The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

As Hurricane Ida moves north this morning into Mississippi, it's important to note that the Supreme Court's decision to kill the CDC eviction moratorium means people are being evicted into the twin storms of a Gulf hurricane and COVID delta, and some of them will simply not survive the next few weeks.

T. Young’s reprieve from homelessness was three days.

The mother of four rushed home Friday when she heard the news. When she arrived, officers were still traveling door to door at Catherine Street Apartments in Starkville, flanking a representative from her new rental company. They were informing the residents that the mass-eviction process that started only weeks before was resolving, and resolving quickly.

What happened next is disputed. Were residents given three hours, or three days? Young is adamant that she heard three hours. “They said, ‘you have three hours to get out,’” she told the Mississippi Free Press in an Aug. 28 interview. “I was on the phone with my boyfriend, and I heard her say it. She was close enough for me to hear her. (Then) she said to get all our stuff packed up and leave.”

Others at the apartment complex heard the same message. Before long, activists arrived, representatives from Starkville Strong, from the Oktibbeha County NAACP. Twenty minutes after Young made it home, Starkville Mayor Lynn Spruill arrived. The eviction moratorium had not even been dead a full day. It may not have helped, though; the Starkville evictions have nothing to do with rent money.

Spruill conferred with Judge Marty Haug, who confirmed that he had not yet signed a removal order. But the order is coming, as sure as the hurricane brewing in the south. Monday morning, his signature will adorn it. On Tuesday, Young, her boyfriend and their four children—11, 9, 7, and a month old—will lose their home. Accompanying them will be many of the dozens and dozens of families living across 61 units at Catherine Street Apartments.

No back rent can save them. The apartments’ new owners plan to rehabilitate the buildings. For this, they want all of the residents gone. Without an active lease, nothing in Mississippi State Code prevents the evictions.

“At this point, we don’t know where we’re going next,” Young said. Her family had experienced homelessness already, finding a place at Catherine Street Apartments in December 2020 with the assistance of Starkville Strong, a local civic support group. That same organization is working to help Young and her partner now. Exhaustion fills her voice, and sorrow quiets it.

A hotel stay, they hope, will get them through the first weeks of September. Then, God willing, another affordable housing unit, one that might provide shelter for more than a year before unceremoniously throwing them out.

Imagine that this is the best case scenario for you, surviving long enough to get evicted again in a few years. Most likely, some of these folks will simply disappear into the hell of near-permanent homelessness. And some will die from COVID or other diseases. That's if they survive Ida flooding the state. 

This hell awaits tens of millions of us if we don't put in real safety guardrails. Sadly, we don't have the political will to do even that. Climate change, COVID, and a runaway Supreme Court? All preventable.

But we didn't prevent it.

So now we will pay for decades to come.

Some of us will pay with our lives, sooner rather than later.

This is America now.