‘Nowhere to go’: Forced-out Boise tenants dive into desperate search for housing
In three years’ time, Daisy Garner and Jesse Lawson covered their apartment walls with canvases, framed art, quilts and mirrors. They hung plants in the shower and laid colorful rugs on the carpet. They placed tiki lamps to curve over their green couch, with a cat tree nearby where Junipurr could rub his face at its corners.
The couple has been living in their West Boise apartment for $1,100 a month. On July 12, they received notice from their landlord that the rent would rise to $1,425 a month — nearly a 30% jump. Hoping to stay, they tried to negotiate a 20% increase as a compromise, or a month-to-month lease. Instead, the landlord sent them a nonrenewal notice.
Garner and Lawson now must move out by the end of August.
“It’s heartbreaking. This is our home,” Garner, a 31-year-old cosmetologist, said with tears in her eyes. “It’s scary. There’s nowhere to go right now. … And there’s nothing to protect people here.”
To help prevent spread during the COVID-19 pandemic — and keep people from being forced into more congregate living situations — the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Sept. 4, 2020, issued a temporary moratorium on evictions. Last month, President Joe Biden extended that moratorium, for the last time, until the end of July, and the U.S. Supreme Court last month also upheld the effort to pause evictions nationally in a 5-4 decision.
But the moratorium narrowly applied to nonpayment of rent, and carved out exceptions for landlords who wished to sell their property or issue nonrenewal notices — like the one handed to Garner and Lawson. Still, the eviction ban did even less in Idaho, where it lacked the teeth of enforcement, according to housing advocates.
Unlike some neighboring Western states — Washington, Oregon and Montana among them — that had some version of a moratorium, Idaho remained quiet on eviction protections.
From September through December, while the moratorium was in place, Boise State University’s Idaho Policy Institute counted nearly 600 eviction filings in the state. Hundreds more have poured in since that time, which excludes many evictions that never made it to court.
Ben Larsen, a research associate at BSU’s Idaho Policy Institute, said the federal moratorium provided states and cities a “blueprint” for what they could implement at the local level. But without those local policies, eviction rates largely remained unchanged from pre-pandemic levels.
“There’s just not a whole lot of evidence out there to show that the eviction moratorium is working,” Larsen told the Idaho Statesman. “It really seems like the evidence points toward state and local laws that are making the difference.”
Coupled with skyrocketing rental costs in the Boise area, one of the fastest-growing regions in the U.S., residents are trying to navigate a highly competitive housing market — and sometimes deal with forced moves.
In Ada and Canyon counties, Idaho’s two most populous, eviction court hearings have reached a combined 10 to 15 — sometimes as many as 20 — per week since the federal moratorium went into effect. In total, more than 760 eviction cases have hit the courts between the two counties through last week, according to Jesse Tree, an area nonprofit focused on homelessness prevention.
“I think there’s a lot of confusion on behalf of judges, tenants alike and landlords. Nobody really knows if the moratorium applies,” state Sen. Ali Rabe, Jesse Tree’s executive director, told the Statesman in an interview. “So we’ve definitely not had a successful time of trying to get it enforced.”
Idaho state officials ‘should have stepped up’
Rabe, a first-term Democratic state senator representing District 17 on Boise’s Central Bench, laid responsibility for the inconsistent application of the ban in Idaho on the state’s decision makers.
“All three branches of government should have stepped up, really. Probably more of it had fallen to the governor and (Idaho) Supreme Court to enforce that,” she said. “The governor or Supreme Court, or the Legislature, should have provided additional guidance for the moratorium to be enforced. Idaho has not done anything like that.”
Gov. Brad Little’s spokesperson, Marissa Morrison Hyer, said in a written statement Friday that the governor’s office is meeting with many groups and stakeholders to address affordable housing in the state.
Little is currently in the process of deciding budget recommendations for the next fiscal year, she wrote. The governor will make those determinations “based on the most pressing needs of Idahoans,” Morrison Hyer said.
Last year, Little allocated $15 million in federal CARES Act money dedicated to the state for rental assistance through the Idaho Housing and Finance Association. After spending all of the money, state lawmakers approved nearly $176 million in new federal COVID-19 relief funds for renters unable to pay their housing and utility costs due to financial hardships amid the pandemic, which the state’s Housing and Finance Association also is overseeing.
Through the middle of this month, about $9.4 million of that money has been disbursed, program director Brady Ellis told the Statesman.
For its specific geographic area, the Boise City/Ada County Housing Authorities received more than $24 million in emergency rental assistance funds administered by the U.S. Treasury Department. Of that total, 90%, or nearly $22 million, must go directly to eligible households before the end of September 2022. As of this week, $8.4 million has been disbursed, according to the housing authority, with any unspent money set to go back to the federal government.
The same is true of the dollars managed by the state’s Housing and Finance Association, which is available to all of the other cities and counties in Idaho. So far, the rental relief program has served more than 8,000 individual households, Ellis said. But at the current pace, millions of dollars could go unused and returned to the federal government.
“We’re looking at it as a federal resource, and those are tax dollars,” Ellis, IHFA’s vice president of housing support programs, said by phone. “We don’t want to spend more than is necessary and needed. We’re happy that it’s there, and if we need to call upon it, we will to support families in need.”
How the federal rental assistance program works
The statewide program requires that renters — or landlords, with their tenants’ sign-off on their behalf — submit an application at idahohousing.com/hpp, or by phone. Eligibility requirements include providing proof of Idaho residency, yearly household income of no more than 80% of the area’s median income, and an ability to show economic strain tied to the pandemic.
“Really, there’s a wide range of circumstances we’re seeing that qualify for COVID-related hardship,” Ellis said. “The Treasury has come out with guidelines and has been running the program at the federal level, and has really pushed and encouraged self-attestation, where the renter is left to say this is my circumstance … and I need this.”
In Ada and Canyon counties, qualifying residents include individuals making at or below $42,200 in annual earnings, and up to $60,250 for families of four. There is no cap on the amount that can be paid out toward monthly rent and utility bills, for up to 15 months of assistance — past-due or going forward in three-month increments, Ellis said. Homeowners behind on their monthly mortgage payments are not eligible for the relief program.
Approved payments are made directly to landlords or property managers, or utility companies. Funds also may go toward late fees not deemed excessive, or to cover temporary hotel costs while residents find new homes if they’ve already lost their permanent housing.
The state program is receiving about 50 applications per day, with most receiving initial review within five days and disbursement of approved funds about a week later, according to IHFA. Priority is granted to applicants at or below 50% of the area’s median income, or $37,650 for a family of four in the state’s highest-cost counties.
Housing advocates fear a new wave of evictions
Many renters have been unclear whether they had protections and how the eviction ban applied in Idaho, advocates say. Garner and Lawson, who will lose their West Boise apartment in a little more than a month, thought the moratorium had already expired, and they’re not alone.
Kodie Shepard, a 28-year-old married mother of three, moved out of the family’s Caldwell duplex at the end of April after they were served with a 30-day notice to vacate. The owners decided to fix up the house to sell, Shepard said. The family’s desperate hunt for housing led them all the way to Emmett.
Shepard said their monthly rent rose from $825 in the affordable duplex to $1,400 they’re now paying at the rental home — totaling more than half their monthly income. With the federal moratorium on evictions in place, Shepard thought her family was protected. She was wrong.
“It was really a stab in the back,” Shepard told the Statesman by phone. “I was really hurt. I thought that we had done anything and everything we could to be the best tenants.”
Rabe is concerned that the coming expiration of the moratorium could produce a raft of new evictions. Landlords who held off from booting their tenants might feel emboldened as prospective pandemic protections lapse, she said.
“I mostly just feel uncertainness,” Rabe said. “It’s just really hard to know how much the moratorium has had an effect. Things haven’t changed a ton there. So there’s definitely a fear in the back of my mind, but really, mostly I just feel unsure what’s going to happen.”
Through a federal grant award of its own, Jesse Tree also works to support families making up to 80% of the area median income in situations that left them unable to pay their monthly rent during the pandemic. The nonprofit received more than 1,350 applications through the first seven months of this year, Rabe said, and has approved back rent, legal fees to fend off an eviction and the like for about 350 of them.
But with 30% of Ada County’s roughly 482,000 residents living paycheck to paycheck, according to Jesse Tree, and ongoing economic challenges from a housing supply that hasn’t kept up with exploding demand, tough realities are facing many needy Idahoans.
“I expect we’ll see more people in our community that are dealing with housing instability in the long and short term,” Rabe said. “And more people with evictions on their record, which never leave them and make it more difficult to find new housing, and more people that are living in our shelters, hotels, streets and couch-surfing.”
If a spike in evictions does occur, the Idaho Housing and Finance Association said it will be ready by adding staff to review applications to maintain swift turnaround times.
“I wouldn’t say we know for sure that it’s going to happen,” said Ellis, the statewide program’s director. “I have heard a lot of national and even some local advocates say to expect that. It’s something that we want to be prepared for.”
Landlord: rentals ‘never intended to be affordable housing’
In email exchanges, Wayne Callender, Garner and Lawson’s landlord, told Lawson that they’ve been “excellent tenants,” but that he needed to start charging closer to Boise’s soaring market rates on rentals. He didn’t raise rent last year, he told the couple, because of the pandemic.
Callender told the Statesman that his property taxes for the building spiked 22% last year and 37% more this year. He and his wife were also unemployed during the pandemic, he said, so their mix of rental properties made a big difference for them financially.
“We’re trying to do everything we can to make this work,” Callender told the Statesman. “Our building was never intended to be affordable housing. That was never my intent.”
Lawson said he and Garner are expecting lean times ahead. He began the process of withdrawing $4,000 from his retirement account to pay taxes this year, for example. But his plans for that money changed when the couple found out they needed to move, and the funds will now go toward first and last months’ rent, he said.
Shepard, too, worries that with few options for help and with the Treasure Valley’s inflated housing costs, tenants forced out of their homes could be entering a harsh cycle.
“It is still in the back of my head: What if this happens again?” Shepard said. “What if this is a perfect time to sell? … Financially, we’re still playing catch-up.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect the correct income qualification for financial assistance through area nonprofit Jesse Tree.
