Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Evictions are among the harshest, most violent, disruptive, and damaging acts authorized by our civil courts. An armed official with a gun orders a tenant and their family out of their home and removes their possessions, often simply placing a family’s belongings — photos, knick-knacks, furniture, the accumulations of a life — on the sidewalk to be lost or damaged. Evictions ravage lives — they damage physical and mental health, disrupt education, cause job loss and homelessness, and dislodge people from community and stability. The violence of eviction is always implicit and often explicit. Sometimes, evictions result in armed conflict and death. And evictions are racialized and feminized: they are visited on Black women and other women of color in vastly disproportionate numbers. It is time to develop strategies to abolish evictions. Evictions do not take place in a vacuum. Much needs to be in place (or fail to be in place) for evictions to happen. Eviction is the end-product of a system that enlists judicial authority to maintain the existing power dynamic between landlords and tenants by employing this harshest of “civil” remedies. The eviction system exalts profit over human need. The eviction system denies tenants the legal and financial safeguards and supports that are needed to avert the types of conflicts that lead to eviction. The eviction system uses unfair, biased, one-sided, rapid-fire court processes and fails to provide tenants with legal counsel and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. The eviction system relies on modern-day bounty-hunters who make more money the more people they evict. The eviction system denies tenants’ dignity, respect, and humanity, and disregards the devastating impact of eviction on lives and livelihoods. It does not have to be this way. We know what to do to disrupt the eviction system and abolish evictions. There are tools and approaches already in use around the world, and increasingly in the United States, that can avert evictions, minimize their likelihood, and mitigate their devastating impact. This article calls for developing a strategy to abolish the use of evictions and presents a taxonomy of tools and approaches that are now being used or that could be used to that end.

Comments

https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/

Fordham Urban Law Journal, Volume 51, Number 5 (2024)

With People Struggling and the Law Failing, What Are the Solutions to the Access to Justice Crisis in America?

Download

Share

COinS