Introduction

Carmen Jones nudged me in the arm, then pointed down at her cell phone screen. A text had just come in from a company that manages a half dozen rental properties on the far east side of Indianapolis.

“Your rental application has unfortunately been denied for one or more of the following reasons: Court filing from landlord on tenancy screening report.”

As it happened, we were at that very moment in front of a judge who was conducting a hearing on that court filing: her landlord’s demand that Carmen and her two children be evicted. Shortly after the constable delivered court papers to her door, Carmen and her children (I will not use clients’ real names in this book) voluntarily left the apartment. But that did not stop the so-called “Scarlet E” of the eviction filing from following her.¹

By the day of the court hearing, Carmen and the children were sleeping at an extended-stay motel, with Carmen leaving the room every morning to go to work. The cost of eighty-five dollars a night was clearly unsustainable, and some nights Carmen could not come up with the fee. On those nights, she and the kids slept in their car. But motels don’t check tenant reports, and the landlords she applied to were rejecting her left and right. Many of the other motel residents were in the same situation.

After the hearing ended, one of my law students and I walked out in the hallway to talk for a few minutes with Carmen. But the court bailiff followed us out, summoning us back into the courtroom for Natasha Green’s case.

The police had recently arrested Natasha’s abuser, the father of her children. The arrest protected Natasha from his drunken beatings but also left her without his income to help support their five kids. So Natasha took a job thirty-five miles away from home, working in a warehouse on the 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, four nights a week. She has a rickety car and tenuous nighttime child care arrangements.

Natasha is struggling with lack of sleep—she does not have much help watching the kids during the day. But she hopes that she can keep all this going long enough to pull in the paychecks she needs to catch up on rent.

Tanya Lyons sits in court watching all this, waiting for her turn. Tanya’s four-year-old son Amari is nestled into the crook of her arm, drawing with a highlighter on white paper the court reporter has given him. Two days ago, one of our law school clinic students had successfully argued that the judge should allow Tanya and Amari to stay in their home an extra month before eviction. But at 10 p.m. the night after the hearing, the home’s power was cut off, presumably after a call to the utility company by the angry landlord.

So goes about twenty minutes in eviction court.

When we started our student practice program at Indiana University McKinney School of Law a decade ago, we called it the Health and Human Rights Clinic. The plan was for law students on the verge of graduation to gain experience by advocating for low-income clients who were seeking access to health care. At first, we spent most of our time helping clients appeal denials of their applications for Medicaid. But what experts call the social determinants of health kept poking up in our clients’ lives.² There were red-tape cutoffs of food stamps for hungry households, shady employers not paying hardworking roofers and restaurant servers, unemployment benefits blocked by a system seemingly designed to prevent laid-off workers from getting stopgap help.

And, of course, housing.

There may be no more critical social determinant of health than whether a person is living in a safe, secure home. Decades of research tells us that each eviction causes damage not just to a family’s finances, but also their physical and mental health.³ Evictions are particularly harmful to the health of the children in these displaced households—and a household with young children is one of those most likely to face an eviction.⁴

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the combination of massive work income loss and rent taking up a huge chunk of the financial obligations of low-income families made one thing clear: a tsunami of evictions was coming, even as the US Centers for Disease Control moratorium held it back temporarily. Now, as I write this in late 2024, the number of evictions across the country is rising.⁵ The latest census reports show over seven million households are behind on their rent, which means they are on track to join our clients lining up in court each day to fight to stay in their homes—or, more often, to hear what day the judge orders them to move.⁶

Fifty-five million people in the US live in households paying more than half their income for rent, and that spells trouble too.⁷ These families may be balancing all their obligations now, but our clients’ experience tells us that many are just a broken-down vehicle or a child’s illness away from eviction court.

Lawyers and law students can’t fix all this. But we can sometimes slow down the eviction process for tenants, buying them time to search for a safe place to move or uncover a temporary influx of cash to make rent. And we can push for fairness in a process that is notoriously dismissive of renters’ rights. Like firefighters arriving at a home already engulfed in flames, we arrive too late to prevent the worst damage from happening. But we do have the tools to mitigate the harm, at least some of the time.⁸

So the Health and Human Rights Clinic became a housing clinic. This book shares the lessons we learned about how our nation should respond to our clients and the millions of others struggling to stay housed in your neighborhood and mine.

Full disclosure here: The first four chapters of this book are not uplifting. They describe the devastating impact of housing insecurity on families and individuals. They lay out how the US abandoned a once-promising approach to ensuring housing for all. These chapters also walk us through the shameful legacy of racism in US housing policies and practices and describe how we lavish government housing benefits for wealthy individuals and corporations while leaving low-income families out in the cold.

When it comes to the US housing crisis, it is tempting to despair. But we shouldn’t, because we know how to fix this. The later chapters in this book show the way.

We learn in chapter 5 that we can prevent many evictions simply by no longer allowing our courts to operate as a fast and cheap collection tool for landlords. Research from Princeton’s Eviction Lab shows that higher eviction filing fees, even in low-income states like Alabama, are associated with significantly lower eviction rates.⁹ And there are fewer evictions in cities where the law requires landlords to show “good cause” before putting tenants out.¹⁰

In chapter 6, we learn that US cities like Houston, Milwaukee, and Denver, as well as international examples like Finland, prove that a “Housing First” approach can all but eliminate chronic homelessness. The most humane response to the needs of our sisters and brothers struggling with homelessness is to prioritize a safe, secure roof overhead as a human right, then addressing other social service needs. This Housing First process works, reducing the number of people who are unhoused and blocking the too-common path from homelessness to arrest and incarceration.

We also learn in chapter 6 that inclusionary zoning in cities like Santa Fe can blunt the forces of gentrification. Zoning codes should ensure that we can build affordable housing in areas where low-income working families, seniors, and others can access jobs, schools, health care, and public transportation.

For our clients and most other low-income families, housing costs are by far the highest expense in their household.¹¹ That means that income supports like child tax credits, maximized food stamps, and stimulus checks can keep these families housed. Emphatic proof of this approach came during the first years of the COVID pandemic, when expanded benefits pushed US poverty rates to the lowest they have been in recorded history—a remarkable achievement accomplished during an era of widespread joblessness and illness.¹²

In chapter 7, we see how two-hundred-plus US municipalities with rent control measures in place have prevented the price gouging that has led some of our clients to lose their homes in communities like ours in Indianapolis, which have no rent control. The longtime presence of rent control in many of our nation’s most profitable real estate markets proves that reasonable price limits not only protect tenants, but they also guarantee landlords a fair return on their investment. These regulations do not slow housing development, either: New Jersey in particular has proved that housing construction can thrive and even boom in locations where both inclusionary zoning and rent control are the law.¹³

In chapter 8, we address the fact that millions of households, because of disability or low wages or both, have incomes that are too low to consistently afford market-rate housing. The good news is that there are many examples across the US and in other countries showing that public housing can be a safe, secure alternative. We can provide housing that is far less expensive than the for-profit market could ever offer, protecting our most vulnerable neighbors and allowing families to thrive.

Chapter 9 reviews the success stories from other nations proving that providing housing for all can be effective, affordable, and sustainable. We will see that many of the most highly praised cities in the world feature a great deal of subsidized housing, built on a foundation of legal and binding commitments to housing as a human right. The blueprints for success are there for us to follow.

Abundant, high-quality public housing. Rent control. Tenant protections. Of course, as our clients attest, none of that is the norm in the US today. So chapter 10 shows us how religious communities, who have played key roles in past social movements, can make an important contribution to the current housing movement, too. Strong scriptural and historical foundations are already in place calling for US religious communities to prioritize housing. Many already do so. More need to pitch in.

Finally, in chapters 11 and 12, we reveal what I think is the most promising development in US housing: the growing tenant movement.

History tells us that social change happens when those most affected are in the lead, so it is exciting to see that US tenants are pushing to the front of the line. Tenants across the country are mobilizing under the “Rent Is Too Damn High” banner. They are demanding a tenants’ bill of rights that includes good-cause protections from eviction, mandates for livable housing conditions, and federal action on rent control.

These tenants are canvassing rental communities and trailer parks, occupying vacant buildings, and pushing ballot initiatives. And they are starting to rack up impressive victories. So chapters 11 and 12 tell their stories, with a particular focus on the vibrant, multiracial Louisville Tenants Union.

This movement needs all of us. So, on behalf of Carmen, Natasha, Tanya, and the millions of other Americans who are engaged in the daily struggle to keep a safe, secure roof over their heads, thank you for reading about their challenges. And thank you for reading about how we can end their suffering. I hope you will agree that we can—and we must—make their struggles a thing of the past.