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Over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri camped out on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in an overnight rally to demand President Joe Biden extend the federal moratorium on evictions. The pressure worked. On Tuesday, Biden renewed the eviction moratorium, which the federal government originally passed in 2020 to keep renters in their homes during the pandemic.
But the eviction moratorium might not be as ironclad as you think.
Over the last year, we’ve teamed with The Devil Strip, a community-owned news co-op in Akron, Ohio, to understand whether evictions were continuing in the pandemic.
Reveal Investigative Fellow Noor Hindi spent months sitting in on the local eviction court and learned something surprising. Over the past year, evictions never stopped. Hindi reported the story for our episode this week and also for a digital story exposing the reality of renting amid the pandemic.
Here’s some of what she learned:
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Magistrate judges granted landlords the right to evict tenants, even when landlords didn’t follow the publicly stated rules and even when renters were the exact people the federal government was trying to prevent from being kicked onto the streets.
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Judges granted an average of nearly two evictions a day from April 2020 through March 2021. That’s a total of at least 665 evictions in the midst of the biggest public health emergency in a century.
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Judges granted at least 42% of the nearly 1,600 evictions that landlords requested over that 12-month period.
Read the full story to understand how a health care worker like Amber Moreland could get evicted, even as everyone around her thought she’d be protected.
Born in Jordan, Hindi has lived in Akron since she was 3. She spent the last year in the Reveal Investigative Fellowship, which seeks to help diversify the ranks of investigative reporting and support local journalism. In addition to being a reporter, Hindi is also a poet. During the fellowship, she landed a book deal for her first poetry collection, “Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow,” with Haymarket Books. She talks here about the difficulty of reporting about housing in Ohio and how her journalism influences her poetry.
What did it feel like to sit through over 100 eviction hearings?
 My first few days in eviction court, I didn't know what was happening. There was a lot of language that I wasn't familiar with – first cause of action, second cause of action, restitution – all these really complicated terms for simple things. I just was not familiar with the law. But eventually, I got more and more familiar with the procedures, and I was really sort of surprised. The pandemic was happening and there were distraught people in terrible conditions. They were either sick or getting laid off; everything was really unfamiliar and terrifying. And in the midst of that, I'm sitting in court and watching people get evicted, like one person after the next person after the next person. It was heartbreaking to see how the system could fail people again and again and again and again. And the justification was: This is the law.
What do you feel like you learned from reporting on all this?
I think that I learned about all of the ways bureaucratic systems, complicated language and reducing people to case numbers could be used to justify throwing people out of their homes. The court proceeds like a machine. This person is just a case number, like, 21-CVG-14563. It's super formal. It’s easy to forget that somebody’s life is at stake. But then there would be these really staggering interactions – someone would come to court and start crying or have a really long explanation. It would cause you to step back and remember again, “Oh, this is a human who is going to be homeless in two weeks.”
You’re also a poet. So does your reporting influence your poetry in any way?
It does in really big ways. The book that I started to work on this past year is actually related to housing and systems. While I was working on the eviction story for Reveal, that was when the forced evictions in Palestine were happening. There was this really interesting parallel of how little we recognize people's rights to be housed. Not just in small little Akron, Ohio, but internationally. So my second book is nonfiction dealing with the ways in which systems and laws reduce human lives into numbers and statistics.
Listen to the episode: The teen reporter, the evictions and the church
Read the story: Eviction moratoriums didn’t stop judges in one Ohio city from ousting hundreds from their homes
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