“I think the legislature this year was very happy to take incremental steps,” Neumann said. Lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled statehouse shot down multiple proposed renter protections in the last legislative session. It is far easier to occasionally assist neighbors struggling with unexpected emergencies than bear the enormous cost of their displacement.”ĭenver voters and Colorado policymakers have resisted sweeping changes to the current approach to eviction. “The low end of this range is double the cost of the median annual rent in Denver. “The City’s average cost of serving someone experiencing homelessness is between $42,000 and $104,000 annually,” the anti-poverty advocates wrote in their letter to the mayoral candidates. Outside of keeping people housed, healthy and alive, there are economic benefits to the city when people are able to stay in their homes, according to advocates. Those reasons are followed by lost jobs or an inability to find work, relationship problems or family break-ups, and finally alcohol or substance abuse problems. For nearly 26%, eviction or requests to leave their homes were the cause. The Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative’s point-in-time survey identified the primary reasons people became homeless.įor nearly 30%, an inability to pay rent or mortgage led people to homelessness. “Research suggests that for every eviction filing, two more households self-evict before a filing occurs, often due to landlord pressure,” the letter continued.īy that count, nearly 3,650 households likely faced displacement last month. “Eviction filings are merely the tip of the iceberg and do not reflect the actual number of Denver families displaced each month,” according to a letter to Denver’s next mayor sent by a coalition of more than 20 anti-poverty organizations, including the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and the Communtiy Economic Defense Project. A few win against their landlords in court. Some households move before their court dates. Not all filings lead to a sheriff’s completed eviction. The full scope of housing insecurity isn’t captured in eviction filing numbers, which don’t count every person who lost a home after a landlord threatened eviction. If the trend continues this year, we’re on pace to hit nearly 13,300 eviction filings in 2023. The record year, in that time frame, was 2010, when the city saw 10,241 in total, or roughly 850 a month. If eviction filing rates keep pace in 2023, with roughly 1,107 a month, they will surpass the highest annual number since at least 2008. 2021, the federal government has not renewed that funding, and those rental assistance programs have been shut down by both Denver and the state. The moratorium plus federally funded rental assistance helped keep people housed. Only 7 eviction cases were filed in May of 2020, 228 in May of 2021 and 542 in May of 2022. In May 2023, there were 1,216 eviction cases launched in Denver alone, compared to 784 in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the economy.ĭuring the pandemic, eviction filings dropped after the Centers for Disease Control issued an eviction moratorium. In a typical year, 3.6 million eviction cases are filed in courts across the United States, according to the Eviction Lab. Rents remain high, even as vacancy rates have rebounded from pandemic lows. “Otherwise, there would be economic incentive to hoard housing and no units available for people to move into. “A healthy rental housing market requires a functioning eviction system,” noted Drew Hamrick, general counsel and senior VP of government affairs for the group, in November. Yet according to the Colorado Apartment Association, a landlord trade group, there is a citywide upside to evictions. “Rental prices are up, and the availability of emergency rental assistance is down.” In May, the city saw more eviction filings than any other month in the past five years, surpassing pre-pandemic numbers.Įach filing represents a household facing homelessness, with higher mortality rates and an increased likelihood of both physical and mental health issues, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. “I think it’s a really simple story,” said eviction defense attorney Zach Neumann, who heads the Community Economic Defense Project. As anti-poverty groups call on the next mayor to end evictions for nonpayment by 2025, the number of eviction filings in Denver County Court have just continued to rise.
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