Philly renters facing eviction owe more in back rent now than before the pandemic

$17,000. That’s how much the tenant owed her landlord in back rent and accumulating fees for her Northeast Philadelphia apartment.

When the pandemic hit, the single mother and immigrant from West Africa had already lost her job at an Amazon warehouse, because she couldn’t work after being hit by a car. Then the pandemic temporarily halted the flea markets where the woman, who is in her mid-50s, sold beauty products.

After Amazon rehired her in June 2021, she paid her current rent and a little extra each month to try to catch up on her debt. But digging out of such a large hole was impossible.

“It comes up like a wave. So you find yourself, even though you keep paying and paying, you’re not like getting anywhere,” said the tenant, who asked that her name not be published to protect her privacy. “There was a time when I thought I was going to be locked out of my place, even though I’m paying.”

In mid-2021, after the city’s eviction court reopened for cases of missed rent, attorneys at the nonprofit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia regularly saw clients who owed more than $10,000.

Using rental assistance, tenant advocates were able to help resolve a lot of these eviction cases, including the Northeast Philadelphia woman’s a couple weeks ago. The woman’s landlord was willing to work with her and keep her in her home. But the woman’s rent is now almost $1,000 a month, and she said any further rent increases would be difficult.

Now, the typical renter debt that Community Legal Services sees is down to $3,000 or $5,000, but these amounts are still insurmountable for tenants struggling to get by, especially since much of the extra help households received earlier in the pandemic has stopped, including rental assistance. Roughly three years into the pandemic, levels of renter debt remain higher than they were before the health and economic crisis began.

In the months before the pandemic, tenants facing eviction in court owed a median of about $2,000, according to an analysis of landlords’ claims in eviction filings by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Past-due payments reached a peak last February, when tenants owed a median of more than $6,100. Now, monthly median rent debts are trending down, but remain above $4,500.

“This could mean that it’s that much harder to come to some kind of resolution that keeps tenants in their home,” said Peter Hepburn, a research fellow at the Eviction Lab and an assistant sociology professor at Rutgers University-Newark.

Larger debts are a problem for tenants and for landlords, especially those with just a few rental units who rely on rental income to pay for their mortgages, property taxes, and maintenance. Small landlords offer most of the private housing in Philadelphia that is affordable to the city’s lowest-income residents.

Mediators in Philadelphia’s Eviction Diversion Program continue to help tenants and landlords reach agreements, but high rent debts are a barrier, since rental assistance is not currently available to fill gaps in payments.

In the next few weeks, the city plans to restart distributing rental assistance through a new program tied to the Eviction Diversion Program, according to a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Planning and Development, which oversees eviction diversion. The city allocated $45 million in local funding for rental assistance this fiscal year and next through the diversion program.

“We understand that many Philadelphians face difficulties paying rent,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The city is committed to helping renters stay in their homes when possible, and we look forward to the launch of our program as we believe it will be a help to many individuals and families.”

Osarugue Grace Osa-Edoh, divisional supervising attorney of habitability at Community Legal Services, said she’s not surprised that Philadelphians’ rent debts aren’t back to where they were before the pandemic.

“The impact is still being so deeply felt by so many Philadelphia families,” she said. “One of the things that we as a community, a city, a country need to come to terms with is that this quote-unquote post-pandemic period is going to be a recovery process period not for weeks or months but for years, if not decades.”

Over the last couple of years, she and other advocates working with tenants have seen “just a real devastation in peoples’ lives,” she said. Philadelphia tenants have lost jobs or hours, had to share income with struggling family members or care for sick ones, recovered from being sick themselves, paid for funerals, lost their homes, and dealt with family separations and deteriorating mental health, she said.

On top of all that, tenants are navigating higher rents and also rising costs of everyday goods thanks to inflation. Their wages aren’t keeping up.

Nicole Lawrence, executive director of the Philadelphia-based tenant advocacy group Tenant Union Representative Network, said the need for help for tenants “is beyond what anyone could possibly think.”

The group used to see typical renter debts of a couple thousand dollars. “Now we’re seeing people calling saying that the landlords are saying they owe back rent of upwards of $6,000 to $10,000,” she said.

And tenants often are surprised when they receive notice of how much they owe, Lawrence said. Sometimes tenants pay in cash and don’t get a rent receipt, or they pay an employee at the rental office or slip their rent into a drop box, and landlords deny that they paid. Then there are late fees, administrative fees, and court costs tacked onto back rent.

Lost rent during the pandemic is one reason landlords say they have raised prices.

Some Philadelphia rental property owners who are out thousands of dollars in rent also have decided to leave the business. Ebony Harris is selling her only rental property, a Germantown triplex she bought in 2018 with a loan from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

For about 18 months early in the pandemic, her two tenants didn’t pay rent, she said.

She helped one apply for rental assistance from the city, and she received the money he owed. She said her second tenant received funds for the almost $16,000 in back rent she owed, but Harris never got the money.

She evicted her tenants, and her property has been vacant for more than a year, she said. During the height of the pandemic, Harris deferred mortgage payments, and now she has to pay more per month.

“It’s a struggle to pay for an empty building,” she said, but “I’m afraid to put anybody in it.”

So now she’s fixing up the house to sell it.