After end of eviction moratorium, Macon nonprofits cope with increase in homelessness

After becoming sick due to mold in her home, a woman living in Macon lost the job she had worked at for four years.

Sharon Guilford’s landlord filed to evict her not long after, and she has been living in her car for the past few months while she tries to find another job and a place to live.

“It was a struggle, but it’s been doable. It’s better than being out in the weather. I mean, these guys got it a lot worse than I got. At least I have a little bit of room,” she said outside of the Loaves & Fishes Ministry on Tuesday afternoon waiting for food.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ended an eviction moratorium in August, Maconites started getting evicted in Macon-Bibb County Civil & Magistrate Court, and they started reaching out to local nonprofits and agencies for help.

Allison Bender, the executive director of the Brookdale Resource Center, said the center has definitely seen an increase in people arriving at the shelter after the moratorium ended, especially families.

“We’ve probably doubled in the amount of folks that are here now, families that are here, and we see it more with families than we do the individual,” Bender said.

Usually individuals have an easier time finding friends or family to stay with after they’ve been evicted, so it might take them longer to make it to the shelter, according to Bender.

“When you have a family, it’s much harder to move in with your sister or move in with a parent or something like that because there’s just simply no room,” she said. “I think that the majority of the folks are single mothers. There’s a lot of single mothers out there that are doing everything they can to make ends meet.”

When schools shut down because of the pandemic, low income parents had to decide whether to go to work or stay home to make sure their children were getting an education, Bender said.

“I think that’s where a lot of people got behind and got just really broken from everything that was going on. It’s super stressful,” she said.

Working through the trauma

Individuals and families might have a hard time coming to the realization that they’ve been evicted or they might not know their rights, Bender said.

Cortez Kirkland, who stood outside Loaves & Fishes earlier this week, knew he had received a notice from his landlord to vacate his home, but he wasn’t clear whether he had been evicted through the court system.

Kirkland receives payments from the Social Security Administration, but said he fell behind paying his rent because he didn’t have enough money to cover expenses.

Kirkland, 50, was served with an eviction notice on Sept. 9, and the writ of possession was filed on Sept. 22, according to the Macon-Bibb County Civil & Magistrate court website.

Once Kirkland received the notice, he moved out of his apartment and began sleeping around town. He had never experienced homelessness before.

“This is my first time, so hopefully it’ll be my last. I’m going to try to find me some reasonable housing,” he said. “It’s been rough. Like I said, concrete, it ain’t for me, but I just have to do it until I can find somewhere again.”

Since Kirkland lost his home, he’s been walking to Loaves & Fishes, the Daybreak Day Resource Center and Mulberry Street United Methodist Church to get food every day.

“It’s just like a puzzle here, there, there, and then back where I sleep at. Get up and do the same thing again,” he said.

Sister Theresa Sullivan, the director of the Macon Daybreak Day Resource Center, said the center hasn’t seen a huge influx of people since the moratorium ended, mostly because Daybreak deals with more individuals than families. However she expects the numbers will continue to grow as people are evicted.

“A lot of times when you lose your home, then you start living in your car or with your family; then something happens. So, I’m sure we are seeing an increase, but right now it’s really at the level of advocating for people so they don’t lose their homes,” Sullivan said. “Our first step is to try to keep people from being evicted. The hard part is... people’s rents and different things have accrued, and a lot of our people don’t know their rights.”

Daybreak focuses on connecting people to resources and trying to educate them on how to manage a budget and stay in their homes, she said.

Although people might understand that they shouldn’t be evicted, they aren’t aware of the resources or their rights in order to advocate for themselves, Bender said.

“They know that they shouldn’t be kicked out... but they don’t know what steps to take to get them out of that situation and it just becomes overwhelming and they become defeated,” she said. “I think a lot of folks are scared. I think that that’s the first feeling that a lot of folks have especially if they’ve never experienced anything like this before.”

Instead of a traditional homeless shelter that has its clients leave every morning and come back in the evening, Brookdale allows people to stay all day, every day, Bender said.

Because people get to stay, Bender said they are able to get a lot more comfortable with the staff and they are able to gain their trust more easily.

Tamika Johnson, a case manager at Brookdale, said she thinks eviction impacts the children more than it impacts parents, because everything they knew was gone in a day.

“We are literally living back in those village times right now,” Johnson said. “It takes a village to raise a child like a whole community and that’s what we’re in right now. The village, the community is trying to get over this eviction process.”

Struggling to find housing for low income families

After they’re evicted, tenants face a real challenge finding low income housing, Sullivan said.

“The big thing is that once you get evicted it gives you a bad mark, so it’s harder to rent something else out,” she said. “The other thing is for our normal base of homeless people that we’re trying to move into housing, because everybody’s scrambling for the housing that is available, there’s less access available.”

The first action the staff at Brookdale takes is making sure everyone has identification, because tenants need at least three forms of identification to get housing, especially Section 8 housing, Bender said.

“If you’ve been evicted, maybe you didn’t grab those important papers. You had to get out in a certain time frame or something, so a lot of times that stuff gets left behind,” Bender said.

The Brookdale Resource Center, at 3600 Brookdale Ave., can hold up to 130 people, and they currently have around 100 including 11 families. The maximum number of children the center has ever held was 41, Bender said.

“We don’t want to turn anybody away, and we really don’t. And so, we work really hard to try to fit someone in here even if it might be a tight squeeze, but we’re going to get you in,” Bender said.