Shawn Vestal: As Washington’s pandemic protections ended, evictions soared

When Katie Vozzy went into the hospital in July, she expected she’d be off work for a couple of weeks.

Instead, she found herself in and out of the hospital for weeks on end, as doctors tried to resolve infections resulting from a cesarean-section birth several years before. Unable to work, she and her husband, Dimitri Vozzy – who wound up taking care of the couple’s six children – fell months behind on the $1,000-a-month rent they were paying for a five-bedroom home.

In November, they say, their landlord informed them that they would need to move out in three days or face formal eviction. Knowing that an eviction on their record would lead to a “closed, locked door” everywhere else, Katie said, they packed up and left.

Since then, they’ve landed in a hotel room in Spokane Valley with two queen beds for the eight of them, as they await a more stable solution through a program run by Family Promise of Spokane.

With her health problems and the need to take care of the younger kids, there’s no way they could round up what they’d need for a market-rate rental, they said.

“Knowing there’s nothing you can do about it just feels … awful,” she said during a recent interview in their hotel room with four of their kids. “They deserve better. They deserve stability. They deserve not to sleep on a motel floor, especially during the holidays.”

The Vozzys are among hundreds of renters in Spokane County who faced eviction during the past year. As pandemic protections expired, rental assistance evaporated and rents kept rising, the pace of evictions surged dramatically, in Spokane County and statewide, and especially over the last three months.

Landlords filed 1,663 eviction actions in Spokane County in 2023, which is the highest in eight years and a 44% increase over the number of evictions filed in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic profoundly altered the housing landscape.

“There are more people struggling to pay rent than I’ve seen before,” said Nate Alexandrovich, who oversees affordable housing projects for Spokane Neighborhood Action Partners. “More and more people just can’t afford rent. I think it’s an issue we all need to focus on solving.”

These figures represent just one facet of the crisis facing low-income renters in Spokane County. Rents have gone up sharply, outpacing inflation, while wages have not. More than half of all renters in the Spokane-Spokane Valley metro area are considered “cost-burdened” – spending more than 30% of their income on housing – and the rate of increase of cost-burdened renters here was the highest among the nation’s top metro areas between 2019 and 2022.

A survey of more than 850 residents in the city of Spokane by the Zone, a community initiative focused on Northeast Spokane, found that nearly half the renters surveyed were behind on rent. More than three-quarters said they were “struggling to pay rent or expected to be in the next few months.”

And for those who run out of options, the wait for subsidized, low-income housing programs can be years, and the obstacles to acquiring a market-rate apartment are enormous.

The pace of evictions has those who work with people experiencing homelessness concerned, given that the number of homeless people in Spokane’s annual point-in-time count has nearly doubled in the past five years.

Joe Ader, the executive director of Family Promise of Spokane, said his organization has been tracking the rise in evictions, as the number of people seeking shelter or housing assistance grows.

“We’ve been seeing super-high numbers … of people seeking shelter – seeking all kinds of assistance,” he said.

A year ago, Ader warned of a coming “tsunami of homelessness” resulting from the end of pandemic protections, an expected increase in evictions and an insufficiency of programs to help keep people housed.

“We’re really starting to see the tidal wave we were predicting from COVID,” he said.

‘First month they were late’

During the pandemic, a combination of state and federal aid programs and other measures put a pause on most evictions. More than $1.7 billion in federal rental assistance came into Washington – and to Washington landlords – to help keep people in their homes during the pandemic. A state program is expected to provide roughly $30 million a year in ongoing aid.

A statewide moratorium on most evictions was in place between March 2020 and October 2021. A new law guaranteed tenants the right to a state-paid attorney in an eviction action, and other changes in state law extended notification periods for eviction actions and put other limits on evictions.

The state implemented other measures, as well, including programs that required landlords to offer repayment agreements to tenants in arrears and to offer mediation.

Most of the pandemic protections came to an end in the past couple of years – even as rents were surging at a rate well above inflation. In Spokane County, for example, the average price of a two-bedroom apartment rose 39% in the last five years, according to the University of Washington’s Center for Real Estate Research.

Renee Ballou, who represents tenants as part of the state’s right-to-counsel program, said most tenants are doing their best, sometimes in the face of “massive, massive rent increases.” In some cases, the rental increases her clients have seen range between 60% and 100%.

“I’m really not seeing a ton of cases where the tenant isn’t trying everything they can to make things right,” she said.

Ballou is the Spokane County managing attorney for the King County Bar Association’s Housing Justice project, which contracts with the state to provide legal services here.

She and other attorneys representing tenants say that many landlords, released from the restraints of pandemic programs, are now rushing to evict, and doing so more quickly than in the past, over smaller amounts of back-due rent.

Delaney Jacobson, community resource coordinator for the Housing Justice Project, said it used to be more common for evictions to be filed when a tenant fell four to six months behind. Now it’s routine to see evictions over rent that is one to three months late, she said.

“We’re seeing people with less than $1,000 in back rent” being served with eviction actions, she said.

Ader, the executive director of Family Promise, told the story of an elderly man raising his granddaughter who recently saw his rent increase from $550 to $1,300. He mentioned another renter who received an eviction notice after a single late payment.

“This was the first month they were late on rent, and they got a 14-day notice,” he said. “They’ve never been late before and now they’re facing eviction.”

‘Keep people in their homes’

Landlords and their attorneys argue that many of the pandemic programs, along with changes in state and city laws intended to protect tenants from unscrupulous landlords, have tied their hands with regard to bad tenants.

The recent spike in evictions arises, in part, because many landlords waited to evict tenants until the expiration in mid-2023 of programs requiring them to offer repayment plans or to mediate eviction disputes, they said.

Eric Steven, an attorney who represents many landlords who operate subsidized multifamily housing projects, said the terms of those programs were terrible for landlords – and especially landlords who deal with low-income tenants.

The program requiring landlords to make repayment plans, for example, came with such low repayment requirements that landlords could wait for years to be made whole in cases involving many months of back-due rent.

“I’ve never seen higher amounts of nonpayment than I see now,” he said. “I have clients with repayment agreements that will take 10 years for the tenant to repay.”

He said well-intentioned programs to prevent eviction, along with recent court rulings that make landlords liable for some criminal activity on their property, are making it difficult for those who serve the neediest renters to stay in business.

One consequence of the rental assistance that flowed in during the pandemic has been that some renters “kind of got used to not paying rent,” said Steven Schneider, an attorney who represents landlords.

He said programs intended to protect renters from large, unscrupulous landlords have made life difficult for small landlords who rely on rental income.

“I represent a lot of small landlords who might have one or two units,” he said. “It’s made it very hard to manage tenants, to manage behavior and to get rid of undesirable tenants.”

If the small landlords can’t make it work, they often sell to corporate property managers who are likely to raise the rent and further erode the stock of affordable housing.

“The low-income housing is decreased because small landlords can’t play the odds,” he said.

Steve Corker, president of the Landlord Association of the Inland Northwest, agreed that more renters are unable to keep up with payments now, even as Spokane faces a crisis in the availability of affordable housing. He said the state should focus on providing rental assistance for those renters, because the cost of services if they lose their housing will be even greater.

“Keep people in their homes,” he said. “If you don’t keep them in their homes, the services cost three, four times as much.”

Corker emphasized that rental assistance is vital in the short term because the longer-term problems of insufficient affordable housing for renters is going to take time to address.

“We’re 12 to 15 years away from catching up on the housing shortage,” he said.

‘Hamster wheel of poverty’

For the Vozzys, the questions surrounding how to return to housing stability are not theoretical. They are living in the daily, minute-to-minute urgency that comes with financial emergency – their car won’t work, the kids need care, Katie’s health is still poor, food is expensive without a kitchen and the assistance they’re receiving to secure a new place to live takes time.

The arrival of new emergencies can feel endless.

“It’s almost this hamster wheel of poverty that is really affecting people who are trying their best,” said Emma Hughes, the outreach and recruitment director of Family Promise who is working with the Vozzys.

The family has been on that wheel before – they were homeless before and have a previous eviction on their record from years ago. But they’d been living in a rental house for several years, and though they’d fallen significantly behind on rent during the pandemic, they received a rental assistance grant and felt like things had stabilized by the middle of 2023, they said.

Katie had gone through a jobs program and gotten a job as an outreach worker for Family Promise. Dimitri was working, and the rent was affordable, compared to the rest of the market.

“We were doing really, really good before I got sick,” Katie said.

In July, she went into the hospital for a surgery. Instead of being sidelined for a couple of weeks, she wound up undergoing 39 separate procedures and spending almost nine weeks hospitalized, she said.

Dimitri had a hard time finding work because he needed to care for the kids, they said. Their finances began to unravel, and by autumn they’d fallen behind again on the rent – to say nothing of other bills. They were able to secure rental assistance in November, but their landlord told them they would need to leave if they couldn’t afford to keep up on the rent, they said.

They stayed with Katie’s mother and in another hotel. In mid-December, they reached financial bottom.

“We spent our last money on an oil change,” Katie said, “and our car broke down 20 minutes later.”

‘We live both sides’

By far, most evictions are based on unpaid rent – people on all sides of the issue estimate that between 80% and 90% of evictions are of people who can’t afford to pay.

Those who work with tenants facing eviction say they’ve seen more people are losing their housing despite the fact that they’re working and trying to catch up on relatively small amounts of back rent.

“We’re seeing more people who have lost their jobs,” said Robert McMillen, an attorney for the Northwest Justice Project, a legal aid program that contracts with the state to provide counsel for tenants. “We’re seeing more people who are trying to find work and can’t.”

Hughes, the Family Promise outreach worker, echoed that observation.

“We’re seeing more and more families who are working-class families, paycheck-to-paycheck families,” she said.

Landlords say that some of the changes intended to protect tenants have made it much harder to evict those who do break the rules, commit crimes or violate other terms of their leases. In particular, they say, the new right-to-counsel program, which provides a state-paid attorney to qualifying tenants in eviction actions, has slowed down the pace of evictions – even in cases where a tenant is a threat to others.

For property owners like Catholic Charities and Volunteers of America, which provide federally subsidized housing for low-income and formerly homeless people, the issue can cut both ways. Many of their clients have an eviction in their past. Among the homeless, evictions are common on their road toward becoming unhoused.

At the same time, some organizations that help the homeless are also landlords themselves. And they are running into the same challenges as market-rate landlords: evicting a dangerous or disruptive tenant takes much longer than it used to and costs much more in legal fees.

“We really see both sides of the issue,” said Rob McCann, president and CEO of Catholic Charities. “We live both sides.”

Catholic Charities runs several “havens” – 50-unit permanent supportive housing projects that help to stabilize formerly homeless people, and others in need.

“Many of them come to our housing with an eviction in their past,” he said. “Evictions are a very profound moment. They can really do lifetime damage to people, and that’s why we do them so rarely.”

But with the surge in fentanyl addiction, often paired with other problematic or dangerous behavior, the need to evict tenants has risen, McCann said.

A report on eviction law prepared by Catholic Charities’ chief housing officer, Jonathan Mallahan, noted that before 2019, “most evictions occurred in less than 60 days and evictions resulting from behaviors that resulted in arrest (e.g., violent acts) could be processed in three days. Today, evictions take at least 120 days and may take up to 220 days, even in cases where resident behaviors pose a significant risk to health and safety.”

In the past two years, there have been two SWAT standoffs at Catholic Charities properties. Both involved a tenant who was in the middle of an eviction process, McCann said.

Jacobson, the community resource coordinator with the Housing Justice Project, said her program has represented many tenants in actions involving Catholic Charities. She said the organization has also evicted tenants in recent years for lesser violations of rules, sometimes stemming from mental health crises.

The evictions related to criminal or dangerous behavior, she said, are “few and far between.”

In Olympia

Various proposals involving affordable housing are likely to be debated during the upcoming legislative session, including the return of a “rent-stabilization” proposal aiming to limit rent increases and give tenants more time to respond to them. A rent-stabilization bill, supported by tenants’ rights activists, died in the last session.

Critics of the bill characterized it as rent control, which is illegal under state law, but proponents argue there are key differences – rent control freezes rents, whereas the proposals in Olympia would have tied rent increases to inflation and put caps on predatory rent increases, for example.

Another proposal from last session that could return is a “just-cause evictions” bill establishing a specific and limited range of reasons that evictions would be carried out.

Landlords will be seeking some changes that allow them to evict dangerous tenants more quickly. Corker said his priority for positive changes out of Olympia would be increased rental assistance to keep people housed, as well as incentives for private-sector landlords to provide affordable housing.

Rep. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, said the upcoming session will include various proposals that relate to affordable housing, including one to allow more dense development near transit routes. He said he thought it would make sense to invest in direct rental assistance in instances where renters are on the borderline of losing their housing.

Riccelli said he’s interested in the idea of a community campaign to address the many challenges involved in affordable housing – something with measurable goals and a way of tracking progress, not unlike a fundraising thermometer.

“Too many people are just throwing their hands up, saying it’s too big a problem,” he said. “Let’s quantify the problem in Spokane. How many units do we need, and how many that are affordable or low-income? Then let’s start talking about how we get there.”

‘We just want to go home’

If you lose your home because you couldn’t afford the rent, the hurdles toward finding a new place are enormous. An eviction on your record means an automatic rejection from many landlords. And even without that, the ability to scrape together the resources for a new rental – first and last months’ rent, and deposit – can be insurmountable.

“On our own, it would be impossible,” Katie Vozzy said.

She is hopeful that Family Promise will be able to help them secure a new place. Dimitri is planning to return to work as her health improves. As she spoke about their circumstances, four of her younger kids – ages 4 to 15 – sat quietly on the bed next to her.

She talked about celebrating Christmas in that room, with pizza. She talked about how her kids have kept their grades up despite all the chaos. She talked about how many people live a single paycheck away from being right where she is – they’re one car breakdown, one medical crisis away from it.

“Not everyone is the picture of homelessness that you see on a corner downtown.”

She’s hoping things turn around in the months to come.

“We just want to go home,” she said. “Whatever that looks like.”