Evictions in Cook County have caught up to pre-pandemic levels. The lack of affordable housing and rising costs are to blame, experts say

The TV was turned to the news as the smell of bacon wafted from the kitchen after the sheriff’s police entered Michael Hallmon’s South Shore apartment on a chilly November morning.

Inside the two-bedroom apartment sat a pile of clothes and shoes, along with a stack of bikes and a lawn chair made up as a bed. A computer monitor on a cluttered desk had a Microsoft Teams chat pulled up, and the kitchen counter was full of groceries. A greasy pan sat on the stove.

Hallmon, 47, was surprised to see the Cook County sheriff’s office on his doorstep. He said he filed documents in court requesting a jury hear his eviction case. The sheriff’s office, which was there to enforce the eviction, said he filed the wrong paperwork.

“This is ridiculous. Who does this?” Hallmon said after he and his roommate were removed from the apartment. “I have places to go, but I shouldn’t have to when I’m doing everything the right way.”

Hallmon was one of nearly 6,600 people evicted this year in Cook County, according to data through Dec. 5 from the Cook County sheriff’s office. While the number of eviction filings have been at pre-pandemic levels since 2022, this is the first year the number of enforced evictions — those that are carried out by the sheriff’s office under a court order — at residential rental properties in Cook County have caught up to 2019.

Tenants’ and landlords’ attorneys say evictions are up because many property owners are unwilling to take a second round of government rental assistance from tenants who have already received aid. Some tenants are also ineligible for money under the state’s program, which caps support at $25,000 or 18 months of rent — whichever comes first.

More broadly, significant rent increases in recent years are boosting eviction levels as many tenants are unable to pay higher monthly rents. Property owners say rent increases are unavoidable because of their own rising costs.

And while government legal aid programs put in place since the pandemic to help prevent evictions have assisted both tenants and landlords, they can only do so much, experts say.

‘A tremendous strain’

Marlene Tambourine, 78, has gone through the eviction process this year with the residents of her two-flat in Gladstone Park. She and her husband started renting out the two-flat in 1985 to help subsidize their mortgage payments after they moved to Northbrook when they had children. Renting out the two-flat was the only way they could afford the move, Tambourine said.

Tambourine said her family’s monthly fixed income is around $4,000, not counting the income she brings in from her small business or from the rental properties she owns. The mortgage payment for their Northbrook home is $2,700 a month, with the two-flat still having monthly payments as well, she said.

As of October 2022, Tambourine said her tenants, a mother and daughter, were behind about $6,000 for their $1,425 a month two-bedroom unit. She said she gave them the required five-day notice before filing for eviction, and they paid her.

After that, Tambourine said she tried to help her tenants of four years by reducing their rent to $1,100 for six months so they could afford to stay until they found a place to move to by the end of May 2023. Come May 31, they didn’t move and stopped paying rent, she said.

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“It has put a tremendous strain on our finances,” Tambourine said. “I have to constantly, every month, liquidate whatever assets I have to be able to keep the mortgage payments current because otherwise we are going to lose the house.”

Now, she says, the daughter is still living there, while the mother is out of the house .

“I went out of my way when they were running into financial problems to try to help them,” Tambourine said. “And I gave them that extra time, and I kept sending them emails and text messages saying … ‘Find an apartment that you can afford. You can’t afford this apartment.’”

On Dec. 8, Tambourine received a default judgment against her tenant from a Cook County judge since her tenant did not appear in court. Now, she waits for the sheriff’s office to enforce the eviction, one that might not happen until the end of January due to the holiday moratorium that goes into effect from Monday until Jan. 3.

Cook County has had an eviction diversion program in place since November 2020 to help renters and small landlords avoid adverse court rulings like the one Tambourine’s tenant faced. The program launched when court systems across the country were strategizing how to help administer billions of dollars in federal rental assistance. Attorneys attributed the notable decline — around 2,000 fewer evictions — in enforced evictions in 2022 to the program, which offers free legal aid, mediation services and connections to rental assistance.

The program has significantly changed the eviction process in the county. Before the pandemic, it could take just a few weeks for a tenant to be evicted. Now it takes at least a couple of months. The slowdown, tenants’ attorneys have argued, is necessary to ensure everyone, including landlords, gets the help they need. But the extra time leads to financial distress for property owners, landlords’ attorneys have argued.

Bob Glaves, executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation, which manages the county’s eviction diversion program, said the process was slower at the beginning because there weren’t enough legal aid attorneys and paralegals to meet the demand as eviction filings rose in 2021 and 2022 once COVID-19 eviction moratoria ended.

Glaves said the number of attorneys they have now is “very close” to the capacity they estimate is needed to match the current volume of eviction cases and should allow people to “get more timely connections to legal aid and help them reach more settlements.”

Also, with a right to counsel ordinance introduced earlier this year in City Council, more legal help for tenants facing eviction may be on the way by 2027.

In 2023, most evictions in the city took place on the South and West sides in majority Black and Latino communities, trends that match years past and line up with national data showing racial minorities are more likely to face eviction.

The pandemic disproportionately affected minorities, who were more likely to experience hardships such as job loss and illness. The pandemic issues compounded with the issue of lagging generational wealth among families of color compared with white families because of historical racial discrimination.

Tenants’ attorneys involved in Cook County’s eviction diversion program say they are seeing a variety of reasons for why people are facing eviction this year. There are people who have mental health challenges and aren’t receiving the care they need; others are victims of domestic violence or are distrustful of the court system because of past mistreatment.

Some people are withholding rent due to poor conditions in their apartment but don’t properly inform their housing providers of what they are legally allowed to do under the local Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance and, in turn, face eviction. And there are residents who catch up on their rent payments but are still behind on the monthly late fees, and landlords who refuse to work out payment plans with their tenants.

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Since the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of millions of dollars in rental assistance has been disbursed in Illinois, with over 100,000 Chicago and suburban Cook County residents receiving aid. Nationally, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development research credits emergency rental assistance and other forms of household aid for preventing an increase in homelessness in 2020 and 2021.

Yet, attorneys say rental assistance is good for people experiencing short-term crises but not necessarily for those who are chronically unable to pay rent. Landlords also don’t have to participate in the rental assistance program.

Robert Kahn, an attorney for landlords who owns buildings throughout Chicago, said he thinks eviction levels are ticking up because a lot of landlords are unwilling to take rental assistance repeatedly for the same tenant. The person is not showing any effort to pay rent on their own, he said.

“I am still getting a lot of cases dismissed because of rental assistance, which is great, but it’s a joke,” Kahn said. “COVID is over. There are tons of jobs out there. People are choosing not to get them.”

Dennericka Brooks, an attorney and director of housing at Legal Aid Chicago, said there are still people falling behind on rent payments because they are affected by COVID-19 and the country’s challenging economic conditions.

“Prices of everything are going up, and it is difficult for people to maintain,” Brooks said. “Even though, as a community we think that COVID is over, it’s not. People are still trying to catch up. When you have fallen behind before, especially if you are low-income, it is so hard to catch up.”

‘Ripped from your life’

On the day Hallmon was evicted, the sheriff’s police attempted to enforce 13 evictions, though most people had vacated their units by the time officers got there.

The few people who did answer were surprised to see the sheriff’s department at their door, telling them they had to leave the property with only their most valuable belongings until they could arrange with the property manager to retrieve other items later.

Evictions restarted in fall 2021 after the roughly yearlong, pandemic-induced moratoria were lifted. The part of the city with the most enforced evictions so far this year — about 400 — was the 60649 area code, an area of South Shore that included Hallmon’s apartment.

Hallmon later told the Tribune he fell behind on rent after his father, who lived out of state, died, and Hallmon had to take care of his father’s affairs. After getting evicted, Hallmon said he stayed with his ex-wife and children while looking for an apartment.

“Think about being ripped from your life, with no other options,” Hallmon said. “You don’t even know where you are going to go because you are emotional; you are distressed; you are vulnerable.”

Hallmon and the property management firm have conflicting accounts of what led to his eviction. Hallmon said he made partial rent payments until catching up earlier this year, while WPD Management said in a statement he hadn’t paid rent in eight months. Hallmon blamed poor record-keeping for the discrepancy.

A spokesperson for WPD Management said, “all means to prevent this situation have been exhausted. Unfortunately, we were left with no choice except to move forward with the eviction process.”

Since 2007, the sheriff’s office has had a social services division that attempts to contact every person who receives an eviction judgment in the weeks leading up to the eviction to see if they can connect residents to resources.

The sheriff’s office said through November of this year, it has helped more than 1,500 people in over 700 unique eviction cases. Sheriff Tom Dart said the program helps housing providers too because it may expedite the move-out process.

But, the overpowering factor at play driving eviction levels is that rents are too high for many people to keep up, as wages have not risen at the same pace. In 2021 and 2022, Chicago saw double-digit rent increases compared with the years prior.

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In November, rents were up 5.3% over the same month last year, with the typical rental property costing $1,933 per month in the Chicago metro area, according to Zillow. The real estate website estimates a household would need to make $77,300 to afford the typical rent in Chicago.

Kahn, the landlord’s attorney and property owner, said rents are going to increase as long as the costs to maintain a building are increasing, including the costs to evict someone.

More housing needed

As for the future of local efforts to avoid evictions, the county allocated $6 million toward the Cook County Legal Aid for Housing and Debt program, which includes the eviction diversion program, in its fiscal year 2024 budget. The county is also having discussions with state, federal, private and philanthropic entities regarding future options for rental assistance, according to Nick Mathiowdis, spokesperson for Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle’s office.

The Illinois Housing Development Authority, the entity in charge of doling out the rest of the federal rental assistance dollars, told the Tribune it expects its rental assistance program to conclude by summer 2024.

Samira Nazem — who leads the eviction diversion initiative at the National Center for State Courts and previously worked at the Chicago Bar Foundation as the group set up Cook County’s eviction diversion program — works with 22 courts across the country to model different eviction diversion methods.

Nazem said the initiative’s goal is not only to prevent evictions, but also to get more tenants to engage in the court process, more time to move out and fewer judgments from the court demanding payment, which she and local experts are seeing happening.

“I think that eviction diversion programs are a wonderful part of trying to promote housing stability and financial stability in our communities,” Nazem said. “They are not magic fixes that are going to alleviate the lack of affordable housing and the double digit rent increases that we are seeing across the country.”

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Lorraine McNeal, 53, is struggling to find affordable housing. McNeal had never faced eviction prior to the pandemic but has faced it twice since then and worries she may face it again. She’s been getting calls, texts and emails from her management company about her overdue rent balance, she said.

In the past, she received help through the city’s Right To Counsel Pilot Program aimed at connecting more renters with legal aid and has received rental assistance to pay off her debt and stay housed.

Now, she is having difficulties paying her rent again since the payments are greater than her Social Security disability insurance, her primary source of income since she lost her job during the pandemic. She told the Tribune in October that the pandemic and her disability made it hard to find work. She lives with her daughter, who is also disabled, and pays $1,295 monthly rent for her three-bedroom South Shore apartment.

McNeal said it has been “rough” trying to find a new apartment she can afford. Many of the buildings she is looking at are at capacity — a common issue in the colder months of the year when fewer people move — or only accept people 62 and older.

She said she has put her name on housing voucher waitlists throughout the country, all the way from San Francisco to Grand Rapids, Michigan, as she is desperate to move herself and her family.

“Here I go again on the hamster wheel, looking, looking, looking, trying to decipher through some of these programs,” McNeal said. “And believe me, they are out there; I just haven’t hit the jackpot.”

ekane@chicagotribune.com