DETROIT – Safonya Gurley says she got the call on Thanksgiving: She was getting evicted over $5,000 in back rent.

Never mind that the house on Detroit’s east side was a wreck with no running water, persistent mold, a broken toilet and flooded basement – or that Gurley couldn’t get the management company on the phone and faithfully put her monthly $600 rent in an escrow account toward repairs.

“Evicted? For what?” Gurley recalled with disgust, speaking at a forum about eviction in Detroit on Tuesday.

She’s far from alone. For the past several years, more than 30,000 annual evictions are filed at Detroit’s 36th District Court. That means roughly 1 in 5 of the city’s rentals face evictions each year, according to a recent analysis by The Detroit News.

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The deluge of evictions is yet another symptom of a housing crisis that has decimated Detroit, flipping the city from having the one of the nation's best home ownership rates among African Americans to being a majority-rental city.