Early in 2022, Dr Yan Li, a Yale graduate with a biostatistics doctorate, found herself suffering from the effects of bipolar disorder and unable to pay the homeowner’s association fees for her San Diego apartment. Instead of being met with support and resources, Li was fatally shot by law enforcement officials while being evicted from her home.
“It was an unnecessary escalation when conducting a very simple eviction notice, a simple procedure,” said Chenyang “Sunny” Rickard of the Alliance of Chinese Americans San Diego. “This death, in our opinion, could have been avoided.”
Li’s case stands out while being unremarkable: though there is rare video evidence substantiating how she died, her death itself reflects the violent reality faced by many involved in the eviction process. On 3 March of last year, officers came to her home to serve her with an eviction notice and remove her from the apartment. Their tense exchange escalated, at which point Li charged at one of the officers with a knife and stabbed him. She was subsequently shot several times. Li’s ex-husband said that law enforcement did not recognize that she was in the midst of a mental health crisis and failed to appropriately diffuse the situation.
Although there is no national data tracking violent or fatal outcomes of the eviction process, Princeton University’s Eviction Lab has been monitoring news reports of such cases in the US since July 2021. Within that time frame, there have been more than 80 deaths related to evictions, with more than 30 fatal cases happening in 2023 so far.
Other forms of violence happen several times a month, including physical altercations between tenants and landlords, incidents of violence involving law enforcement and cases of arson. Though this research has stopped short of investigating the circumstances of each incident, in aggregate these events tell a systemic story about the physical, emotional and economic violence of eviction.
These cases exemplify one of the many ways the US employs punitive measures to manage social crises. Incarceration and eviction have become parallel processes that trap people into cycles of poverty and instability. The violence of the eviction process is more than symbolic: eviction can and does lead to physical violence, incarceration and even death for tenants, their families, landlords and law enforcement officials. Similar incidents happen year-round across the country, though solutions are well within grasp if only these cases were investigated thoroughly, and resources allotted preemptively.
Earlier this year, Philadelphia saw three eviction-related shooting incidents in just four months, leading the city to temporarily halt its eviction proceedings. Near Cincinnati, a mother fatally shot three members of her family and then died by suicide just before deputies attempted to remove her from her home. And in Pittsburgh, an eviction evolved into a fatal four-and-a-half-hour-long standoff between a tenant and the police.
“We believe the suspect was neutralized during the gunfight,” the Pittsburgh police chief, Larry Scirotto, told local media.
Violence in the eviction process also endangers law enforcement officials. A deputy in a suburb outside Portland, Oregon was wounded but survived a July shooting, in which the tenant died. In August 2022, a Pima county constable suffered a less fortunate fate in Tucson, Arizona: a tenant who was being removed from their home opened fire against her and an apartment complex employee, and later against a neighbor. All four people involved in the incident died.
No two evictions look the same. Since the process of legal eviction is governed by state law and is driven by the rules of individual courts, the process of removing someone from their home can look very different across the US.
Despite this, generally speaking, a landlord must first provide a tenant with a formal written warning that they are in violation of the lease. Some states require landlords to provide tenants with a few days’ notice before filing, while still others require no notice at all. After this warning, the tenant has a specific number of days to either pay the rent due or move out voluntarily; this can range from three days to two weeks, depending on the state. If a tenant moves without paying their rent first, the landlord can still sue for the amount of rent owed. After that period, a landlord may file an eviction in court, at which time a judge will review the case and either refer the case to mediation or issue a ruling. The final step is the removal of the tenant and their belongings from the property by local law enforcement, usually no more than 10 days after the judge’s ruling. In states with few or no notice requirements, a landlord can forcibly remove a tenant from a unit in as quickly as a few weeks.
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In a typical year, American landlords file 3.6m eviction cases. In 2016, seven evictions were filed every minute. The process has been criticized by legal scholars Deborah Eisenberg and Noam Ebner as an “expedited, state sanctioned collection process for landlords”. Notably, eviction disproportionately affects Black and Latino households, with Black women and Latinas facing higher rates of eviction than men in these groups.
Systemic injustices require systemic solutions. Tenant advocates and alternative dispute resolution professionals alike have long imagined many interventions – known as eviction diversion programs – that could help diminish the possibility and stress of losing a home, reduce violent outcomes, and increase overall housing stability.
Eviction diversion programs seek to intervene in eviction cases, offer tenants resources, and divert cases away from trial or a forcible move-out. According to a report by the American Bar Association and Harvard Law School’s Dispute Systems Design Clinic, the best way to avoid eviction is to connect tenants with a holistic set of services, a combination of rental or cash assistance, access to legal representation, quality mediation and self-help resources for those without legal representation. Many of these services can be delivered by justice workers, non-lawyers who are skilled in navigating the legal system and can connect litigants with targeted resources and support. Eviction diversion programs are generally most successful when they intervene before a landlord takes legal action against a tenant. Such programs often result in a payment plan for back rent, a tenant-landlord agreement to continue their relationship or a voluntary move-out plan that connects the tenant to alternate housing – all without the involvement of law enforcement.
A community in Sarasota county, Florida, took several recent incidents of eviction-related violence as a call to employ some of these practices. After a deadly shooting, the sheriff’s department partnered with the local United Way chapter to build a program that connects tenants with the potentially life-saving support of case managers, mediators and legal aid attorneys. If the program cannot negotiate an outcome for the tenant with these resources, the United Way helps them move to a temporary housing solution, while working toward a permanent plan. Interventions such as these slow down the otherwise near-automatic process of removing a tenant and supports them in ways that can help them avoid homelessness, prolonged poverty and even death.
Unfortunately, initiatives such as these are few and far between. Rather than receiving support, tenants often face heavily armed officers at the moment of being removed from their homes. The violence eviction inflicts is not just economic or symbolic: when tenants are removed from their homes, people are harmed, and some die. Their tragic stories are under-reported; with investment in eviction prevention, they need not be inevitable.