Shouldn’t Every Day be Like No-Evictions Christmas?

Thanks to Common Dreams for publishing my article this week. You can read it on their site if you wish, or it is reprinted in its entirety here:

In the grim setting of eviction courts where our law school clinic represents people facing the loss of their homes, this is the closest we get to a magical time of year. ‘Tis the season when we follow our clients into hallways outside courtrooms where they have just received the devastating order to move out of their homes. Quietly, we deliver the unofficial news that softens the blow just a bit: they likely won’t be forced out during the holidays.

It turns out that most courts and law enforcement have a distaste for both the vibe and the optics of putting a kids’ Christmas tree and presents out at the curb. No matter what the court-ordered eviction date is, very few forced move-outs occur between mid-December and January 1^st.

Sometimes this practice is formalized, such as when a county sheriff announced his deputies wouldn’t be evicting people during the holiday season. In past years, banks and government lending agencies paused foreclosure-triggered evictions over the holidays. Several European nations and a handful of U.S. cities like Washington DC, Chicago, and Seattle won’t carry out eviction orders during severely cold weather.

But the Christmas season eviction pause is most often an unwritten practice, coinciding with holiday time off for courts and law enforcement. That does not have the force of law, as one eager Minnesota landlord attorney points out on his website:

I am often asked whether a landlord should hold off on evicting a tenant until after the holidays. The short answer is no, the landlord should bring an eviction as soon as possible.  A landlord will do well to remember that being a landlord is a business.

That lecture is echoed by a Texas property management company that offers to “Be the Grinch” for squeamish landlords. Not only can families be evicted over the holidays, the company insists, but there is similarly no prohibition against putting out families with children during the school year or, in most jurisdictions, evicting during even the most brutal weather conditions.

Sadly, these landlord agents are correct. In a country that does not recognize in practice that housing is a human right, there is no legal barrier preventing even the most vulnerable among us from being forced into homelessness. U.S. landlords and their representatives know this, which means far more tenants are pushed out by “informal” evictions--anything from threatening notes on the door to illegal lock-outs—than are removed after formal court orders.

It is hard to track the numbers of those off-the-books evictions, but we know that there are 3.6  million formal eviction filings each year. And we know that eviction filings have in some cities have climbed to 50% or more above pre-pandemic levels. In one local court here in Indianapolis, there are 98 eviction cases set to be heard in a single morning session this week. Compare that to the many nations that enforce housing as a human right, where lawmakers say that “evictions really aren’t a thing here,” and the Center for Disease Control’s early-pandemic moratorium that prevented 1.5 million-plus eviction filings.

But at least the full power of the government and its police power to evict renters—a process that I and others have criticized as “fast, cheap, and easy”--is put on pause for a few weeks. Maybe we should be grateful that our clients’ recurring nightmares abate for a short time. Yet, when we know well the devastating physical and emotional impacts evictions have on families, especially children, it is puzzling to realize that throwing into the street a family or a person living with disabilities is so distasteful on December 24^th, yet perfectly acceptable on January 24^th.

The holiday evictions pause reminds me of the remarkable story of the World War I “Christmas Truce” in 1914. On Christmas Day, German and British soldiers paused their fighting to sing carols, trade drinks and cigarettes, and play a pick-up soccer game.

To me, it is less striking that the war paused for the holiday than that the soldiers went back to disemboweling each other the day after. We know the so-called “better angels of our nature” can prevail for a day or even a week. Our clients who will end up sleeping in their cars or on the streets on January 2^nd can’t help but wonder: Why it can’t be Christmas every day?