Housing advocates rally outside the Buncombe County Courthouse on Wednesday to call for a moratorium on evictions. (Photo: Courtesy of the Western North Carolina Tenants Network.)
Tenant advocacy organizations across North Carolina are calling on Gov. Roy Cooper and Chief Justice Paul Newby to enact an emergency moratorium blocking evictions and foreclosures in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
The NC Inclusive Disaster Recovery Network (NCIDR) and the NC Housing Coalition penned a letter to Cooper and Newby urging them to “prevent evictions and foreclosures in areas of the state impacted by Hurricane Helene for 90 days.” The group has asked for a response to its letter within 24 hours. Cooper had not responded by the time this story was published. NC Newsline has reached out to the governor’s office for a response to the letter.
About 75 people gathered at the Buncombe County Courthouse on Wednesday to call for a 90-day moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. (Photo: Courtesy of the Western North Carolina Tenants Network.)
“The use of eviction and foreclosure moratoriums has precedent in related executive actions undertaken after recent disasters,” NCIDR said in its Oct. 15 letter. “After COVID-19, we were very thankful that the State of North Carolina acted quickly to invoke an eviction moratorium to ensure that North Carolinians did not face displacement or homelessness.”
NCIDR is a statewide coalition of more than 300 organizations. It was founded in 2016 following Hurricane Matthew to work “collaboratively toward a disaster recovery system where all impacted communities can fully recover,” the group states on its website.
Forecasting an “economic disaster”
“Evictions and foreclosures will slow and worsen the recovery of the impacted areas. Without this requested action [moratorium], the workers vital to the economy of Western North Carolina will be forced to relocate away from the area,” NCIDR said. “These households will be unlikely to return any time soon. Any effort to assist Western North Carolina in economically recovering from Hurricane Helene will be difficult if there is no workforce able to contribute and benefit.”
On Wednesday, the Western North Carolina Tenants Network held a press conference in front of the Buncombe County Courthouse to demand that Cooper, Newby and local officials take action to avoid the “economic disaster” they contend will occur if evictions and foreclosures are allowed to proceed in the region.
Forcibly evicting people unable to pay mortgages or rent will undermine the recovery effort, the group said in a statement.
“I lost my job due to Helene, I was denied FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance), unemployment can’t cover costs, and to top it off, landlords want rent and banks expect mortgage payments, Cortne Roche, a tenant leader with the WNC Tenants Network said. “To expect rent when people have no running water, are jobless and hurting from this disaster is deplorable.
Roche said the county has the authority to keep people in their homes. “Stop landlords from evicting us,” Roche said. “Working class people in WNC [Western North Carolina] are suffering and the landlords think only of money.”
Samuel Gunter (Photo: NC Housing Coalition)
Samuel Gunter, executive director of the Housing Coalition, told colleagues during the organization’s weekly call that there were 40 evictions on the docket in Buncombe County this week and 22 in Henderson County. Courts have reopened in some disaster counties.
“Forget whether or not bills are being paid at the moment, there’s just no place for folks to go,” Gunter said.
Gunter has heard through parents with children at Appalachian State University and others in the region that landlords are demanding rent even though tenants don’t have access to rental units due to storm damage.
“To clarify, there is no legal option for tenants in North Carolina to withhold rent and landlords are within their rights to demand it even if the housing is inaccessible in the aftermath of a disaster, which is wild,” Gunter said. “That is the landlord-tenant law that we live with in this state, which is why it’s absolutely critical now, especially in the disaster, to pause on evictions because there’s nowhere to go and with loss of employment and loss of housing for a number of folks, it is unconscionable that you would evict someone under these conditions.”
Gunter said that data received late last week showed that 143,000 households have signed up for FEMA individual assistance but only 1,400 families — roughly 3,300 people — were checked in to temporary shelters.
Nick MacLeod, executive director of NC Tenants Union, worries that unless evictions are paused, many western North Carolina residents will be displaced.
NC Tenants Union executive director Nick MacLeod (Photo: Screenshot from NC Newsline News & Views podcast interview)
“Part of the piece that’s so crucial there is that it’s a lot harder to get access to federal resources, to unemployment benefits, to rental assistance, all of those pieces, if you’ve gotten pushed out, you don’t have a stable address,” MacLeod said. “You’ve gotta put a pause on it [evictions] so that people can get the resources they need and ultimately end up in an OK spot.”
An impending cliff
MacLeod expects eviction petitions to increase over the next couple of weeks but worries that there will be an explosion of them next month.
“The real cliff is Nov. 1 when folks will have had no or very limited income for an entire month,” MacLeod said. “My expectation is that we’ll see, if there is not a moratorium, a huge influx of evictions and foreclosures.
Hurricane Helene dumped historic rainfall on the western part of the state last month. Hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed in subsequent flooding. Thousands of residents were left without a source of income.
“It’s already hard enough to make it in this town. With no work, how are we supposed to survive?” said Drew Walley, a member of Asheville Food & Beverage United, a worker-led trade union for service workers. “If people are forced to leave their homes, then this town will die. It will be a ghost town and open itself up to crime this city couldn’t imagine.”
Since Sept. 29, there have been 17,871 Hurricane Helene disaster-related unemployment claims, according to the North Carolina Division of Employment Security’s website. The division announced last week that 25 counties and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina have been approved for Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA).
People unemployed as a direct result of Hurricane Helene may be eligible for unemployment benefits under the DUA program. Business owners and self-employed individuals affected by the storm may also qualify for benefits.
Eligible counties include Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba, Clay, Cleveland, Gaston, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Lincoln, Macon, Madison, McDowell, Mecklenburg, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga, Wilkes and Yancey.