Homelessness. It takes many forms in modern North Carolina – some familiar, some less so. For several thousand families, it means double-bunking or “couch surfing” with friends or relatives for an extended period. For a tragic number, it means living in a vehicle or even camping out in tents, shanties, parking garages, and downtown doorways, under highway overpasses, or on park benches.
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evictions
evictions
WASHINGTON — Jon Zang walks his dog several times a day in his mobile home community in West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania. It’s quiet, as most of his neighbors are at work. But he often wonders how many more walks he and his bulldog mix, Ladybug, will have down the streets of the place he’s called home for 21 years. “We’re literally sitting on a time bomb that we’re sure is going to go off at some point, but we don’t know when,” Zang said.
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Additional federal funds are helping, but locals fear being swamped as evictions multiply A U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month struck down a federal moratorium on evictions, threatening to displace thousands of North Carolina’s K-12 students whose families can no longer pay their rents.
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The red Honda parked on Debee Anderson's lawn saved her and her daughter's life when they fled Hurricane Florence in September 2018. Anderson was picking up medication for her daughter and about to return to her Spring Lake home when a state trooper told her she couldn't, because of river flooding.
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A morning in evictions court: 123 cases, residents of 31 households on the verge of homelessness On the brisk Monday morning of March 29, Magistrate William Glascoff in the Forsyth County small claims court handed down one eviction judgment after another. Residents of 31 households lost their homes.
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Legal loopholes in the moratorium fail to protect some renters Kerston Rankins put all her plans and belongings for a better life in boxes when she moved to Winston-Salem. Five chests of clothes, three cases of DVDs and several other keepsakes, which she and her husband loaded in the car and drove up from Statesville.
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Last December, as North Carolina was hurtling toward an eviction tsunami, a diverse group of stakeholders met to brainstorm policy interventions. Thankfully, a crisis was temporally averted when Congress passed a second Covid-19 relief bill in late December that provided the states with $25 billion in rental assistance and extended the nationwide eviction moratorium.
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With the first shipments of a COVID-19 vaccine arriving in the state, many North Carolinians are feeling a new kind of hope as the pandemic stretches into 2021. But without swift government action at the state and federal levels, the new year could usher in an “eviction tsunami” and economic devastation, according to experts who gathered to discuss the problem Tuesday.
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Red and white “For Rent” signs have yet to crop up on lawns in Southeast Raleigh, but Kimberly Muktarian, a lifelong resident of the area, is expecting they will soon. For the last few months, a statewide eviction moratorium has kept residents safely in their homes. Gov. Roy Cooper created the moratorium by executive order on May 30, but it expired on June 21.
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