Creative Commons
A homeless encampment in Tuscon, Arizona.
In late 2019, our team founded the Tucson Tenants Union to address the alarming housing crisis growing rapidly within our community. At the time, the number of forcibly displaced families was staggering, with hundreds of evictions taking place every single week in Pima County, Arizona. The lack of safe, affordable, and secure housing has become an existential threat for many tenants in Tucson—and the crisis has only deepened since the pandemic began.
Between 2015 and 2019, across Pima County, more than 50,000 tenants were displaced from their homes. In 2018 alone, more than 13,000 evictions were filed. Shockingly, 95 percent of those eviction hearings were ruled in the landlord’s favor. Most tenants do not appear in court for eviction hearings, and those who do seldom have legal representation.
We have seen institution after institution fail so many vulnerable tenants.
Meanwhile, the availability of affordable housing is continuing to decline across Southern Arizona, in line with national trends. In Tucson, 60,000 more affordable housing units would have been needed to meet the demand in 2019. And the number of landlords willing to accept subsidized housing voucher programs is dwindling. In short, with evictions expected to spike drastically after the August repeal of the federal eviction moratorium, Tucson already faced extreme housing instability.
To make matters worse, 23 percent of Arizona’s nearly one million tenants are considered “extremely low income,” and Tucson’s poverty rate, which has increased during the pandemic, is roughly 9 percent above the national average. Arizona’s unemployment rate has also grown since the pandemic. But even before COVID-19, Tucson’s poverty rate was worse in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities.
Overall, according to an analysis by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renters in Pima County would have to earn $18.44 per hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent of $959, but the average renter’s wage here is only $15.22.
The displacement of families has also been exacerbated by tax incentives that exert upward pressure on rents by incentivizing large developers to move into historic neighborhoods. These efforts single out Tucson’s most vulnerable residents as they gentrify swaths of low-income and historically Black and brown neighborhoods and barrios.
Here, lifelong residents are being forced out of their homes through indiscriminate rent hikes and rising property taxes. For retired seniors and adults on a fixed income, hikes in housing costs can quickly lead to displacement.
Recent research has found that expiring state eviction bans have led to hundreds of thousands of additional COVID-19 cases and an estimated 10,700 additional deaths in the United States between March and September 2020. To make matters worse, Tucson is expected to have a tsunami of eviction filings now that the federal moratorium has been struck down.
On the ground, these factors have proven incredibly difficult to navigate. When we created the Tucson Tenants Union, we focused strictly on building the infrastructure needed for collective tenant power. This is a long and arduous process that requires months, if not years, of membership building. Once the pandemic began, however, our efforts had to shift toward mutual aid efforts and direct action to address the immediate and shifting needs of our community.
On issues directly related to tenant resources and protection, we had a steep learning curve. When we began, we understood that resources were lacking and that tenant law generally favored landlords, but nothing could have prepared us for the true extremity of these issues. We have seen institution after institution fail so many vulnerable tenants.
The laws themselves are geared toward criminalizing at-risk tenants and protecting landlords. We have seen the most vulnerable families fall through the cracks, with resources quickly drying up. Even at the height of the utility shut-off ban, we witnessed landlords turning off vital amenities such as electricity, water, and air conditioning in the middle of the summer, with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
Despite these extreme situations, neither local elected officials, utility companies, nor police were able to address the forcible removal of tenants by landlords and management companies.
Now more than ever, we need to see housing as a human right.