The tenant protectors

The conversations could be difficult to stomach. Jobs had been eliminated or hours slashed. Some people missed shifts after contracting the novel coronavirus. Many were single mothers, unable to afford child care and bereft of options. One woman had used money set aside for housing to cover her father’s unexpected funeral bills. Everyone who called had rent due and was painfully concerned about eviction, a brutal outcome on its own but a potentially lethal one during a public health emergency.

On the other end of the line sat Leanna Gruhn, a dual-degree master’s student in both social work and women and gender studies at Loyola University Chicago. Last summer, she’d taken an internship with the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing (LCBH), a nonprofit legal aid clinic that advocates on behalf of low- and moderate-income renters in Chicago. As a COVID-19 case manager, she fielded inquiries from those suddenly stripped of work and anxious about losing their home. Initially, the weekly supplemental unemployment insurance benefit of $600 baked into the federal CARES Act proved to be a crucial backstop. When that expired at the end of July, a flood of Chicagoans turned to LCBH for guidance.

That’s when Gruhn’s part-time gig morphed into a grueling full-time position, in which she balanced the needs of a dozen clients at a time and screened many more inquiries, all while juggling her own graduate coursework. If someone was eligible for rental assistance, Gruhn would guide them through the application process: collecting documents, contacting landlords, tracking deadlines. Often, people just needed a shoulder on which to lean. “We give them some type of comfort and support,” says Gruhn, “and let them know they aren’t alone, that there are options available, and that we’ll do everything we can to help them out.”

The work felt pressing in a way that Gruhn—who first interviewed with LCBH a month before the pandemic erupted—could never have anticipated.

In his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, sociologist Matthew Desmond laid bare America’s ongoing evictions crisis, both the causes and devastating effects. For decades, incomes in many fields have stagnated or even fallen. Housing costs have nonetheless soared. Late payments stack up, and landlords react. “Eviction’s fallout is severe,” Desmond writes. “Losing a home sends families to shelters, abandoned homes, and the street. It invites depression and illness, compels families to move into degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods, uproots communities, and harms children.”

Rosenblatt and LCBH turned their attention in a new direction after COVID-19 swept across the country last spring. Local eviction courts paused in March. In April, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker issued his first 30-day eviction moratorium; he’s issued a new order every month since, for tenants who provide sworn statements about why they are unable to pay rent. These were urgent needs addressed urgently. By and large, though, rent payments were rarely paused. That meant that tenants who struggled to keep steady hours during the pandemic might find themselves buried behind the eight ball whenever the moratorium is lifted. Approximating how many Chicagoans were at risk was a question CURL thought they could answer.

They did so using mathematical modeling of the historical relationship between unemployment in any given month and the following month’s eviction filings. The relationship, it turns out, is statistically significant—a 1-percent increase in the unemployment rate is associated with an additional 82 evictions filed in Chicago the following month. “With tens of thousands of Chicagoans having lost their jobs,” the report states, “the wave of filings we expect to see when the moratorium ends may turn out to be a tsunami.” LCBH pegged the nightmare estimate at a full 21,000 by the end of January, compared to the roughly 1,500 evictions the city logged each month in 2019.

Grace Rock (BA ’20) spent most of the last year deep in these data weeds. A Loyola alumna and a former sociology student of Rosenblatt, she was hired by LCBH (through the Americorps VISTA program) as a data and technology specialist, tasked with cleaning up computer code for the data portal so LCBH could run its algorithms more cleanly.

Not every projected case will ultimately wind its way through eviction court, Rock notes. Landlords may work out payment plans with tenants or renters might scrap together funds through other means. The Biden administration has also extended, by two months, a federal eviction moratorium that was scheduled to expire at the end of January. But it’d be wrong to assume leniency will last.

LCBH, for its part, is calling on state legislators to enact protections for tenants who have made partial payments during the pandemic, and to seal eviction files from public view (as a means to protect against landlord discrimination). Additional government stimulus assistance would also go a long way—Rosenblatt found a “pretty significant decline” in CURL’s predicted eviction filings when they took into account last year’s monthly $600 unemployment stipend, which he characterized as “de facto housing policy.” (The recent federal COVID-19 relief bill, passed in December, allotted $25 billion towards rent relief nationally.) Their research sheds bracing light on this shifting housing imbalance. “It’s good practice not to be kicking people out of their homes in the middle of a pandemic,” he adds. “But it really needs to be coupled with some form of rental assistance. A moratorium only kicks the can down the road.”

Rock is now studying for the LSAT and plans to enroll in law school, with ambitions to specialize in housing policy. Gruhn, when not fielding anxious calls for LCBH, will wrap up her own program later this year. Both consider their anti-eviction experiences in 2020 foundational. “There’s this vast wealth of knowledge about tenant issues [in Chicago],” Rock says, “but most people don’t necessarily know how to get connected to those resources. That’s why these organizations are so vital.”