The Washington City Paper is reporting a completely distressing story entitled “Eviction Companies Pay the Homeless Illegally Low Wages to Put People on the Street.”
The headline pretty much says it all, but some of the details are worth noting. First, the homeless are coming to a local shelter in D.C. each day hoping to be picked up as day laborers. Second, the men (and occasional) women homeless people are generally dealing with addiction of some kind. Third, the eviction companies have already been sued about paying below minimum wage to these day workers. Fourth, while the payments are extremely low, the companies pick homeless addicts and occasionally supplement the wages with alcohol. This effectively drives the homeless addicts to get another fix, which then leads them back to the miserable work arrangement so they can get just enough money to get another boost.
Here’s part of the report:
A man who works for both Street Sense and on the trucks, who is homeless and did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the eviction companies, says he first got work on an East Coast Express Eviction truck right after he moved to D.C. several years ago. He had heard through the grapevine that employment was available outside S.O.M.E. and was surprised to find that he did not need to fill out paperwork. When he first got on the truck, he says he saw a cooler of beer, and thought, “I’m in the right place.” It seemed like a party—and it was—drinking in a van with other guys before work. But he soon learned that whatever he drank would be deducted from his pay at the end of the day.
And he realized why the men were getting beers. “We have seen babies crying, grandmas. … You get a beer, so you don’t have any emotion,” he says in an interview at the Street Sense offices. “You do some kind of drugs, so then you don’t care, so you leave them on the curb over there crying, and go on to next one.” He says the evictees don’t get any information either—no shelter listing or hotline number.
The man, who struggles with a drinking problem, also says it was no mystery to him why eviction companies continued to show up outside S.O.M.E. even after the lawsuit. “Instead of choosing someone professional who says, ‘I can’t do it,’ they choose people who don’t have any feelings anymore, and have given up on life,” he says. “Because they will get on this truck for $7.”
As poverty and homelessness research Kevin Corinth states, this is NOT OKAY. But Corinth’s reasons aren’t exactly what you may expect. For one, he’s not arguing about whether the minimum wage is “fair.” Nor does Corinth have a problem with eviction in principle. Even as a researcher on homelessness, he acknowledges that landlords have a legal and moral right to be paid rent for providing living accommodations. As he points out, “Stopping all evictions would mean that landlords would no longer be willing to accept the tenants who are at greater risk of defaulting on their rental obligations in the first place.”
Corinth also doesn’t have an issue with the person who would take the job of evicting a family because while difficult to do, a professional and empathetic worker can “help preserve a sense of humanity in the face of horrible circumstances.”
For Corinth, his issue is with eviction companies that would exploit homeless people with addiction to keep them coming back to the illegally low-wage job.
Rather than being encouraged to serve with professionalism and empathy, they are encouraged to numb their humanity with alcohol.
And that means that families at their lowest point are dehumanized as well. Their personal belongings are handled by crews of men who have shut down. Meanwhile, some workers reportedly engage in theft to supplement their wages. As ACLU attorney Scott Michelman puts it, “[l]osing your home shouldn’t mean losing your dignity.”
Corinth says there are solutions to the mistreatment of homeless addicted aside from taking these companies to court. They include relaxing regulations on how many workers must be used to clear out a house, which leads eviction companies to look for cheap, unqualified work crews.
Another solution could be to prevent evictions from happening in the first place. Recent research has shown that offering families who are at risk of homelessness modest one-time payment leads to sharp reductions in entries into homeless shelters (and presumably reduces evictions as well).
The research Corinth references is here. It notes that one funding experiment found that giving someone who is about to become homeless a single cash infusion, averaging about $1000, could delay homelessness for two years. The research was done by offering one-time cash payments “to people on the brink of homelessness who can demonstrate that they will be able to pay rent by themselves in the future, but who have been afflicted by some nonrecurring crisis, such as a medical bill.” The team found those who received the cash infusion were 88 percent less likely to become homeless after three months and 76 percent less likely after six months. That’s a worthwhile investment when the overall cost of homelessness to society is much more expensive.
