Maricopa County's eviction epidemic grew through another year.

Nothing has been able to slow the system's relentless churn. Not newfound attention in the county's Justice Courts. Not a state-funded eviction prevention program, which has been delayed for months. Even early discussions in the state Legislature, which is debating at least two bills that could tip the scales for tenants and landlords, have failed to contain the crisis.

Last year, the pace picked up yet again. Maricopa County's Justices of the Peace signed about 43,800 eviction judgments in 2018, according to court data obtained by The Arizona Republic. That marks a 3 percent increase over the year before.

“It’s kind of like that story doesn’t go away," said Judge Anna Huberman, whose Country Meadows Justice Court issued the second-most evictions in the county. "You expect that maybe things would get better. It doesn’t seem that way to me.”

The county’s “eviction mill,” as one housing advocate described it, sits at the heart of a decade-long affordable housing shortage. It’s also fueled by a rapid-fire legal system that’s designed to clear non-paying tenants as quickly as possible.

A retired judge once taught a class on how to blitz through 200 cases in two hours. Most tenants don’t show up, so they lose instantly. Those who do almost always lose anyway. They’re overpowered by expert attorneys and state laws that tend to protect a landlord’s right to their property more than a person’s need to keep their home.

Last year, plaintiffs won nearly two-thirds of the 65,892 eviction cases filed in Maricopa County.

“The playing field is not level,” Stan Silas, an attorney with the nonprofit Community Legal Services, told The Republic last year.

Pilot program still in the wings

So far, Arizona’s only significant step toward balancing that system has faltered. The Department of Housing’s proposed Eviction Prevention Program was intended to stop evictions before they happen. It promised to provide emergency cash handouts to tenants behind on their rent and point some eligible tenants toward legal representation. ADOH announced the program with a flourish, holding two public hearings but offering few details.

The original plan called for installing phone lines in offices around the state. Low-income tenants who had already missed rent would call and be directed toward cash or a lawyer.

A pilot program was scheduled to launch in two Maricopa County courts last September.

It has yet to happen.

In an email, ADOH spokeswoman Janelle Johnsen said the department "intentionally slowed down its launch process to obtain additional feedback from housing advocates and eviction program providers."

Discussions about the proposal were frosty from the beginning. ADOH planned to fund the program with up to $2 million from the state Housing Trust Fund. That concerned some homeless service providers and developers of low-income rental properties; both had targeted that fund for their purposes. Tenant advocates fretted that the program didn’t go far enough. The Arizona Multihousing Association, the state’s largest landlord lobbying group, worried ADOH had moved too quickly to announce the program and worked without input from landlords.

“There’s been no outreach to the landlords that are out there,” AMA President Courtney Gilstrap LeVinus said at a public hearing held last July.

In response, ADOH special-needs program administrator Karia Lee Basta said she wanted to get the program running as quickly as possible. She said she didn’t want to let tenants be evicted as they spent eight months meeting and negotiating.

That meeting was eight months ago.

Johnsen, the ADOH spokeswoman, wrote in an email that a pilot program will start soon. It will be open to residents of the county's two most-evicted precincts: Country Meadows, west of Phoenix, and Manistee, which covers an area around Surprise.

The department will not announce a targeted start date.

Lawmakers looking at issues

Whenever it begins, the program may start with more funding than ADOH expected. A bill introduced by State Sen. Lela Alston, D-Phoenix, would create an Eviction Prevention Fund and fill it with $1 million from the state budget. The bill has drawn early bipartisan support.

Early discussions around another eviction-related bill have been more contentious. House Bill 2358 — introduced by Rep. Ben Toma, R-Peoria — aims to restore a landlord’s right to evict a tenant in a subsidized rental unit, even after accepting the government’s portion of their monthly rent.

Toma and the bill's supporters say it solidifies a long-held legal understanding and protects a landlord's right to evict problematic tenants.

But the bill's opponents argue it would discourage organizations that provide rental assistance, leaving even more low-income renters vulnerable to eviction.

The bill comes in direct reaction to a Maricopa County Superior Court decision made last September, which ruled that a landlord who accepted a housing authority's Section 8 payment waived their right to evict the tenant.

Under Arizona law, a landlord who accepts any partial rent payment cannot file for eviction in the same month.

"Payments of rent are payments of rent regardless of the source," Commissioner Sigmund Popko wrote in his decision.

The ruling rattled landlords, who worried that it would erase their ability to evict any tenant who used a rental voucher, even if that tenant violated other portions of their lease. They argued there was no simple way to refuse a single tenant's subsidy payment, which are typically distributed automatically and in one lump sum. Housing program managers complained that the decision made it even more difficult to find landlords willing to accept Section 8 vouchers.

Questions about bill's effects

Toma — a freshman lawmaker who built a Century 21 real-estate brokerage and once managed a handful of rental properties — said his bill was designed to offset that ruling. He called concerns that it would make it easier to evict voucher-holding tenants "a stretch."

“As far as I read the bill, and I’m fairly certain I’m right here, this is not an endorsement of landlords taking vouchers and evicting people,” he said. He insisted that the bill applies mostly to Section 8 vouchers.

But the bill's text refers only to “housing assistance,” defining that term as any payment made by a government agency, a public housing authority or any other organization, whether for-profit or nonprofit.

Opponents fear that definition would include churches and charities, which often cover rent for people who can’t make a month’s payment. If the bill became law, they claim, a gift of goodwill couldn’t stave off an eviction.

“It’s not counted as rent,” said Ellen Sue Katz, executive director of the William E. Morris Institute for Justice, which advocates on behalf of low-income Arizonans. “What charities are going to want to pay a landlord rent if they know the tenant is going to get evicted?”

Toma’s bill has created an uncommon alliance. Eight Republican lawmakers co-sponsored the bill, and both the Arizona Multihousing Association and a well-known local homelessness advocate have signed their support.

Michael Shore, the CEO of low-income housing provider HOM, Inc., said the court's subsidized-payment ruling had already led multiple landlords to threaten to abandon his housing programs. He said the bill likely had wide support among housing providers, even if some were hesitant to say it in public.

Tenant advocates voiced their opposition to HB 2358 at Tuesday's meeting of the House Commerce Committee, calling it "over-broad" and saying it went "way beyond" its stated purpose. Rep. Mitzi Epstein, D-Tempe, said she was concerned with the bill's definition of "housing assistance."

“I want landlords to participate in the programs. I want people to keep their homes," Epstein said. "But we’ve got to improve the situation, not to make it worse. And I think this bill could accidentally make it worse.”

She voted no. But the larger committee followed the encouragement of the bill's main supporters — AMA board member Mark Zinman and AMA consultant Jake Hinman — and voted to advance the bill.

Agnel Philip contributed reporting.

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