SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Shannon Baker was two months and nine days late with rent this summer when, during a record heat wave and a global pandemic, her landlord shut off her electricity at the Valley Drive apartment she shared with her two kids.
Tensions had been rising for months between Baker and her landlord, Robert J. Bennett, they said in separate interviews. Baker, a school cafeteria worker, said the pandemic deprived her of odd jobs she relied on during the summer, so she couldn’t pay the rent.
Bennett, 60, said his tenant had ways to pay, but she was exploiting state and federal orders banning him from evicting her. He relied on the rent money just to pay taxes on 823 Valley Drive, which is where he also lives and the only property his family owns.
He needed to clear the apartment for a new tenant, he said.
“I had no recourse,” Bennett said. “What am I supposed to do? Let people live here for free? I’m not living here for free.”
So Bennett went to the basement to cut power to the upstairs apartment on the afternoon of July 9, 2020, as temperatures outside reached 95 degrees. Baker was with her 8-year-old son when the lights went off, she said.
“I can’t believe he did that,” Baker said. “It was like the hottest day of the year.”
Shannon Baker lived in an apartment with her 8-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter until her landlord shut off the electricity. He is now being charged.
Conflicts like this are popping up in rental apartments across the city, according to Syracuse.com interviews with landlords, tenants, housing attorneys and advocates. The pandemic decimated the economy, leaving many renters unable to pay landlords, many of whom are then unable to pay their mortgages or property taxes.
Those interviewed agreed on one thing that would lower the temperature: Taxpayer-funded rent relief for those who lost income because of the pandemic.
But federal and state money dedicated to rent aid has hit snags. Many landlords and tenants went months without the help. In Onondaga County, some funds are just now beginning to be distributed, nine months into the pandemic.
As of mid-December, 2,200 households had applied for rent relief to Onondaga County’s Department of Social Services; just 16 had received the help.
“There has to be relief all around. There just has to be, in order to make this work,” said Assemblywoman Pamela Hunter, who has increasingly fielded calls from frustrated landlords and fearful tenants. “You can’t penalize one over the other. We need to holistically take care of all of them.”
In the meantime, tenants’ outstanding rent bills continue to grow, and landlords, especially those who own few properties, continue to feel the pinch. And housing attorneys say tenants are living in deteriorating apartments as landlords can’t or won’t pay for repairs.
Landlords take matters into their own hands
Bennett, 60, is now facing a misdemeanor charge for “unlawful eviction” and a $2,000 fine, which he said he cannot afford. He’s already facing $7,000 owed in back taxes from before and during the pandemic. The property has apartments for him and two tenants, and he lives on disability income, he said.
He’s the first Syracuse landlord ever to face a criminal charge for “unlawful eviction.” The criminal charge was created in June 2019 as part of statewide reforms to housing policy aimed at helping tenants avoid eviction.
At least one other landlord in Syracuse has been charged since the pandemic began for so-called “self-help” evictions, where a landlord changes locks or shuts off hot water to force out a tenant. Charges are pending for at least one other.
Many other cases have been referred to police or prosecutors, but they are resolved without charges, according to prosecutors and lawyers representing tenants. That makes an exact number difficult to come by, but advocates say the cases are on the rise.
Sam Young, advocacy director of Legal Services of CNY, said tenants his organization represent are increasingly subject to "self-help," or unlawful evictions, amid a pandemic and eviction moratorium that is squeezing landlords and tenants.Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com
Sam Young, advocacy director of Legal Services of CNY, said more landlords are trying to force out their tenants, which he sees as a way landlords are trying to bypass the legal system and skirt the moratoriums on evictions enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office.
“They have been tempted in the meantime to take matters into their own hands … by engaging in behaviors such as turning off utilities, turning off water, taking off a door or removing a lock from a door,” Young said. “And those are all illegal acts.”
In early March, the CDC and Cuomo’s office forbade landlords from evicting tenants who lost income because of the pandemic. Also, landlord-tenant court in Syracuse was closed until early November, so a city landlord couldn’t initiate the eviction process for around six months even if the case was unrelated to the pandemic.
State lawmakers this week passed a law that stops all eviction proceedings for 60 days, and it states that tenants who can prove they lost income or had health impacts from the virus can’t be evicted until May 1.
Even with the eviction ban in place, a trickle of evictions have occurred here since courts reopened in November. Those cases tend to predate the pandemic and occur when a tenant repeatedly fails to appear in court, housing lawyers said. About 25 tenants have been evicted in Syracuse, Hunter said recently.
Also, while most tenants can’t be evicted, they still owe the rent. Nine months into the pandemic, tenants have faced back rents of up to $7,000, according to housing attorneys. One tenant owed $5,000 in back rent, his landlord testified in a recent court hearing. Landlords can still seek money judgments against their tenants, even if they can’t evict them.
If tenants can’t pay back that money, those judgments will hang over their heads for at least 10 years – damaging their credit, garnisheeing their wages and making it harder to find a new place to live, housing attorneys said.
Sharon Owens, deputy Syracuse mayor, said the city has been getting calls from smaller landlords.
“These aren’t massive property owners,” Owens said. “These are the mom-and-pop folks who maybe bought a duplex and they’re like, ‘I’m at the end now. There’s no revenue coming in. I can’t fix anything. I don’t want to be in trouble with codes. I don’t want to be in trouble with the courts, but I just, I don’t have it. I can’t do anything.’ ”
Without rent income, Hunter, the assemblywoman, said she’s worried the landlords will ultimately feel forced to sell their properties, which she sees as an echo of the Great Recession, during which Syracuse housing was sold on the cheap to outside buyers who became absentee landlords.
“I’ve had landlords call me and say, ‘I’m done. I can’t ever recoup this (rent),’ ” Hunter said. “And what we were experiencing before is coming back around again, where they’re selling to out-of-town landlords who scoop up these buildings, and all they care about is collecting rent from folks here.”’
Bennett, the owner of 823 Valley Drive who is facing criminal charges, has been trying to sell the property for two years, he said. His preference would be to sell to a local buyer.
But if that falls through, he said, selling to a landlord outside of Syracuse is growing more tempting.
“I can’t say I won’t sell to an outsider,” he said.
Rent relief slow out the door
Local housing experts all say one way to help tenants stay housed and landlords pay their bills is to get rent relief, but it has so far been hard to come by.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development gave Syracuse and Onondaga County about $4 million in July to help tenants and landlords. The money is given to landlords on behalf of tenants who apply.
In mid-July, around when the money was allocated, Sarah Merrick, commissioner of the Department of Social Services, told county legislators that she hoped the money would be out the door as soon as possible.
“The federal government wants this money to go out really fast,” she told legislators July 12. So she anticipated that the next few months would be “really busy” processing applications and awarding the money.
Merrick also said she expected that the $4 million would be “just the beginning of a lot of federal money coming down through the pipeline to keep people housed.”
It didn’t exactly work out that way. Until, this week, Congress and President Trump remained deadlocked on a multitrillion-dollar spending bill to give businesses, families and renters relief from the economic devastation of the pandemic. The bill Trump signed Monday contains $25 billion for rent relief.
Before the rent relief could reach tenants, the county needed its plan for distributing it to be approved by the federal government.
The county submitted its plan in July, but federal officials didn’t approve it until late September, according to county spokesman Justin Sayles. Late September is more than six months after the pandemic shuttered businesses and forced the layoffs of many renters living paycheck to paycheck.
Sayles attributed the delay to a slow-moving federal bureaucracy but said the county is now trying to get that money out the door quickly.
Now that the program is open, the county has received about 2,200 applications, Sayles said. As of mid-December, just 16 households had gotten money, he said.
Those successful 16 households were referred to the county from landlord-tenant court, which reopened in early November.
A New York state program that administers $100 million in rent relief has also been plagued with delays. In mid-July, the state Homes and Community Renewal agency opened applications for five weeks for renters seeking help paying their bills.
However, by late-October, it had awarded just $40 million of the $100 million, and just $73,000 to Onondaga County. Renters in Onondaga County who successfully applied got an average of $1,400 apiece.
Advocates said the program was too complicated and turned away too many applicants. Of about 94,000 applications, 57,000 were denied, according to the agency, because they didn’t meet the criteria. That was often because it requires that tenants be “rent-burdened,” in addition to facing financial hardship from the pandemic.
Hunter said that requirement – that tenants pay more than 30% of the income toward rent to be eligible – made the program poorly tailored to Upstate cities like Syracuse, which has lower housing prices.
On Dec. 18, the state agency announced it was removing the rent-burden requirement, which will make it easier for new applicants and those who have already applied to get the money.
Eviction court returns — virtually
The friction between tenants and landlords spilled into a virtual courtroom recently in one of the first landlord-tenant court hearings since the pandemic.
Judge Vanessa Bogan presided over a remote video meeting Nov. 30 featuring dozens of people — tenants, landlords and attorneys — and spoke over the background noise of unrelated chatter, phones ringing and crying babies.
She heard attorneys for landlords and tenants describe the hardship of the past nine months. Several tenants said they lost income from the pandemic but were having trouble demonstrating it. Other landlords described being owed thousands in rent while their tenants went to and from work every day.
Those were on top of eviction cases unrelated to the pandemic in a city with more than 10,000 evictions a year.
And then she heard from Tavaris McLaurin, whose wife was exposed to the virus, which meant she couldn’t work for six days, which meant rent would be late.
In response, his landlord extinguished the pilot light for his apartment’s water heater, McLaurin said. Beginning in late September, McLaurin, his wife and their kids went without heat and hot water for 35 days, McLaurin said.
But earlier this month, McLaurin and his landlord reached a settlement. He owes no back rent and will pay no rent until at least Feb. 1.
By then, he and others hope, help will be on the way.
Contact reporter Patrick Lohmann at (315)766-6670 or PLohmann@Syracuse.com.
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