A Twist in California’s Homeless Crisis: Evictions by the Evicted

https://news.yahoo.com/homeless-searched-steady-found-evicting-200041934.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/us/homeless-evictions-california.html?searchResultPosition=1

By Thomas Fuller
Feb. 11, 2020

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The couple’s predicament offers a measure of how far-reaching the homelessness crisis has become in California. The evicted are doing the evicting.

It is not their job to change locks or physically remove people from their homes — that is the sheriff’s domain — but several times a week Mr. Hebbring and Ms. Hansen leave the crowded, trash-filled, homeless encampment in Oakland where they live and travel to cities around the Bay Area: Newark, Millbrae, Fremont, Daly City, East Palo Alto and Hayward among them.

They go mainly by public transport, with a stack of documents. In some cases, they can post the notices on doors. In others, they are required to put them directly into the recipients’ hands.

“I’m sympathetic to their situation because I know what mine is,” Ms. Hansen said, bundled up on a rainy and cold winter night outside their trailer. “Look at us. I’m out here sick and homeless.”

Ms. Hansen says that despite the couple’s misgivings about delivering eviction notices, their options are limited.

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Ms. Hansen’s and Mr. Hebbring’s trailer is in a homeless encampment profiled by The New York Times in December that the authorities are in the process of dismantling, one of more than 100 camps across Oakland.
[How will dismantling a homeless encampment help the situation? Where are they expected to go?]

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Evictions brought on by rising rents have helped reshape the demographics of Northern California. The wealthy have concentrated in the bull’s-eye of the Bay Area — in and around San Francisco — and those who cannot afford the rent have shifted to the outer rings, to towns further and further away.

There is no reliable eviction data in California because most records are sealed, according to Carolyn Gold, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative, a nonprofit organization. She estimates that there are around 3,000 evictions a year in San Francisco alone based on the number of cases in court calendars.

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For Ms. Hansen it was the combination of a fractured family, a mother who got hooked on methamphetamines and natural disasters: Twice Ms. Hansen had her home burn in wildfires.

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Roy Cordeiro, the owner of a process serving company in the Bay Area, says the number of eviction notices he serves has increased from a couple each week to, more recently, a couple every day.

Despite the soaring stock market and the lowest unemployment rates in decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans are falling with no one to catch them.

“They say the economy is doing good but people can’t pay the rent,” Mr. Cordeiro said.

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Ms. Hansen says she wonders how many people they serve papers to end up homeless. Maybe she will see them on the streets someday or in the vacant lot where they sleep in Oakland.

“I almost want to tell them, ‘If you get kicked out, I’ve got a spot right here next to me.’”