Milwaukee County evictions fell with stimulus, study shows, By Georgia Pabst, August 30, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “With a 2-year-old and a baby on the way, Jenny Furne said she started to worry that she and her growing family would be homeless. She said she moved to Milwaukee last year from another state to escape from a domestic violence situation and found a job in sales. But after she lost her job and couldn’t find another one, she fell a month behind in the rent on her north side apartment. Although she signed up for W-2, the state’s welfare-to-work program, she initially received a partial payment of $300, not enough to cover her rent of $510 a month. ‘Two weeks before having my baby, I got an eviction notice,’ said Furne, 24. ‘I was freaking out because I didn’t know if I would have a home to come back to with the baby.’ She went to Community Advocates and explained her predicament. Using federal stimulus money designed to stem evictions and prevent homelessness, the agency paid the $510 rent owed, buying Furne the time she needed to get her W-2 check and get on track. Furne isn’t the only one who has been helped from the brink of homelessness. According to a Harvard University study that looked at local eviction records, the influx of federal stimulus money to help stem homelessness coincided with 836 fewer evictions filed in Milwaukee County from August 2009 to March 2010, compared with the same period the previous year…”
Tag: Eviction
Poor Women and Eviction
A sight all too familiar in poor neighborhoods, By Erik Eckholm, February 18, 2010, New York Times: “Shantana Smith, a single mother who had not paid rent for three months, watched on a recent morning as men from Eagle Moving carried her tattered furniture to the sidewalk. Bystanders knew too well what was happening. ‘When you see the Eagle movers truck, you know it’s time to get going,’ a neighbor said. On Milwaukee’s impoverished North Side, the mover’s name is nearly as familiar as McDonald’s, because Eagle often accompanies sheriffs on evictions. They haul tenants’ belongings into storage or, as Ms. Smith preferred, leave them outside for tenants to truck away. Here and in swaths of many cities, evictions from rental properties are so common that they are part of the texture of life. New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing. And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt…”
Public Housing Proposals – Hawaii
Hawaii tackles unpaid rents, By Mary Vorsino, February 11, 2010, Honolulu Advertiser: “Incoming public housing tenants could be subject to credit checks and visits to their current home under proposals meant to better screen applicants and cut down on delinquent renters. The planned changes are troubling some advocates, who say making it harder for low-income people to get into public housing will only worsen the housing crisis. But public housing officials say the changes are meant to decrease the number of tenants who fail to pay or who damage units, spurring costly repairs that add up quickly. And they point out that other public housing authorities already take similar steps. In December, more than 20 percent of the thousands of households in public housing were behind on their rent, with the Hawai’i Public Housing Authority owed as much as $1 million. The planned screening measures are part of other proposed changes to decrease rent delinquency in public housing, including speeding up evictions, and come as the agency attempts to tackle an aging public housing inventory, deal with budget shortfalls and catch up on tens of millions of dollars in backlogged repairs…”