Luis Erazo moved to East Boston 18 years ago, took a job as a custodian and started a family. Now the father of four said he lays awake at night, kept up by the stress of losing his home — a possibility that looms less than two months away.
“If I was just one person, it would be fine to find a place, but I have kids, and it’s very difficult,” Erazo said through a translator during an interview with WGBH News Sunday. “I don’t speak English, and there’s a lot of discrmination I have to deal with as well."
Erazo is one of more than 20,000 Boston residents facing threats of eviction since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to housing rights activist group City Life/Vida Urbana.
Despite a statewide moratorium prohibiting written evictions until August 18, Erazo said his landlord has made it clear that she intends to turn his apartment and the one next door into a development.
“It's really a difficult situation for us because we told the owner that we couldn't, like, leave the house,” Erazo said. “She told us to leave the house in March. And we just keep fighting, telling her that we can't leave because of the pandemic.”
At the beginning of the shutdown, Erazo was forced to reduce his work hours from 90 to 20 per week, which equated to less than one third of his previous paycheck.
“It’s like, is it going to be food or rent?” Erazo said. “We had to choose to get food and to stay behind on the rent.”
A report released Sunday by City Life/Vida Urbana and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that evictions disproportionately affect communities of color. The report looked at both subsidized and market-rate housing and analyzed Boston Housing Court eviction records in Boston from 2014 to 2016, and found that the highest eviction filing rates occurred in communities of color, like Roxbury, Mattapan, Hyde Park, the South End, Lower Roxbury and Dorchester.
Tenants living in market-rate apartments in Roxbury, which is 90% people of color, are evicted seven times more than tenants in Allston/Brighton, which is 62% white, according to the report.
Only 52% of rental housingis in neighborhoods of color, evictions impact those neighborhoods much more significantly — 70% of eviction notices in private-market housing are served in neighborhoods of color, and 37% are served in majority Black neighborhoods. That's more than double the private-market eviction notices served to primarily white communities, which only make up 30% of total evictions across the city.
The study also noted that communities like East Boston and Chinatown have the highest percentages of immigrant communities, and could potentially have a significant portion of underreported evictions.
City Life/Vida Urbana Communications Director Helen “Homefries” Matthews says the organization has been working with MIT researchers for at least a year before the coronavirus pandemic hit. “The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbates the disproportionate effects of evictions on communities of color,” the report reads.
“Our findings demonstrate that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the housing crisis in Boston was severe and that the struggles of housing instability and trauma of evictions disproportionately affect low-income renters of color in neighborhoods like Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.”
In response to these findings, City Life/Vida Urbana activists organized two car caravan protests over the weekend, driving through the city and stopping at some of the homes of residents who face eviction, tenant associations in East Boston, and Suffolk Downs, a former racetrack being transformed into a 10,000-unit luxury apartment complex.
“Racial justice is housing justice. Until we get housing justice, we're not going to be anywhere close to reaching racial justice,” City Life organizer Gabriela Cartagena said on Sunday, as more than 100 drivers decorated signs to tape to the outside of their cars ahead of the protest. “The goal today is not only to get the moratorium extended, the goal today is to bring awareness and push the rent control bill that is currently stuck in the State House.”
Last month, the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing voted to push forward a measure that would allow rent control and other tenant protections in Massachusetts for the first time since it was banned by a ballot measure in 1994. The housing rights group also plans to lobby for a housing stability act that would help tenants and homeowners cancel housing debt accrued during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The protest, Cartagena said, was not just on behalf of tenants, but to represent the interest of small landlords and homeowners as well.
“If the moratorium is not going to get extended, if we don't get rent control, if we don't get this act for housing stability out, we're going to see a lot more than 20,000 evictions on August 18,” she said. “We're going to see a lot of these small homeowners getting foreclosed. It's not just evictions, it's foreclosures. We do not want a repeat of 2008 due to the negligence of our government.”
Waiting for the procession of cars to begin, protester Kimberly Landaverde held a sign that read:“Cancel COVID-19 debt, rent evictions, mortgage and foreclosure.”
Landaverde moved into her East Boston apartment with her parents in March. She said they received a verbal threat of eviction from their landlord after not being able to pay their rent for May.
“My parents are both really worried about it because there is a lot more to pay, including utilities, so it's very hard,” Landaverde said. “Right now, we're grateful for the moratorium. But that's not going to last forever, so this is why we're here fighting.”
Landaverde’s mother had a baby in March, and then both her parents each lost one of their two jobs due to the pandemic.
Landaverde said that, “in a perfect world,” the moratorium could be extended and their debt could be forgiven, but she’s not sure what will come next.
“There are days where my mom is just really worried that we won't be able to make ends meet,” she said. “But we’re very hopeful that something will turn out in the end.”
East Boston resident Frances Amador has rallied her neighbors together, with the help of City Life/Vida Urbana, to block their landlord from evicting them and building condominiums where their apartment currently stands.
“It's very unfair,” Amador said. “The moratorium is coming in August, and there will be mass evictions.”
Amador said eviction is not a reasonable option for herself and her neighbors, many of whom have been unemployed for months, due to the pandemic.
“Our plan is to fight,” she said. “And when we fight, we win. So we’re taking it day by day.”
Correction: an earlier version of this article cited percentages in reference to demographics of individual tenants that get evicted, instead of demographics of total communities.
