Idaho shouldn’t be making it easier to evict people right now
Fair housing advocates are concerned that a bill that would have sped up the process for evictions in Idaho and narrowly failed in the House of Representatives last year will make a return this session.
The bill’s sponsors last year said it would have simplified the eviction process for landlords and added some new protections for renters.
Opponents of the bill, including the ACLU, see the legislation as simply giving landlords more leverage over renters in a state that some see as already one of the most landlord-friendly in the country.
It’s expected that another housing bill will be introduced this session that is a mirror image of the one that failed last year.
While recognizing the needs of landlords, fair housing advocates are seeking solutions that pursue a more anti-displacement approach and decrease the significant barriers for low-income and modest-means populations.
The bill, introduced by the Idaho Apartment Association, would have changed the way landlords act against tenants who violate the terms of their lease or fail to pay rent. Current law forces a landlord to file two lawsuits to evict a tenant — one forcing the tenant to return the property to the landlord, the other to seek monetary damages.
The bill would have combined those lawsuits into one and reduced the maximum time for the eviction process to a month or less. Courts would be forced to schedule trials within 12 days.
That raises a concern about due process, according to Joshua Taylor, an adjunct professor at Concordia University School of Law in Boise who co-teaches the Concordia University Housing Clinic.
Taylor was one of three panelists at a housing forum I moderated on Tuesday at Concordia. He was joined by Ali Rabe, executive director of the Jesse Tree in Boise, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing eviction and homelessness, and Liam Spencer, a property manager who is president of Spencer Group Realty, affiliated with the Silvercreek Real Estate Group here in the Treasure Valley.
Even as the law stands now, the Idaho Attorney General’s Office wrote a letter that said parts of the current law regulating the relationship between tenants and landlords violate the Idaho Constitution. Taylor said further changes could lead to a legal challenge on constitutional grounds.
Taylor said the bill would allow a landlord to bring an eviction case to court much more quickly with very little notice for the tenant, increasing a landlord’s ability to evict a tenant quickly for minor violations, such as not trimming hedges or leaving garbage cans outside for too long.
Spencer said he tries to avoid evictions not only to be humane but also because it makes business sense.
In the current economy, with rents in the Treasure Valley skyrocketing, it’s tempting for landlords to kick tenants out who are paying lower rents so the landlords can quickly raise the rent for new tenants.
Rents in Boise are up 2.5% over the past year, the 23rd fastest growth rate among the nation’s medium-sized cities, according to a report released this month by Apartment List. For comparison, the national rent index grew by just 1.4% over the past year.
Since 2014, rents in Boise have grown by 17.4%, outpacing the national average of 11.3%, according to the report.
The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Boise is currently $951 compared with the national average of $1,192.
Rabe said she’s concerned that a bill that expedites evictions will simply mean more phone calls coming into Jesse Tree’s hotline, 208-383-9486.
She said most of the calls for help her organization receives deal with an inability to pay rent.
Jesse Tree helps people who, because of a cut in hours, loss of employment or an unexpected expense, find themselves unable to make a rent payment, which could lead to homelessness.
And that’s expensive for everyone.
Preventing homelessness costs on average about $800 per client, Rabe said, but once a family becomes homeless, it costs up to $10,000 to re-house them, and each person experiencing homelessness costs over $53,000 annually in supportive and emergency services. , according to a study by Boise State University researcher Vanessa Fry. So an $800 investment in prevention pays off.
Households paying more than 30 percent of their income are deemed to be cost-burdened, and these families often must choose among paying for rent, healthy food, medical care and other necessities. As of February, Idaho had a shortage of more than 23,000 affordable and available rentals for Idaho renters with extremely low incomes.
Jesse Tree, which has been around for 20 years providing homelessness-prevention services, has a success rate of 98 percent, Rabe said.
Over the past two years, Jesse Tree has assisted 711 households, and of those, 699 are still in their housing, Rabe said. But Jesse Tree is able to help only about a third of the clients who call in seeking assistance, she said.
All three on Tuesday’s panel said that the proposed bill, if passed, would likely simply mean more litigation, more court time and more attorney costs.
I’d listen to the folks who are on the front lines of this, and I’d be skeptical of anything that further tips the scales against renters.
This story was originally published January 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
