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Deiadra Sturgis’ life burst into chaos in April, when she says her boyfriend abandoned her and her four children, including his 1-year-old daughter.

Without his income, Sturgis was stuck: She had no family in town to help take care of her baby, and she couldn’t afford day care, so she couldn’t get a job to pay the rent.

The landlord for the mobile home she lived in near Ingram Park Mall wouldn’t negotiate a payment plan because the lease was in her boyfriend’s name, Sturgis said. For the same reason, she couldn’t fight the eviction in court.

She made desperate phone calls and drove to local charities that offer rent assistance, but none could help her. She even donated blood plasma for gas money, she said.

“I felt a lot like I was a hamster on a wheel. I was just running in a circle, over and over again,” Sturgis said. “But I couldn’t just surrender and give up.”

Her time finally ran out. One day in June, Bexar County Constable officers came to her mobile home and stuffed her possessions into black trash bags that they carried out to the curb.

Even while San Antonio’s economy thrives and its population swells, more and more local renters are finding themselves in situations like Sturgis’.

San Antonio’s eviction rate nearly doubled between 2011 and 2016, from 2.1 to 4.1 evictions per hundred renter homes, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which has compiled data on evictions from communities across the U.S. That’s the highest rate for the Alamo City since Princeton’s data begins in 2000. The data likely underestimates the number of evictions, because it is difficult to collect it in some rural areas, according to the website.

About 27 San Antonio residents were evicted on an average day in 2016, adding up to 9,848 evictions for the whole year, the data show.

No one is sure what is driving the rate up, but the trend comes as the city grapples with a growing shortage of affordable housing and a dramatic increase in its homeless population.

Tenants who are evicted have often suffered a big shock in their lives, such as the loss of their job, the death of a family member, a health emergency or a broken-down car, according to interviews with charity leaders and lawyers and judges who handle evictions. Like Sturgis, many of them fall into financial peril because they couldn’t afford day care.

Some face eviction after withholding rent when a landlord fails to make repairs, said Rick Roman, an attorney with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, a nonprofit that provides free legal services. Unlike other states, tenants in Texas can’t do that.

For those having trouble paying rent, an eviction makes their path to financial stability even more difficult, advocates say. They often lose access to the bus routes they rely on to get to work, and their children are pulled away from their friends. Without a permanent address, the tenants can have trouble applying for jobs or using social assistance programs.

“They’re demoralized. Children are traumatized,” said Navarra R. Williams, president and CEO of SAMMinistries, a charity that helps the homeless. “Homelessness really has a huge impact on the children. They don’t understand, they don’t know what’s going on.”

With an eviction on their credit history, they have more trouble applying for mortgages or other loans. Apartment complexes often charge more or refuse to rent to tenants who have been evicted, so they resort to lower-quality housing advertised on a website like Craigslist.

“It means you’re probably going to have to move downward... and it will be a cycle,” Roman said. “That’s the real problem with evictions. It’s not just the immediate problem of ‘My family is going to be without a roof over their head.’ The next roof is going to be a worse one.”

On the day she was evicted, Sturgis scrambled for somewhere to put her furniture, her family pictures and her children’s toys. She says the county officers packed her stuff haphazardly, soaking her papers in vinegar and leaking cleaning products onto her children’s clothing. Someone stole her washer and dryer from the curb.

Nonetheless, she’s grateful she and her children never had to go without shelter. Local homeless shelter Haven for Hope took them in, and they now sleep in a pair of bunk beds in their own room in the charity’s dormitory west of downtown.

“For the most part, I am grateful every day for the things that I have, and I don’t worry about the things that I don’t have because if I could have them I would have them,” Sturgis said. “My kids have somewhere to sleep every day, they have food to eat... Anything else is just something extra.”

Rising housing costs

Housing experts couldn’t say for sure what is causing more tenants to be thrown out, but many of them pointed to the local area’s rising housing costs as a likely culprit.

San Antonio is one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., but developers haven’t been able to build enough new homes and apartments for the incoming residents. As a result, demand for housing is growing faster than supply, and the cost of renting an apartment or buying a home is soaring.

The median rent per square foot for an apartment in the local metro area rose by 39 percent between 2008 and 2018, from $0.82 to $1.14 a square foot, according to Austin Investor Interests, an analytics firm that tracks the local market.

At the same time, new residents are flocking to downtown neighborhoods that are home to low-income communities, causing rents and home prices to spike there.

“There’s been a bit of a housing boom here in San Antonio, and a lot of concentration downtown and in other areas that were somewhat blighted,” Williams said. “They’re not putting in low-income housing when they buy this property and redo it and invest millions of dollars in it. There’s just no affordable housing for folks that are really indigent.”

Rising housing costs are putting local residents in a bind: The city has determined that San Antonio is in need of 153,000 affordable housing units. The waiting list to get an apartment from the San Antonio Housing Authority is 16,000 names long.

In 2016, 45 percent of apartment tenants in the San Antonio metro area were what the federal government defines as “cost-burdened” — in other words, they spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. A decade earlier, the rate was 43 percent.

Yet housing in San Antonio is cheap relative to many other metro areas, including Austin, where an ongoing tech boom has caused apartment demand to skyrocket. In spite of that, Austin’s eviction rate in 2016 was 0.98 per hundred renters in 2016, less than a quarter of San Antonio’s, according to Princeton’s data.

In Dallas, the eviction rate that year was 1.52 percent, while in Houston it was 2.3 percent, the data show. Fort Worth’s rate was higher than San Antonio’s, at 4.59 percent.

Experts weren’t surprised that San Antonio’s eviction rate is higher than other metros, considering the city’s stark economic inequality. Bexar County’s median income lags behind Austin’s Travis County and Houston’s Harris County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Eviction process

Many eviction cases on the North Side are decided in a courtroom on the third floor of a concrete-faced office building just south of the airport that also serves as the headquarters for Taco Cabana.

Judge William Donovan, justice of the peace for Bexar County’s Precinct 3, had a few dozen eviction cases on his docket on a Tuesday afternoon earlier this month.

The tenants and landlords were told to turn off their phones, and they seemed bored while they waited for their cases to be heard. Donovan, sitting at a desk between two stuffed deer heads on the walls, brought some levity to the courtroom.

“How are you folks doing today, apart from having to be here?” he asked everyone.

Some of the tenants didn’t show up, so their cases were automatically ruled against them. Donovan encouraged those who came to work out a deal with their landlords’ attorneys. Some of them retreated into conference rooms and emerged with a deal, and Donovan told others he would delay their case for a week in the hope they would work something out.

One couple, Paul and Lillian Rodriguez, faced eviction from the mobile home they rented near University of Texas at San Antonio after a series of disputes with their landlord that they said arose from his lack of respect for their privacy and Paul’s bipolar disorder.

The landlord had been going into their home without their permission, they said — they think he was suspicious of them because of problems with the previous tenant — leaving the door wide open and allowing their dog to scamper away. They filed three police reports against him and changed their locks to keep him out, they said. In June, he told them they had to leave.

“Several times, I had to walk away from him, because in my manic state, when you have issues like mine, you lose it, it escalates very quickly,” Paul said. “I tried to avoid all that by just letting him talk to her, but he was insistent that I was being rude to him, and he was insisting that I give him a key. He doesn’t understand that renters have rights.”

Donovan ruled the couple had to leave their apartment and pay $2,600 in rent that had accrued since the eviction process began, and $740 in attorney fees. They said afterward they planned to appeal.

The city has a fair housing counseling program that can mediate between landlords and tenants to prevent evictions, and it can also help local tenants get into a federal program for short-term rental assistance, said Melody Woosley, director of the city’s Department of Human Services. Other local agencies, including Haven for Hope and SAMMinistries, also have programs to help tenants catch up on their rent.

Yet funding for some programs has dried up. For a few years after the housing crisis spiked in 2008, the federal government provided SAMMinistries with about $800,000 a year to prevent homelessness, said Williams, the CEO.

As the economy improved, that amount decreased to between $600,000 and $700,000, and it is set to go down again to $300,000, he said.

“We’re looking every day” for more funding, Williams said. “I think maybe the community doesn’t understand how effective and efficient that program can be.”

Even while living in a homeless shelter, Sturgis and her children managed to have a good summer, she said. The children went on field trips to Splashtown and the San Antonio Zoo through Boys & Girls Club San Antonio, and she walked them to the pool at San Pedro Springs Park, a mile and a half away.

Her kids will stay in their same schools in the Northside Independent School District — they’ll just have to get up a little earlier to catch buses that will take them up there, she said.

Sturgis wanted to leave the shelter by the time they start school at the end of the month, but that doesn’t look likely. Her goal now is to have a place by her son’s birthday in October.

She thinks she’ll be able to find a day care program for her daughter, which will give her the time to get a job in retail; she has previously worked as an assistant manager at Whataburger, Taco Bell and Wendy’s, she said. Once she has work, she’ll be eligible for Haven for Hope’s rental assistance program.

“I feel like I’m going to get a place,” she said. “I have definitely learned that even when you feel there’s no hope, there’s always some hope.”

Richard Webner is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | rwebner@express-news.net | Twitter: @RWebner