Have you ever wished that Greensboro, High Point, and Guilford County valued its renters like it values its developers?
Have you, like far too many of us, ever gotten a phone call from a loved one asking for support to help pay their rent, or scramble to help them find a new place because they got an eviction notice and discovered that their former landlord raised the rent price to make more profit on what should be a basic human right?
Join Guilford for All and AFSC on April 7th at 2pm!
Guilford County has a housing affordability crisis.
We see the headlines, the tents, the heartbreaking choices our neighbors have to make when they can’t afford or find shelter. Greensboro, High Point and Guilford County together spend well over $12 million on our housing crisis each year – largely to provide support to people who have become homeless. And that doesn’t count the indirect costs measured in local budget line items for school social workers, police officers and others tasked with responding to homelessness.
Someone’s benefiting from the evictions that leave our neighbors unhoused, and it’s not you or me.
The headlines don’t mention how it is that many of our neighbors become homeless due to corporations and landlords treating housing like their own personal piggy bank, and renters like disposable tokens on a game board. In 2022, 16,000 county residents had eviction notices filed against them. 90% did not have legal counsel, whereas 90% of the landlords in eviction court were represented by attorneys. Evictions lead to a number of significant harms to our communities.
1) Evictions destabilize every neighborhood.
Already, every day, children who are homeless attend Guilford County Schools, and staff have shared heartbreaking stories about attempting to help them keep up with other students academically.
2) Evictions make all of us less safe.
They can increase financial instability in the home and increase intimate partner violence, intensify police violence, and exacerbate other forms of gun violence.
3) Evictions lead to homelessness, poor health, job loss.
Preventing them isn’t the only way to keep our neighbors from becoming homeless, but it’s an approach that’s working in other cities, saving them millions of dollars on programs only needed after someone loses their home.
But there’s good news. Have you heard about TEAM?
Currently UNCG is helping to run a program called TEAM to help renters access legal aid, mediation, and for a time, rental assistance. Programs like this have been proven to help more renters stay in their homes and pay less in an eviction crisis.
Local organizers with American Friends Service Committee have been leading a campaign to raise awareness of this program and to identify money from local cities’ budgets to help to fully fund them, prevent homelessness and stop evictions by expanding access to legal resources and rental assistance – and Guilford for All is partnering with them on this campaign. We’ve been consulting with city staff, county officials, service providers, and recruiting community volunteers to have conversations with hundreds of Greensboro residents over the last three months, and we’re ready to fight for our community.