Story by Danielle Chemtob
Photos by Landon Cooper
As the snow swirled outside, Leona Roberts quickly gathered what belongings she could, but she left pieces of her life behind. A big-screen television. A bed. A washer and dryer. Dishes. Clothing.
Earlier that day, shortly after she woke up, she heard a noise at her door. She discovered a woman changing the lock on the door to her three-bedroom house in Durham.
She was being evicted.
Tenants typically get served an eviction notice, and Roberts went out to her mailbox to check. Sure enough, there was a piece of paper sitting in the mailbox. But Roberts said it wasn’t there the night before.
She asked her sister to pick her up, packed what she could in the car, and moved in with her that day. Just like that, she left her home behind.
“I wasn’t trying to make things hard for anybody,” Roberts, 42, said. “I’m a quiet person. I’m just a woman who lives alone, who goes to school, who now goes to work.”
Just over 1,000 eviction filings are made in an average month in Durham, according to a report from the Durham Human Relations Commission.
City leaders have provided funding and support for legal programs to help tenants, but the programs are unequipped to handle the volume of cases. And even when lawyers do step in, North Carolina’s laws make it difficult for tenants to fight for their rights.
“A lot of people that don’t have evictions make assumptions about people that have evictions,” said Jesse Ramos, an attorney at Legal Aid of North Carolina. “A lot of the times people just fall on hard times.”
A lack of rights
From the moment Roberts moved into her house in January 2017, the problems started piling up.
When it rained, water fell through a crack in the bedroom ceiling, soaking her carpet. The water would dry and give off a strong odor.
Her sink and toilet were five feet apart. Between the two, water pooled. Underneath the bathroom sink, she kept a bucket to collect the water that leaked from the pipes. There was water everywhere.
The floor was not level, sinking in every which way. She was constantly killing cockroaches, centipedes, spiders and other critters. There was a hole in the kitchen floor.
“Step hard, your feet will go through,” she said.
Her landlord ignored many of her complaints, and when she did address them, the people she sent did not properly fix the issues. Roberts never saw her face, only communicating with her via text message and on the phone a few times.
“I told her, listen, something’s gotta give,” she said.
Finally, it did.
Roberts left for nearly a month to visit her family in New York, and paid her rent, water and energy bills. When she returned, she expected her expenses to be minimal.
Instead, she was hit with a $730 water bill.
She didn’t tell her landlord right away, hoping that she could work at her temporary job at Staff Zone to pay it off.
“I’m trying to do what I can do to make all this go away on my own without causing a problem or any type of issues for anybody,” she said.
But when November came along, her water was shut off.
Roberts was faced with a decision: go without water or don’t pay rent. She needed to wash dishes. She needed to flush the toilet. So she went to an adult crisis center to ask for help. They paid part of the water bill, but she still owed around $200.
Meanwhile, her landlord was asking for rent. Roberts explained the situation to her landlord, thinking she would understand why she needed some extra time to come up with the money. Plus, Roberts said, the landlord knew there was water leaking in the house and didn’t do anything about it.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, I tried to alleviate the problem and you didn’t want come here and do what you’re supposed to do,” Roberts said to her.
That’s when she first discovered she was being taken to court, which would eventually culminate in her eviction in January.
In some states, tenants can withhold their rent if landlords do not make certain repairs. In North Carolina, they can only do so with the landlord’s consent or if it is allowed by a judge or civil magistrate under a court order.
Because an eviction case, known as a summary ejectment, is carried out in civil court, tenants do not have the right to a lawyer.
“Almost every right that tenants have has to be enforced through a court procedure,” said Bill Rowe, general counsel and deputy director of advocacy at the North Carolina Justice Center. “That quite often is difficult for anybody to navigate who is not a lawyer, but particularly for folks who have tremendous demands on their time.”
Dustin Engelken, government affairs director for the Triangle Landlord Association, said evictions don’t just harm tenants.
“From the landlord’s side, we lose a tenant, which means we have a vacancy, which means every day the unit is empty you’re losing money,” he said. “You’re losing money on the actual eviction process.”
In June, Senate Bill 224 became law, allowing landlords to recover out-of-pocket legal expenses in evictions cases, even when they later settle cases.
“These are people who live in the community who may own a unit or two,” Engelken said. “Those are people who just can’t weather not getting rent paid.”
Time frame
When Roberts showed up in the courtroom, she didn’t realize that the man leaning against the bulletin board was her lawyer.
The eviction notice she was served a week before her court date listed the phone numbers for legal options. Roberts called Legal Aid, but the organization couldn’t help her because the income she made from Social Security and her temp job was too high. So, just before her scheduled appearance, she was referred to the Duke Eviction Diversion Program.
In North Carolina, there’s a 10-day period between when a landlord files an eviction case and the court hearing.
“By the time the papers get into the tenants hands, the tenant often has less than a week,” said Charles Holton, director of Duke University’s Civil Justice Clinic, which runs the Eviction Diversion Program. “Eviction cases are set at dates and times that work for the landlord’s attorney, with no input from the tenant.”
In turn, tenants are far less likely to seek legal help to begin with. At most, Holton said the program sees 10 percent of all cases.
“Quite frequently, the tenant will just sort of just give up and let the eviction judgment be entered against them,” he said.
Evictions are difficult to expunge, impacting the ability to finance the purchase of a home, and even to qualify for a home through Habitat for Humanity in some cases, Holton said.
In 80 percent of the cases the Eviction Diversion Program takes on, the attorneys are able to avoid an eviction judgement. In June, the Durham City Council allocated $200,000 to the program to support two new staff attorneys and a paralegal.
“I think the reason that we’re in this situation is because it hasn’t been enough of a priority,” said Vernetta Alston, a Durham City Council member. “We’re doing what we can right now to help address the problem.”
But the state has cut support to Legal Aid, which provides free legal representation for low-income people in various types of cases, including evictions. At the time, House Speaker Tim Moore told reporters that the organization’s overzealous lawyers in housing cases were hurting “mom and pop” landlords.
“We’re trying to do our best with what we have,” Ramos said. “I do believe we’re scratching the surface. It’s not just in court representation. We do various workshops with different groups in the community to just let them know what their rights are as tenants.”
Fighting back
Roberts lost her case, but she appealed, so she was permitted to stay at the house a little longer, as long as she gave her $680 rent check to the court by the first of each month.
Meanwhile, she gathered as much evidence as she could of the landlord’s mismanagement. She compiled text messages and allowed neighborhood improvement to inspect her home. They found that the conditions in the house were unsafe for anyone to live in.
“As long as I would’ve stayed quiet and didn’t complain about absolutely nothing, she would’ve been fine with it,” Roberts said. “I refused. I didn’t deserve that. I deserve to live in peace like you do.”
But in January, she couldn’t come up with the full rent, so she missed her court payment.
That’s when she was finally evicted.
In April, Roberts finally won her appeal, thanks to the help of the lawyers at the Duke Eviction Diversion Program.
But the money she earned was hardly enough to compensate for what she experienced. Roberts, who is hard of hearing and relies on Social Security, had spent every cent she earned paying expenses related to the house.
“Every dollar that I got out, I was never able to buy anything for myself,” Roberts said. “Any dollars that I got for myself, it went to them. I felt like she owed me.”
Evictions have been shown to have detrimental physical and mental health effects. A 2015 study from researchers at Harvard and Rice Universities found that among low-income urban mothers — a group particularly at risk for evictions — those who were evicted in the previous year experienced more material hardship, were more likely to suffer from depression, reported worse health for themselves and their children and reported more parenting stress.
Eventually, Roberts moved back to New York to be closer to her family. Her daughter graduated high school in June and started community college in the fall. Roberts is living in a furnished room in a boarding house.
But her eviction still heavily impacts her.
“It was a hectic situation to go through,” she said. “I had to get tough and deal with it. To me, I got this image in my head that everybody is not as light and kindhearted as I am.”
