elsewhere dealt mostly with tenants complaining about rent hikes or facing immediate eviction. Now they are swamped with calls from laid-off workers desperate to break their leases so they can move to cheaper apartments or stay with relatives before their credit is stained with a formal eviction. Many are hoping to move to other cities in search of work.

“They’re wanting out,” said Pamala Alfonso, executive director of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization in Chicago.

Experts say this recession has hit tenants particularly hard for several reasons.

First, rents soared during the boom years of the late ‘90s. As a result, many families spent two-thirds or more of their incomes to pay for shelter. So any reduction in their paychecks--even the end of a few hours’ overtime they used to count on--left them unable to pay the landlord.

Welfare Payments End, Adding to the Misery

In Cleveland, for example, the recession has knocked out thousands of manufacturing and steel-industry jobs carrying annual salaries of $70,000 and up. Workers lucky enough to land on their feet often end up with paychecks half what they’re used to--and landlords drumming on their doors.

“We’re seeing a broader base of people facing housing crises,” Mullen said.

“People are stunned. They can’t believe this is happening to them,” agreed Jennifer Lainge, who works with Boston tenants facing eviction.

The recession also has coincided with deadlines ending cash welfare payments to tens of thousands of people across the country. Many who made their way off welfare as the deadlines approached found jobs in the very sectors hit hardest by this downturn, from restaurants to hotels to retail stores. As the most recent hires, they were first to be fired. And they have run out the clock on government aid, so there’s no safety net to catch them.

Then, of course, there’s Sept. 11. In Las Vegas, 15,000 hotel and casino workers lost their jobs almost immediately as tourism plummeted. Holding rock concerts and a golf tournament to raise money, the United Way of Southern Nevada saved 795 families from eviction in just the first few weeks following the attacks.

“It was stunning, the amount of need in the community,” said Gena Satori, a United Way spokeswoman.

Among the newly needy was Rene Abdulrahim, a sales administrator for a charter airline that ferried tourists around Nevada. Two weeks after the terrorist strikes, with the airline’s business near collapse, Abdulrahim’s boss told her she would lose her job--that afternoon. Her $30,000-a-year salary evaporated.

Abdulrahim, 38, applied for unemployment benefits. But the caseworkers were so deluged with claims that they told her it would be two months before they could look at her file. In the meantime, the bills kept coming. Phone bills, light bills, heating bills. Rent. Abdulrahim, a single mother with two girls, scraped her bank account bare. The bills kept coming.

“I felt like everything was stripped away, like I was naked,” she said. “I felt hopeless.” Her voice snagged at the memory. “I felt so many emotions I didn’t even know were there.”

Suicidal with despair, Abdulrahim said, she found the United Way. The agency hooked her up with county programs that will provide food stamps, welfare benefits and rental assistance for the next few months. “I’m going to make it,” she now vows.

But the aid that is keeping Abdulrahim afloat is not available everywhere.

Ohio used to bail out families facing eviction with emergency grants. Over the last 14 months, the program helped 7,000 families in the Cleveland area remain in their homes. But a tight budget forced the state to cancel the program this year. At the same time, the few charities that offer rent relief have found their funds depleted by overwhelming demand.

“There’s nothing out there, absolutely nothing,” said Sharon Malafa, a social worker with the Salvation Army who hears pleas for rental aid daily.

Malafa can offer the poor help with their electricity bills. She can offer a few grocery bags from the food pantry, filled with Lucky Charms and dried soup, powdered milk and tuna. But the Salvation Army, which has laid off some of its own staff in recent months, has no money for rental aid--and few suggestions of who might.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Malafa said. “You try to give them leads, but you can’t help people when there’s nothing to help them with.”

The last stop for many is Courtroom 3A.

It’s all business here, brisk and impersonal, the bailiff calling case after case, the magistrate ordering eviction after eviction. Landlords willing to negotiate with tenants are sent to court mediators, whose caseloads have doubled in the last seven months. But there are many landlords who cannot afford patience.

“I have bills too. I have struggles,” said Misko Maslac, 62, who lost his job as a mechanical designer last fall and now relies on rent from his apartments for income.

Maslac was in court to evict a tenant who had fallen three months behind on the rent. It took just two minutes. The bailiffs set a move-out date for mid-January. If the tenant was not gone by then, her belongings would be hauled to the curb--another pile of sofa cushions and plastic chairs marking another stop on the eviction circuit. These days, the bailiffs schedule 150 such move-outs a week.

“We’ve been quite busy,” said Dave Thompson, who owns a moving company that specializes in evictions.

He watched as his crew cleared out an apartment full of furniture the tenant had left behind when he vacated the premises under court order. The air was frosty. The pile at the curb grew. The bailiff wrote up an orange eviction notice to stick on the apartment door.

“Quite busy,” Thompson said.