SU professors studying Syracuse evictions with local housing activist
By Emma Folts
This article was originally published in The Daily Orange.
A Syracuse tenant left everything behind when she was evicted. As she and her seven children were moving out of their home, her landlord allegedly threatened to make her life a living hell because of a newspaper article she had participated in.
The tenant told Palmer Harvey, co-founder of the Syracuse Tenants Union, that the landlord continues to harass her even after she’s been evicted.
Harvey was interviewing the tenant as part of a pilot eviction case study she’s conducting with Syracuse University professors. The study is following 30 people over the course of a year, with most of the participants found in eviction court.
“No one knew how many people were going through any of these things and what the stories were,” Harvey said. “Some of the stories I’ve heard from the tenants is just mind-boggling.”
About 11,000 Syracuse residents are evicted from their homes each year, according to city data. Nearly 25% of residents move at least once a year, with the percent reaching 35% in some city census areas.
The researchers are working to understand the factors that contribute to evictions, said Evan Weissman, an assistant professor of food studies at the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. They are also looking to determine how much people being evicted know about the eviction process and their legal rights, he said.
Data collection won’t be completed until about summer 2020. The six-member research team is interdisciplinary, including professors from Falk, the College of Law and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
In Syracuse, the problem of having bad landlords is more structural than individual, Weissman said.
“It’s really a broken system,” he said. “Certainly, there are some really terrible landlords operating in Syracuse, but we have a legal system that allows it to continue. We have a financial system that allows it to continue. We have a job market that allows it to continue.”
Almost all of the residents the researchers have interviewed currently work, Weissman said. A medical emergency leading to out-of-pocket costs or lost workdays has occurred immediately before an eviction in many cases studied, he said.
The researchers have also found that city rents are higher than reasonable in many cases, and rent varies minimally between neighborhoods, Weissman said. Students living on Euclid Avenue are not paying much more than people living in some of Syracuse’s poorest neighborhoods, like the Northside and Southside, he said.
“We’re talking about homes that landlords paid less than $20,000 for, and people are renting for $1000 a month, so that’s pretty alarming, and the conditions are beyond deplorable,” Weissman said.
One tenant spent her rent on a brief stay in a motel because bed bugs had infested her home, he said.
Syracuse has “a serious crisis” of substandard housing and poverty, said Gretchen Purser, a professor of sociology at Maxwell. The six researchers discussed that sentiment in an Oct. 15 letter to the editor at Syracuse.com.
“All of the people we interviewed for our study are living in substandard housing with obvious code violations,” the letter reads. “These conditions include sewage backing up into their houses, leaks, broken windows, doors without locks and vermin.”
The letter to the editor was submitted in response to articles concerning a tenant participating in the case study. After hearing about the many code violations in Tawanda O’Neal’s Northside rental property, University Neighborhood landlord Ben Tupper donated $1,000 to help O’Neal’s family relocate, according to Syracuse.com.
The researchers wanted to express that such charity is not a means of resolving Syracuse’s housing problems.
“We really need to just reshape the way in which we understand the challenges of housing here in Syracuse,” Purser said.
Syracuse set out to reduce evictions in May by presenting 11 initiatives to improve overall housing stability in the city. The anti-eviction measures include requiring that a property be registered with the city’s rental registry before a landlord can file to evict a tenant.
New York state also passed the Housing Security and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 in June. The act made tenant blacklists and unlawful evictions illegal. The researchers are using tenant interviews as an opportunity to inform tenants of their new rights under the law, Purser said.
Weissman said the new tenant act and city initiatives will impact the study’s findings, but it’s too soon to notice any immediate changes.
“Both what the city is doing and the attention that this current administration is paying to housing instability and the very strong changes that the state enacted are very positive steps, without a doubt,” Weissman said.