Tag Archives: Marc Lockhart

Virginia Eviction Laws Stacked Against the Poor

by Marc Lockhart

Last Tuesday I joined more than 100 people for the inaugural meeting of the Campaign to Reduce Evictions (CARE), sponsored by the Virginia Poverty Law Center, at First Baptist Church in Richmond. We assembled for two hours to investigate why Richmond has the second highest eviction rate in the country among large cities and what can be done about it. The goal of the campaign is to produce recommendations by 2019 that state and local policy makers can use to craft solutions to the crisis.

Why are we talking about this — how bad is it?

Richmond ranks #2 in the nation with an eviction rate of 11.44% with 6,345 evictions in 2016, according to data from the Eviction Lab. Roughly one out of every nine renters was evicted, or 17.38 households evicted every day. Comparing it to the rest of the country, Richmond is approximately five times the national average of 2.34%.

Moreover, Virginia has half the large cities with the country’s Top 10 highest eviction rates. Part of the reason is that Virginia, unlike many other states, has a legal process that favors landlords. (See eviction data for details.)

As Omari al-Qadaffi, a housing advocate from Leaders of the New South, points out, “An unlawful detainer is the only civil action in Virginia where an indigent person is compelled to pay the appeal bond. Any other civil action, you can be excused from it if you’re poor, but Virginia is such a real estate-friendly state that you cannot be excused from that. Also, something unique about Virginia is that a general district court is not a court of record, so there is no transcript that’s kept. So …in civil court, defendants just get run over top of in general district court, and cannot go back to a record to say ‘hey, my rights were deprived of me.’”

How is CARE approaching this?

CARE is conducting a series of meetings and workshops to create recommendations. The inaugural meeting was well organized and drew a cross-section of people and stakeholders involved in or affected by evictions. The breadth of stakeholder groups assembled was impressive — tenants who are in the process of being evicted and those who have been previously evicted, landlords, property managers, housing advocates and aid societies, housing authorities like Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority interim CEO Orlando Artze, attorneys, court personnel, and academicians.

The meeting started with a moving, personal story by Tonya Kernodle who recounted her experience being evicted as “emotionally devastating.” She admonished the audience to widen its perspective about who is evicted. “Don’t think it’s some type of person; it can be anyone.”

Martin Wegbreit, Director of Litigation for the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, described the typical five-step eviction process, but noted that the duration can vary based on the court’s schedule and local practices. Nationally, 77% of evictions occur because of non-payment of rent and 23% for other reasons, like causing a public nuisance, poor building conditions, or calling the police too many times. Typically the process goes as follows:

Attorney Wegbreit noted how quick the eviction process is in Virginia and it favors the property owner, “the landlord [has many options] and has been made whole.  The landlord has gotten all of the rent, all of the late fees, all of the court fees, and all of the attorneys fees and is out nothing, and yet the tenant can be out everything, if the landlord so chooses.” Continue reading