COLE THALER | April 27, 2020
The ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are testing the limits of our system – and the human suffering is great.
COVID-19 is pushing impoverished Atlanta families that have been living on the edge directly over that edge, into a level of suffering that, for more secure Atlantans, is hard to fathom.
Families that have been living paycheck to minimum-wage paycheck, making that $7.25 an hour stretch as far as it will go, are suddenly without any paycheck at all. People who could never pay all the utility bills in full each month are finding that they can no longer afford food. Workers whose hours have been cut can’t afford to put gas in their cars. New mothers in extended stay hotels can’t afford the weekly fees and are facing street homelessness. Households that relied on a few extra dollars from family members to survive are now facing angry landlords, late fees, and empty cupboards.
And it’s only just begun.
Eviction filings are accruing on the Court’s docket, lining up like bullets in the chamber of a gun.
Fulton County landlords are still filing eviction warrants, but the Court is not scheduling those cases for hearings due to an emergency judicial order that is in effect through May 13. Instead, those filings are accruing on the Court’s docket, lining up like bullets in the chamber of a gun. When the Court reopens, the trigger will be pulled, and thousands of eviction cases will jam their way through the system as quickly as judges can hear them.
Attorneys who are familiar with Fulton County evictions know that the Magistrate Court stops hearing dispossessory cases in the latter half of December, due to the holidays. As a result of that brief pause, every January is profoundly chaotic, as multiple judges operating in multiple courtrooms try to quickly clear the December backlog, hearing case after case, evicting family after family.
The COVID-19 crisis has brought with it a judicial shut-down far longer than the holiday hiatus, which means that, when the Court eventually reopens, the crush of cases will put a typical Fulton County January to shame. Not only the volume, but also the outcomes, will be worse: in January, some families can quickly file their tax returns and use refunds (or advances on those refunds) to pay the past-due rent. But that option won’t be available this time, and the paltry $1200 provided by the federal CARES Act will not be enough to cover multiple months of unpaid rent and late fees – assuming that the $1200 hasn’t already disappeared to meet food costs and utility bills.
This may sound like hyperbole to anyone who has not been reading the news, but the increase in human suffering has already started, and shows no sign of abating.
Over the past decade, Atlanta has been steadily whittling down its number of homeless people, as measured by the annual Point-in-Time count. That number, which used to exceed 7,000, has hovered closer to 3,000 for the past several years. Meanwhile, city leaders have been making progress (painfully slow progress, but progress nonetheless) toward increasing the number of affordable housing units. Get ready for a great reversal of this progress due to COVID-19. Homelessness numbers will skyrocket. Our already-full homeless shelters will become over-full, bursting at the seams. Waitlists will extend from months to years. Lines at food banks and soup kitchens will extend for blocks.
This may sound like hyperbole to anyone who has not been reading the news, but the increase in human suffering has already started, and shows no sign of abating.
In a recent New York Times piece, an employee at a California nonprofit that works to stop homelessness called March’s COVID-driven increase in need “incomprehensibly catastrophic.” That article, titled “Straggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis” (April 16, 2020), is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how a single month of the pandemic’s effects has been enough to drop millions of people through the holes in our so-called safety net.
The short version: we have built a society that prioritizes corporate profits over the well-being of the most vulnerable. And now we will witness the human suffering that is the consequence of those deeply skewed priorities.
We have built a society that prioritizes corporate profits over the well-being of the most vulnerable. And now we will witness the human suffering that is the consequence of those deeply skewed priorities.
Even the most relentlessly optimistic among us – and I count myself among those ranks – are struggling to find any shred of a silver lining, anything hopeful to say about averting or mitigating this disaster. But in the face of suffering caused by a virus we didn’t create and policies we did, we still possess the simple ability to help another human being.
And we must find ways to help: as lawyers, as neighbors, as moral beings.
In the face of the incomprehensibly catastrophic, those of us with the power to help each other are obligated to help each other. It may be all that we can do.
Cole Thaler was recently quoted in a TIME Magazine piece on evictions in the days of COVID-19. You can read it here.
Cole Thaler
Director, Safe & Stable Homes Project
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Cole serves as the director of AVLF’s Safe and Stable Homes Project. He oversees the Saturday Lawyer Program and the Standing with Our Neighbors Program, among others.
Before joining AVLF, Cole was a supervising staff attorney with Georgia Legal Services Program, where he represented low-income rural Georgians in a variety of civil matters. Previously, Cole worked for Lambda Legal, a national legal organization that works on behalf of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and those with HIV. Cole attended Williams College before receiving his J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law. He shares his home with two rescue dogs, three rescue cats, and husband.
