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Friend,
The private security guard, armed with an assault rifle, moved swiftly through the dingy halls of the extended-stay, residential hotel outside of Atlanta on a crisp fall day.
He banged on one door after another, pointing the rifle at longtime residents and forcing them to leave.
The stunning evictions terrified people living at Efficiency Lodge in Decatur, Georgia. Many of them are low-income workers and families with young children who had made the lodge home for years because they had no other option besides living on the street. Only the emergency efforts of a local church ensured that they had beds to sleep in that night in September 2020.
“I never seen nothing like that in my life, just to put a person out on the street,” one resident, Armetrius Neason, told The Associated Press.
Neason, a carpenter, had lived in the hotel for five years, in a room with a small kitchen he had carefully decorated – until the security guard came with the gun.
“You had to go then,” Neason said.
Neason and two other tenants are plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the hotel’s owners by the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. The suit contends that because the residents lived there for months or even years, they should be given the same rights as tenants in apartments or houses. Their attorneys argue that the expulsions violate laws designed to protect tenants.
Most of the tenants who were forced out never got to return. But Neason and one other tenant are living at the hotel again. A judge ruled that they must be considered tenants under the law and prohibited Efficiency Lodge from kicking them out without filing an eviction in court. The hotel owners are appealing the ruling.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, along with the Atlanta-based tenants’ rights organization Housing Justice League, the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation and three academic experts who study housing inequalities, filed an amicus “friend-of-the-court” brief in August, supporting the tenants.
“These sorts of extended-stay hotels can provide a source of stable, safe housing for folks, many of them low-income Black and Brown folks, who otherwise would be on the street,” said Emily Early, senior supervising attorney for the SPLC’s Economic Justice Project. “As a matter of law and a matter of morality, these are their homes and they have the right to have them protected. These sorts of places should be not only extending the same sorts of protections that other renters enjoy, but absolutely providing a safe and comfortable environment for people to live.”
How the case is ultimately decided may have far-reaching implications. Unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic has made it harder for millions of Americans to keep up with the rent.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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