‘My family collapsed’: Why Sacramento’s Latino families face a higher risk of eviction
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Maria Aguilar lost her job cleaning an office building. Shortly after, she and her three children became infected with the virus.
“It affected me tremendously to see my children sick,” said Aguilar, 41, in Spanish. “I wasn’t healthy enough to take care of them.”
While they were still recovering, they received an eviction notice, stuck to their front door. It said they needed to pay more than $2,000 in back rent or leave the North Highlands apartment where they’ve lived for a decade.
“My family collapsed,” Aguilar said. “It was overwhelmingly difficult.”
Aguilar, who is undocumented, reached out to the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which helped her fill out a form to qualify her for the state’s eviction moratorium. Since then, the landlord has stopped threatening eviction — for now, Aguilar said. But she remains worried she will be evicted this winter.
The part-time earnings she and her daughter make working at a Sacramento motel won’t be enough to pay back the more than $4,000 in debt that’s piled up since the pandemic began. Renters could be evicted starting in February unless state lawmakers take additional action.
Aguilar’s story is not uncommon. Herman Barahona of the nonprofit United Latinos hears those stories frequently when talking to Latino renters in Sacramento – especially at the end of the month when rent is due, he said.
“We hear some landlords are compassionate, but most of the time we hear there’s an immense pressure that they have to make the rent,” Barahona said.
About 2 million adults in California were unable to pay July rent on time, and “many will eventually become homeless,” a UCLA report found.
“There are huge racial disparities among those behind on their payments,” the report read. “Compared with non-Hispanic whites, Blacks and Latinxs are two- to two-and-a-half times more likely to experience this housing hardship.”
Of those unable to pay rent, 23% were Black and 20% were Latino compared to 9% of both whites and Asian Americans, the report found.
‘The easiest tenants to take advantage of’
Even before the pandemic struck, Latino renters have historically been the most vulnerable to evictions, said Michelle Pariset of the Sacramento civil rights law firm Public Advocates.
“They’re the easiest tenants to take advantage of,” Pariset said.
Undocumented immigrants are especially at risk. They often try to avoid the court system out of fear of deportation, Pariset said. In addition, undocumented immigrants paid in cash who are laid off do not qualify for unemployment benefits, and Spanish-speaking attorneys to help them free of cost are hard to find.
They also tend to pay more of their earnings toward rent in the first place.
About half of the state’s undocumented residents spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and about a quarter spend more than 50% of their income on housing, according to a report by the the California Budget and Policy Center. Nearly 60,000 undocumented immigrants live in Sacramento County, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
“If you’re already paying half of your income towards housing, it doesn’t take much of a financial emergency to put you over the edge where you can’t afford to pay the rent,” said Sara Kimberlin, a senior policy analyst at the California Budget and Policy Center.
Like Aguilar, many Latinos are low-wage workers in the service industry – housekeepers, custodians, painters, or restaurant workers – the types of jobs workers cannot do from home.
“There’s just a lot of undocumented workers that work in industries and jobs have seen a lot of shutdowns and layoffs due to COVID-19,” Kimberlin said.
When the pandemic struck, Anthony Ydrogo’s family lost their main source of income. His wife is his part-time caregiver through the state’s In-Home Supportive Services Program. Unable to perform an at-home visit early in the pandemic to approve her work, the state stalled her income for three months, he said.
Because Ydrogo lives with a disability and cannot work, he and his three children depend on his wife’s income. They fell behind on rent and now owe more than $6,000. He fears his landlord will evict his family from their south Sacramento apartment as soon as the eviction moratorium expires, he said.
“It’s very hard with three kids, now a wife, and me living on disability trying to make ends meet,” Ydrogo, 40, said. “It’s affected us in a big way.”
What can be done?
Sacramento City Councilman Eric Guerra believes a disproportionate number of Latino families will face eviction throughout the state if renters don’t learn their rights.
“Months ago, we were sounding the alarm on health care numbers,” Guerra said, referring to the high number of COVID-19 cases among Latino communities statewide. “We need to be sounding the alarm right now on evictions and housing.”
The city has partnered with two organizations, the Sacramento Mediation Center and California Lawyers for the Arts, to provide help with landlord mediation, Guerra said.
In addition, the council in August allocated about $4.7 million on rental assistance – $2.7 from its $89 million federal coronavirus stimulus check and $2 million in other federal funds. Undocumented families will not be excluded from receiving that assistance, Mayor Darrell Steinberg said.
Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency will award that money to about 1,175 families next month, SHRA spokeswoman Angela Jones said. But more than 4,400 people applied, Jones said. That means about 3,225 families — 75% of those that applied — will not receive assistance.
Barahona and other activists, who urged the council to allocate additional rental assistance to begin with, are now renewing that call.
If there is any federal coronavirus money that remains unspent, the mayor’s office is considering offering another round of rental assistance, said Mary Lynne Vellinga, Steinberg’s spokeswoman. It would be a tight timeline, though. All the money must be spent by Dec. 31, according to federal guidelines.
This story was originally published November 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘My family collapsed’: Why Sacramento’s Latino families face a higher risk of eviction."
