A little over two weeks after Hurricane Helene turned living rooms into murky, debris-filled pools, washed away homes, and caused upward of $50 billion in damage, dozens of renters and homeowners stood outside the Buncombe County Courthouse on Oct. 17 in Asheville, North Carolina.
With winter approaching and temperatures dipping into the 40s, they gathered wearing thick coats and knit caps and held signs that read “Send help, not evictions,” “Don’t evict during a disaster,” and “Keep people housed.” More than 40 evictions were already on the court’s docket that day, just two days after reopening post-storm.
Thousands of people across the region remain displaced from their homes or stuck in mold-festering conditions without electricity, with unemployment looming. The return of eviction hearings has left many fearing permanent displacement.
As a result, renters, housing advocates, and state legislators across the hardest hurricane-hit regions this year — Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina — have called on the states to enact an emergency moratorium blocking evictions and foreclosures during the recovery process. On average, across the nation and in these three states, Black people are disproportionately renters and make up the largest share of low-income renters. Among homeowners, Black Americans also face the highest rates of missed mortgage payments.
“To expect rent when people have no water, no jobs, and are struggling to survive is deplorable,” said Cortne Roche, a leader with the Western North Carolina Tenants Network.
Read More: Hurricane Helene’s Black Survivors Face Floods, Disinformation, and a Threat to Their Vote
Protesters outside the courthouse warned that Asheville and surrounding communities would become a “ghost town” without intervention. They said that forcibly evicting and displacing people unable to pay their mortgages or rent would undermine the recovery effort.
Dozens of renters and homeowners gathered at the Buncombe County Courthouse on Oct. 17 in Asheville, North Carolina, seeking protection from eviction following the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene. (Courtesy of the Western North Carolina Tenants Network)
“We need funding for the affordable housing crisis that will accelerate as the floodwaters recede and speculators prey on homeowners without the resources to recover,” a coalition of 50 community groups across Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina wrote in a statement to Capital B. The statement was also shared with members of Congress. Federal lawmakers have caught flack because they did not reconvene to vote on extra relief funding for communities impacted by the recent onslaught of storms.
When natural disasters turn into man-made ones
As climate change has intensified these disasters, the housing market has failed to keep up. It’s a regular occurrence that hurricanes and floods are used to supercharge displacement and spur gentrification as landlords use the storms as a means to kick out tenants and rebuild their properties with higher-class renters in mind.
Two years after hurricanes, eviction rates double in impacted communities, according to a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers.
These storms also lead to sharp upticks in the costs of housing. A study on the housing impacts of the 13 hurricanes between 2009 and 2018 that led to emergency intervention by federal officials found that immediately after these storms, rents go up, and they continue to climb throughout the following year. With more people looking for shelter because their prior homes have been made unlivable, landlords use the demand to squeeze cities’ already limited supply of rental housing, driving up prices, the study found.
Black renters have been disproportionately impacted after major storms like Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Ida (2021) in Louisiana, Hurricane Harvey in Houston (2017), Hurricanes Michael (2018) and Ian (2022) in Florida, and other floods and fires nationwide, residents and experts said.
Read More: The Housing Crisis That Climate Change Built
This month, Sonoma County in Northern California passed its own disaster-related eviction protections that, fair housing advocates say, might serve as a national model. The legislation is one of the first of its kind in the U.S. to protect renters during and after these severe weather events. The law bans forced evictions for nonpayment when a state of emergency is declared and lasts for the duration of the emergency. (Sonoma County, with a median household income of $99,000, is much wealthier than the typical American county (where the median household income is about $61,000) and is 85% white and about 2% Black.)
“The renter protections just passed in Sonoma County are nothing short of groundbreaking,” explained Dawn Phillips, the director of the Right to the City Alliance, a national housing rights organization. “They have also provided a blueprint for how local governments can be proactive and responsive to climate crises that has the potential to change many lives across the nation.”
A wave of eviction moratoriums were enacted at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. In the years since, Democratic leaders have largely abandoned the push to pass the measures, while Republican lawmakers have opposed such renter protections.
Opponents of the protections have framed them as government overreach and harmful to the economy. In October 2021, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis allowed the state’s six-month eviction moratorium to expire, citing the need for a return to “normalcy” despite ongoing housing insecurity.
Since then, DeSantis has also signed legislation ensuring that no local ordinances can establish renter protections or regulations beyond those granted under state law. That provision means counties in Florida cannot pass their own renter protections during storms until state officials do so first. Fair housing advocates say that restriction sets back the cause of housing equity.
Residents in Florida have already reported being evicted from their homes in the aftermath of hurricanes Helene and Milton.
“Our states sit at the nexus of the climate and the housing crisis,” the 50 community groups wrote in the statement. “It is the most vulnerable communities who pay the price for others’ poor planning, inaction, and lack of dedicated resources.”
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