Eviction filings rising in North Carolina. Could lessons from the pandemic help?

For nearly two years, an expanded social safety net and other pandemic-related aid kept eviction filings at historic lows in North Carolina.

That slowdown, it appears, is coming to an end.

State court data shows that the number of eviction cases in 2022 rose sharply to the highest level since 2019, the year before the start of a COVID moratorium and federally boosted rental assistance programs.

With eviction filings in North Carolina now poised to return to pre-pandemic levels, advocates for landlords and tenants alike say the state needs more tools to keep families in their homes.

Statewide, courts saw almost 149,000 eviction cases filed in 2022, a rate of about 10.3 per 100 occupied rental units. That’s still a few percentage points lower than the 12.7% filing rate in 2019.

In Mecklenburg County, the filing rate ticked up from 8.9% in 2021 to 15.4% the following year. Filings in Wake County, meanwhile, hit 9.5% in 2022 compared to 6.2% the year prior. In both cases, the filing rate remains below 2019 levels.

But some counties have already seen a return to the number of filings pre-COVID, especially in the last few months, said Dustin Engelken, government affairs director at the Triangle Apartment Association.

“A lot of our members spent a year – some of them two years – working with folks who were unable to pay and who went through the rental assistance process,” Engelken said. “There’s no longer that safety net, so it’s business as usual.”

Filing for an eviction doesn’t always result in a family locked out of their home. But it’s the first step in a legal process that can be tricky to navigate.

Rise or return to ‘normal’?

In Durham, where Sarah D’Amato directs Legal Aid of North Carolina’s eviction diversion program, the courthouse’s eviction docket has now grown to 100 to 200 cases a week. And given the trends over the last few months, she said, rates are easily on pace to hit 2019 levels, if not higher.

As it stands, the program can only represent a few hundred cases a year for households that meet certain income requirements.

“When you’re constantly bombarded, it’s hard to get prepared for the next wave,” D’Amato said. “We haven’t had time to emerge from being constantly in court and dealing with the acute crisis to even be able to think about how we prepare for what is continuing to come at us.”

And there may be more trouble on the horizon.

March marks the end of a COVID-era boost to benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. Since March 2020, eligible families have received at least $95 extra each month from the emergency allotments, according to the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

The end to these “emergency allotments,” state health officials say, will drop the average food stamp recipient from $8.12 to $5.45 per person per day.

“If it’s a choice between feeding your family today and paying the rent, many people are going to buy food,” D’Amato said.

Landlord advocates like Engelken, however, say they’re not certain the rapid jump in filings from 2021 to 2022 is a clear indicator that this year will see more evictions than before the pandemic.

“Anything moving up from zero is a big increase, right?” Engelken said. “Some of that was inevitable as things got back to quote-unquote ‘normal.’”

In the Triangle, for instance, some signals point to good news on the housing front, he said. The overall rate of rental collection, how often landlords actually receive monthly rental payments, has remained relatively consistent at around 95% since before the pandemic, he said.

Vacancy rates for rental units are trending up, and market rents have dropped for the last several months after a period of historic highs. And builders, Engelken said, will soon add thousands of additional rental units that could help with much-needed housing supply.

“A lot of these housing advocates have been talking about an eviction tsunami since way back in mid-2020,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen any evidence that that’s ever happened.”

A call to help tenants

Even if the state is not due for a record-breaking eviction wave in 2023, a return to pre-pandemic levels still means thousands of families ejected from their homes – many due to an inability to pay.

In the long-term, housing affordability remains a top concern in North Carolina, especially in markets like the Triangle and Charlotte, advocates for both landlords and tenants say.

To help people at risk for eviction now, the state needs more investment in rental assistance programs, trade groups and tenant advocates who spoke with The News & Observer said. The pandemic saw the expansion of such programs with the infusion of federal COVID relief money.

It was a “win-win” for both tenants and landlords, said Bill Rowe, attorney and interim executive director for the progressive N.C. Justice Center.

“There’s a short-term problem that plays out with eviction, and it just goes on until you create more housing or more rental assistance,” Rowe said.

With those programs now out of cash, rental assistance is now largely limited to offerings from county social services agencies – and come with strict income requirements.

“There’s really not a whole lot of breathing room for people who have a very acute loss of income,” D’Amato said.

The expansion of rental assistance at the start of the pandemic wasn’t perfect, Engelken said. “But ultimately, it was successful at its goal, which was keeping people housed,” he said.

The statewide apartment association, along with its counterparts in the Triangle and Charlotte, say boosting rental assistance is now part of their legislative priorities, just in time for the N.C. General Assembly’s new session.

Engelken said it’s too early to say exactly what those programs might look like. But with a state surplus likely, depending on revenue forecasts due out next week, he said state lawmakers have options.

“There’s a lot of money in the state coffers right now, so there’s certainly an ability to provide that,” he said. “So our association and our members, I think, are just initiating that conversation as we start to go into the two-year budget cycle here.”

Jesse McCoy, Duke law professor and supervising attorney at the university’s Civil Justice Clinic, said COVID-19 demonstrated ways local, state and national leaders could act to keep families in their homes – if there’s a will to do it.

“All the things that we did during the emergency period are things we could be doing outside that period, but the fact that we don’t lets me know it’s not a priority,” McCoy said.

The pandemic, he said, just upped the urgency.

“Evictions weren’t a crisis just because of COVID – they were a crisis long before COVID,” McCoy said. “COVID made them a catastrophe.”

He and other tenant advocates say they don’t want to see that urgency fade.

“The only way that we’re going to mitigate or slow down the harm and the effects of the eviction crisis in our communities is by understanding that when somebody is evicted, when somebody is facing housing insecurity, it affects us all as a community,” D’Amato said. “At the end of the day, it could affect any of us.”