After Helene, Asheville public housing evictions continue. Residents have 'nowhere to go'

Yahoo

27-01-2025

This story had been updated to include new information
ASHEVILLE - In late September, Shelia Yarborough made her way from her quaint Deaverview apartment in West Asheville to the Buncombe County Courthouse downtown. She was meeting with her lawyer to work out an eviction proceeding for nonpayment of rent ordered by the city housing authority.
A resident at the public housing complex for two years, Yarborough's plan was to work with a lawyer from Pisgah Legal Services to figure out what she could do to appeal the eviction and pay back money owed. Outside, a heavy rain fell. It was the beginning of what would become the most catastrophic natural disaster in Western North Carolina history.
Tropical Storm Helene on Sept. 27 destroyed over 1,000 residential buildings in Buncombe County and transformed lives across the region. Most of Asheville lost power and water. Emergency shelters were setup by the Federal Emergency Management Organization. Jails moved prisoners. Courts closed. Currently, 43 residents in Buncombe county have been reported dead from the storm, according to the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Having lost power, water and cell service in the immediate aftermath of the storm, Yarborough tried to figure out what would become of her eviction case. She reached back out to her lawyer. She called the court, which was closed. She reached out to Helpmate, the nonprofit that had helped her enter public housing just a few years earlier.
"I was gonna have to do an appeal. Then they said they had put all the appeals off because of the disaster," Yarborough said. Then she heard that the housing authority was looking to give relief to residents affected by the storm.
Even as the court had extended the date to file appeals after Helene, the process was confusing. Given that the authority announced it was putting a pause on filing some evictions after Helene, she just "didn't know" when she should file an appeal, she said.
"I got the letter on the door saying that they had stopped all evictions and rent for the next two months was zero," she said.
In early October, Housing Authority of the city of Asheville CEO Monique Pierre, who was fired by the HACA board of commissioners on Nov. 7, said the authority would drop rent "to zero" for those who have housing choice vouchers and are impacted by the storm. Then, on Oct. 24, the HACA Board of Commissioners passed a resolution that they would not be filing new nonpayment eviction proceedings until Feb. 1.
But just over a week after the housing authority said it would not continue filing new evictions against authority residents, a notice arrived at Yarborough's door. It was a writ of possession — she would be evicted on Nov. 6.
When asked where she might go next, Yarborough, who had previously been homeless for a year before entering public housing, said: "Nowhere."
Despite the halt on filing new evictions for nonpayment, the eviction process for currently open cases is going to play out, Pierre told the Citizen Times Nov. 6. It means over two dozen housing residents may be evicted in the coming weeks, despite ongoing displacement from Tropical Storm Helene. Resident cases have been impacted by court closures and confusion about current HACA policies, housing advocates say.
Asheville is facing a housing crunch and with Helene destroying apartments and houses, there are likely even fewer places for low-income residents to turn for affordable housing, Pisgah Legal Services lawyer David Bartholomew said.
"These tenants have been forced to find housing that does not exist at a time when our community is in crisis," Bartholomew said.
The Citizen Times has previously reported on HACA's practice of filing dozens of evictions in a single day, which it has done for years, predating the current leadership. Just before Helene, the Citizen Times had been collecting court records and the total number of filings made by the authority in recent years. Court documents show that process pace of evictions has not slowed down.
The authority filed a total of 528 evictions in 2023 — the most in the seven years analyzed by the Citizen Times — and, as of late September, the authority had filed 388 evictions in 2024.
Early 2024 saw some of the most intense eviction filing periods as the authority filed 88 evictions on Jan. 11, just shortly after the holiday season. It was the highest number of single-day eviction filings made by the authority, according to court documents.
From 2006 to 2016, the average public housing authority in the country filed 40 evictions each year, or 7.6 cases per 100 units, according to a 2022 study conducted by Ashley Gromis, James Hendrickson and Matthew Desmond and published in the National Institutes for Health.
In a March 2024 report, the Asheville Housing Authority reported that it owned 2,117 active units, meaning the agency filed roughly 25 cases per 100 units in 2023, according to a Citizen Times analysis, which translates to a filing rate that is roughly 3.28x the reported national average from 2006 to 2016.
When asked whether other housing authorities file evictions at a similar rate, or if their style of evictions were standard practice, Pierre responded "call them and find that out."
When asked why the authority files so many evictions Pierre said that "if we don't file the eviction, most people will just ignore the letters we send."
"They'll ignore the phone calls we make. They will ignore everything that we do until it gets to be serious to them. Oftentimes, that only happens after the eviction is filed," Pierre said, continuing that she believes in cases of nonpayment of rent the authority has an "obligation to file" against renters.
Pierre called the process "not a threat" but rather "accountability." Though some may face eviction not all are evicted and sometimes the authority works to put renters on payment plans, Pierre said.
"That's the relationship, and it's not a punishment — it's a legal document. It's the relationship," Pierre said of HACA's evictions process.
But evictions also come with court costs of $125. For those who receive the lowest monthly rent rate of $50, just the fees for being sued are more than double their rent. By the end of the process, those fees are often leveed onto tenants.
HACA's eviction process should allow for more time, Bartholomew argued.
"It's about taking time for people to get unemployment approved. It's about time for them to be able to return to work. It's about time for them to find childcare when there is less of it than there ever has been before," Bartholomew said.
More: For Asheville's homeless, Helene brought further devastation and crisis; Will numbers grow?
During the Oct. 24 meeting, Pierre called passing the stay on new eviction filings "very important" as their priority is to ensure that residents "didn't get displaced." The newly passed policy that aims reduce rent to $0 for residents with housing choice vouchers impacted by the storm needs to get approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the authority, Pierre told the Citizen Times, which they are currently in the process of doing.
But for those who are facing pre-Helene evictions, Pierre doesn't plan to shift course. Eviction proceedings will continue.
"There are some folks who were getting evicted prior to [Helene] and those have to be dealt with the way that the status was beforehand," Pierre said.
Yarborough is just one of 40 housing authority residents that had evictions filed against them in September, just two weeks prior to Helene. While one eviction was filed for criminal activity the rest were for nonpayment of rent.
Six cases were resolved between tenants and the authority and 11 are still considered "pending" according to North Carolina eCourts system; 23 cases in September have already seen the court rule in favor of the housing authority, meaning those residents could be on the street in coming days.
At least three of those individuals, including Yarborough, have already seen eviction notices written by the court and delivered by the sheriff, according to court documents.
More: 'The police won't come': Residents decry inaction to violence in Asheville public housing
In September's nonpayment cases, meaning residents were behind on rent, the authority had filed against residents who owed as little as $131. That resident was on a Section 8 housing voucher of $50 a month, the lowest rent the authority typically allows.
The aftermath of Helene was a desperate time further confused by the communication regarding evictions put out by the authority, Bartholomew said. The evictions are taking place at nearly the height of confusion around housing in the region.
"There's no question in my mind that there was confusion for a lot of people about whether rent was going to be waived, about whether evictions were taking place and about whether the courts were open," he said.
Even for those planning to apply for rent reductions and want to fight their eviction status, residents must apply for both from FEMA and the authority. It requires tenants to know the right forms to fill out and when to submit them. Some of the work to get the word out to residents is being done by community organizers.
On Nov. 4, Just Economics Executive Director Vicki Meath and Housing and Wages Organizer Jen Hampton stopped by Deaverview Apartments in effort to tell residents how to apply for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and request an exemption through the housing authority to get their rent reduced to zero.
Meath expressed that due to communication problems between the "CEO and board level and what is being said at and happens on the ground" — a frustration that has been expressed by tenants and community organizations throughout 2024 — the nonprofit has turned to printing aid applications and directly delivering them to residents. Over the past few weeks, they've been going door to door in each neighborhood with large brown paper bags full of fliers.
When receiving applications, residents often open their doors to have short, conversations with the organizers, mostly asking questions about what FEMA aid means and how to fill out the forms required to reduce their rent. Meath said the applications have had a "mixed" reaction from residents. Some know they need to apply for the rent reduction, and some know nothing about the process, she said.
As for evictions, other residents have reached out to the nonprofit, and some have told Meath there is no place for them to go, especially after Helene. She called HACA's eviction practices, both before and after Helene, "unconscionable" for a public agency that is often a last option for residents to find housing in the city.
"We have so many people displaced because of the storm in a community where we already have extensive affordable housing problems. Our housing authority is not helping. Our housing authority is actively harming," Meath said.
Despite frustrations about on-going post-Helene evictions and recent housing authority eviction practices, Meath and Hampton said the decision to postpone filing new evictions for nonpayment was a positive one. They've been calling for a larger moratorium on evictions across Western North Carolina as the region continued to recover from Helene.
Bartholomew believes the recovery efforts could offer an opportunity for some landlords and the authority to "receive money that they're owed." To prevent residents from being displaced as the community faces hardship and a lack of clean water, he hoped more landlords, and the authority, would "take a beat" on evictions.
"It's devastating to the family, but also to our larger economy and to the community as a whole," Bartholomew said of evictions in Asheville. "If people end up leaving this community, then some of these jobs will never return."
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Will Hofmann is the Growth and Development Reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Got a tip? Email him at [e-mail]. Consider supporting this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville Helene Housing Authority evictions continue 'nowhere to go'