‘Feeling less than.’ Evictions take more than a home away from single mothers.

Shani Riley wanted her home to be the place her kids and grandkids could come to for comfort and support.

So when she was evicted from her rental house in Winston-Salem, she faced both a logistical nightmare about where to go, and a deep shame.

“I am the place to go,” she said. “I don’t have a place to go, but I am the place to go. And, just, I’d never been homeless with my children before.”

“I don’t care if I am broke,” she said. “There was times that I would have $10 to last me after I paid everything, and God still brought me through that. And I still maintained a roof over my kids’ head. It has always been important to me. Because, you know, I’m their mom. And my mom supplied the roof over my head.”

“So, it just, it’s my job to do that,” Riley said. “I felt like I failed.”

National studies show women, in particular Black women like Riley, are evicted at higher rates than other groups. And while North Carolina does not keep demographic information about people who are evicted, attorneys and nonprofit leaders interviewed by The News & Observer say anecdotally they mostly see Black women in eviction courts.

READ MORE: Stable housing a foundation for success, but single moms need more, cheaper options

“It’s just painfully obvious that there is a disproportionate effect on women of color and women with children,” said Isaac Sturgill, the housing practice group manager for Legal Aid of North Carolina.

“We see that all the time,” he said. “You walk into an eviction courtroom in Mecklenburg or Wake County and you’ll see like 90% of the tenants in there are Black women. And sometimes they’ve got their kids with them in court. It’s really sobering to see that. But anybody that represents tenants and is in this line of work is familiar with that reality.”

Riley’s family left their house the night before the sheriff’s deputies came.

“I wasn’t gonna have my kids go through that,” she said.

She moved into a hotel with four of her children, first in two rooms, then just one. When her 2017 Jeep Cherokee required a costly engine repair she lost her job picking up medications for hospitals. At night she watched her grandchildren while her oldest daughter worked.

A small respite was the medical center parking lot near the hotel. It was empty after hours.

“I walked (there) every day,” Riley said. “I let my grandchildren ride their bikes and play in the empty parking lots, you know? Just to have some time outside the room.”

Eviction effects

Being evicted can mean losing more than your home. It can mean losing the belongings a person can’t carry or fit in their car. Hotels eat up already stretched paychecks. Personal hygiene takes a backseat without access to a washing machine.

People who are evicted are desperate to avoid homelessness, and single mothers have to navigate that challenge with their children.

“Everything is harder,” said Carl Gershenson, project director of the Eviction Lab. “It’s that much harder to be riding buses across the city. You know, trying to view apartments when you are dragging a child along with you.”

READ MORE: ‘More than just a house’: In her own words, a single mom talks about facing eviction

The Eviction Lab, located at Princeton University, was founded by Matthew Desmond, the author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.” It works to research evictions across the country and make nationwide eviction data available and accessible.

“If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished Black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women,” Desmond wrote in his book. “Poor Black men were locked up. Poor Black women were locked out.”

Some homeless shelters will split up families and not let teenage boys stay with their moms. And studies have shown that a person’s next home after an eviction is worse.

“When people finally do find that next home we can show the home is usually in a higher-poverty, higher-violence neighborhood than the one that they left,” he said. “And the house that they found is generally of lower quality.”

Part of the reason is that an eviction leaves a lasting mark on a person’s credit report.

“It messes up their health and messes up their education prospects,” Sturgill said. “ A lot of times it results in them losing their jobs. The eviction record itself is a stain on their credit that makes them unmarketable to other landlords.”

And people can feel that effect even if the eviction is not carried all the way through.

“They’ll work out some sort of deal or they’ll catch up on the rent and the landlord never actually carries it out,” Sturgill said. “A lot of them are filed and dismissed or they settle or whatever. But a lot of the tenant screening companies that landlords use don’t do a good job of actually looking at the court records and seeing what actually happened in the case.”

Dan Rose, an assistant professor at Winston-Salem State University, is part of a volunteer eviction prevention hotline in Forsyth County. The callers are overwhelmingly single, Black mothers, he said. And he’s seen the impact an eviction can have on those women.

“Single mothers who are evicted and can’t find anywhere else to go will often go back to partners that are abusive, that are toxic for their lives,” he said.

Evictions happen fast

On a fall morning in Durham, the small third-floor courtrooms where evictions are handled was busy.

And the difference in outcomes was stark.

Tenants who represented themselves in court or didn’t show up all lost, even those who promised to make up the back rent. In North Carolina there are no exceptions for people who lose their job or face an unexpected expense that makes them fall behind on their rent payments.

Nearly all the tenants represented by Legal Aid or a university law clinic saw their case continued or outright dismissed.

Signs in English and Spanish lined the hallway offering assistance to those facing evictions with arrows pointed to an office with Legal Aid attorneys. The clinic inside the courthouse itself was launched this summer.

READ MORE: Paying landlords to rent to families? Charlotte agencies find success in partnership.

“A spectator in this system expects that a person’s first expense should always be their house,” said Gary Chavis, one of the attorneys. “It’s a different ballgame when your kid is hungry. Those burdens are much more extreme.”

Evictions in North Carolina happen fast. It’s not uncommon for a tenant to be served with court papers one week and be in court the next, said Sturgill, who oversees the Legal Aid attorneys that help low-income people facing evictions.

“We’ve gotten kind of accustomed to a quick turnaround time,” he said. “So it’s not uncommon for our lawyers to get a case that has court like a day or two days later. ”

Attorneys can make sure landlords follow the law. Cases can be dismissed if paperwork isn’t filed properly or the wrong name is used. Sometimes it’s helping with an appeal or continuance to help give people time to make up the back rent.

In 2021, Legal Aid prevented more than 2,000 evictions, foreclosures and mobile home repossessions

“Especially in the more metropolitan areas like Wake County and Mecklenburg County, a huge disproportionate number of our clients, of tenants that are being evicted, are women, African American and mothers,” Sturgill said. “Like I would say, in Charlotte, that’s probably like, at least 90% of our clientele.”

But the same holds true for rural North Carolina counties too.

“In the predominantly Black counties in North Carolina, you do see eviction filing rates that rival those that you see in really high-filing cities like Atlanta,” Gershenson said. ”And that’s very unusual for rural areas. But you know, sadly, it’s not unusual for predominantly Black communities.”

Law clinics providing help

The United States’ history of racism is woven into the stories of housing and evictions.

“I’ve been in eviction courts in about five different states,” said Jesse McCoy, the supervising attorney for the Duke Law Civil Justice Clinic. “And even in a state that has a lopsided white population compared to the Black population, if you go to the eviction court, it’s still going to be the same people getting evicted. It’s just the way it is. So that tells me that it’s the systemic issues of the past that just continue to show up.”

Up until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, people could openly discriminate against others and dictate where people could live.

“On top of that, you also had all of the redlining, predatory lending, all the issues that usually weeded out Black communities from being able to deal with the banks to pursue ownership,” he said. “So when people can’t own, what did they do? They rent.”

Law clinics like McCoy’s are one of the tools used to help people avoid evictions. There’s a similar clinic in Durham at N.C. Central University, and the city of Raleigh just gave the Campbell University Law School a grant to add eviction prevention to its law clinic.

“I had no idea how impactful being involved in these proceedings would be,” said Dani Murphy, a third-year law student at Campbell who has worked at the school’s clinic.

“I think a lot of people have this idea that people put themselves in these situations or something,” she said. “But so far my experience with my clients is that everyone has been actively trying to improve their situation or get assistance where they can make payments, or they’re just down on their luck a little bit.”

‘Less than a mother’

Valentina Achille was never evicted. But she came close.

When the duplex she was renting in east Raleigh was sold, the new owners wanted $200 more a month in rent. And then her hours at work got cut.

“It was a traumatic experience at the time,” she said in an interview. “I remember sitting on the steps at night crying. Thinking like ‘What am I really going to do?’ Because, again, I have no family here. And it’s just me and my children.”

Between July 2018 and October 2019, Achille and her two teenagers stayed in three hotels. Sometimes she didn’t make enough to cover the weekly hotel rent and they would have to stay with family friends between pay periods.

“It was very depressing,” she said. “It was hurtful because I just felt like …”

She paused and let out a short sigh.

“I just felt like less than a mother at the time. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right for my children.”

She was referred to Families Together, a nonprofit that helps homeless families, by her daughter’s high school guidance counselor. The employment, housing and financial help she got helped Achille get on her feet. But more than that it showed Achille she wasn’t alone.

“I was already in my 50s by then,” she said. “So, I felt like as a grown person, as a quote, unquote mature person, I should have it together. And I didn’t. So what’s wrong with me?”

It’s one of the reasons why Achille now works at Families Together in addition to her medical technician job. She wants other mothers to know they are not alone.

“It makes them feel less than until they hear my story,” she said. “It is a common statement that we feel less than when we feel like we can’t take care of our children.”

It’s a sentiment that Riley wishes she knew when she was living in a hotel with her children.

“I didn’t feel like the mom I was supposed to be,” she said.

Riley eventually moved into her daughter’s home to get out of the hotel, and found a better-paying job driving people to and from medical appointments. She’s in her own place, an apartment, and doesn’t know why her eviction didn’t show up on her credit check.

“This full-time job was a blessing,” she said. “It was a blessing. Really, with this job, I feel like I’m on purpose. I really feel like God is using me.”

Read more stories from the “Women and Children First?” project at newsobserver.com or heraldsun.com.