Advancing Housing Equity in Philadelphia

By Dupe Oyebolu

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic created serious financial strain for millions across the globe, housing advocates across the United States had been sounding the alarm about a looming eviction crisis. Now, as an estimated 40 million people face evictions and housing insecurity, the United States is facing one of the most severe housing crises in history. And while the pandemic has significantly exacerbated this emergency, the root causes are much older and deeper according to attorney and housing advocate Rasheedah Phillips’18. She, through her work with the Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, provides legal representation to many Philadelphians navigating the ripple effects of eviction proceedings. She’s advancing this work with support from AFRE as a recipient of a 2021 Senior Fellow Growth Funding Award.

Housing issues in the U.S. are well documented. Historic and present-day instances of redlining, segregation, and predatory lending have all shaped the current housing landscape in which Black homeownership now lags at 44 percent compared to white homeownership, which stands at approximately 74 percent. However, lesser known are the effects of eviction proceedings on individuals’ ability to rent in the future, despite the outcome of the case. For example, even when renters win cases or eviction filings are withdrawn, as is often the case, the filing history remains on the individual’s rental records, making it difficult to acquire stable, secure housing.

These knock-on effects are among the insights in a report titled “Breaking the Record: Dismantling the Barriers Eviction Records Place on Housing Opportunities,” which Phillips published with her collaborators, including tenant organisers who have faced evictions and their itinerant consequences. The report lays out the impact of eviction records on housing prospects, and attendant opportunities for pathways to personal and financial stability.  

Importantly, the report also highlights the racialised impacts eviction records. Black women are especially hard hit, reflecting larger U.S. trends in which Black Americans are disproportionately at risk for evictions. Since 2015, 56 percent of Philadelphia’s eviction filings were made against Black people and 81 percent were filed against people of colour.

Phillips honed the racial justice lens of her work over multiple fellowships, including her time in the AFRE Fellowship experience.

“I’ve always been informed by my own experiences as a Black person, [as a] queer person, and as a young parent, coming from a community that is always caught up in oppressive forces. [But my fellowship experiences] gave me tools, support and space to name [those forces] intentionally and to engage in systems-level thinking around racial justice issues,” she said.

Since its publication, the Breaking the Record report has been referenced locally in Philadelphia and nationally across the U.S., responding to an urgent need for public understanding of the immediate and long-term effects of evictions, given the looming pandemic-related crisis. Phillips notes the complexity that the current crisis introduces: because more people, particularly those who may otherwise have been shielded from evictions, face serious risk due to the pandemic, there is greater public will to tackle evictions’ effects. At the same time, this shift in the public understanding of who is impacted by evictions introduces the potential of justifying policies with narratives of idealised tenants who are only at risk because of the extraordinary circumstance of a global pandemic.

Phillips and her colleagues are careful to avoid this. Instead, their policy change efforts will be rooted in the breadth of narratives that show the nuance and complexity tenants’ experiences both prior to, and as a result of the pandemic.

“[We want people to] tell their own stories [in ways] that are not just filtered through this lens of ‘who's a good person’ and ‘whose story is a good story.’ We can create space for a lot of different stories and a lot of different angles. And [we can] talk about how each [of these instances are] unfair in and of themselves without leaning on some trope of who's deserving and who's not.”

The Breaking the Record coalition aims for their work to impact local Philadelphia policy, as well as policy across the larger state of Pennsylvania. “When we achieve that, more people will have access to affordable housing and will be able to stabilise themselves, and we'll see more  stabilisation of housing in our city as a whole.”