Eviction filings have steadily risen in Dane County since September of last year, according to data from the state Department of Administration.
That comes as federal funds awarded to Dane County for rental assistance are beginning to dry up.
Robin Sereno is the Executive Director of the Tenant Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Madison tenants, helping to connect renters with housing resources, including in eviction cases.
Sereno says that the current rise in eviction filings is happening for a number of reasons.
“Part of it is (that) landlords are getting concerned and are using the courts as sort of a debt collection, which is still a thing with some folks still having large outstanding balances,” Sereno says. “I think with the abundance of emergency rental assistance, we’ve seen rents rise in Dane County as a response to us not having enough housing stock. Rents that are high with folks who were receiving, and now somewhat reliant on, rental assistance, the amount of rent outpaces what their household income is.”
A federal moratorium on evictions put in place in 2020 was lifted in August of 2021, and soon after Dane County experienced a short spike in eviction filings that lasted only a few months.
In May of last year, there were only 95 evictions filed in Dane County, but that number almost doubled by December, when 183 evictions were filed.
While there has been a spike in eviction filings, few evictions actually end up before a judge. That’s because, Sereno says, most of the time, eviction filings are settled out of court. She says that about 10% of eviction filings actually end in someone being forced out of their home.
Sereno adds that part of the problem in Dane County is out-of-state landlords not realizing all of the options available for tenants. She says that more and more non-local investors are buying property in Madison, and when the state’s emergency rental assistance program closed earlier this year, many of those investors did not realize that Madison tenants still have rental assistance options.
“We’ve seen non-local property owners filing for eviction much quicker than we normally would,” Sereno says. “We’ve seen just an overall fear in ‘hey, the rental assistance is running out in the state,’ and not understanding that Dane County has a separate program than the state. Moving in those two places have definitely increased the filings.”
That rental assistance comes in the form of a program called DaneCORE 2.0. That program kicked off in September of 2021, utilizing federal funding to provide assistance to qualified renters to help pay past-due rent and past due utility bills. Additionally, renters can apply for future rent payments if they are facing an eviction notice or are currently unemployed.
DaneCORE distributes the money to three community resources: the Tenant Resource Center for those facing eviction, the Community Action Coalition for Madison renters, and Urban Triage for renters in the rest of Dane County. As of October of last year, the program had distributed over $46 million to over 7,100 homes, reports the Wisconsin State Journal.
But Jim O’Keefe, Director of Madison’s Community Development Division, which helps oversee the DaneCORE program along with Dane County, says that the money is coming to an end.
“I think we understand that we have gotten all of the funding from the federal government that we are going to get to support this program,” O’Keefe says. “We have received here in the city (of Madison) about $44 million in all. A little more than 70% of those funds have been spent to date. So we are currently in the process of determining how long those funds can last, how long we can continue this program.”
Last September, the DaneCORE rental assistance online portal briefly shut down as the program began to run out of money. The program was able to secure additional federal funding, and reopened the portal shortly after.
Shamercia Brown is the Operations Manager for Urban Triage, and helped to kickstart their portion of the DaneCORE program. She says that the momentary closure of the portal opened the eyes of Madison renters.
“I’d say there was an influx in rental assistance applications when people first heard about the portal closing,” Brown says. “So when the portal opened back up, people were afraid of, from their understanding, this was their last request and they needed to get those in.”
Brown says that currently, Urban Triage has around $10 million left in their rental assistance program.
Across the country, the situation isn’t much better.
Adam Chapnik is a research specialist with The Eviction Lab, a project based out of Princeton University that tracks eviction data nationwide. He says that municipalities across the country are struggling with the same issues.
“About as of October of last year, we’ve basically seen an increase in filings in almost all of the sites that we track, which is three (major) cities and ten states,” Chapnick says. “So in about a third of those, we are seeing even more filings than we’d seen before the pandemic.”
Chapnick adds that the causes of spikes across the country are similar to those here in Dane County: housing prices are rising and the coffers for rental assistance programs are running dry.
Last Sunday, Governor Tony Evers announced parts of his proposed upcoming budget that include expanding access to legal aid for eviction proceedings. Evers announced that his proposed budget will include $60 million over the next two years to create a new civil legal assistance program for low-income folks, and to help create a statewide right to counsel for evictions.
Evers will release his entire proposed budget this evening, where it will then go before the Republican-led state Finance Committee, who can change, add, or remove any parts of the budget as they see fit.
But in the meantime, Robin Sereno says that things are going to get worse before they get better.
“I have a feeling that, well not a feeling because we have some pretty good evidence showing that when the DaneCORE program shuts down this year, that will once again create a large spike in both filings and also actual homelessness,” Sereno says. “I think that that is something we are going to see this summer, for sure.”
Photo courtesy: hajperlink / UNSPLASH
