Our Housing Crisis: The Tucson Tenants Union fights evictions, which have worsened since the beginning of the pandemic.

• Author: Livier, Zaira Emiliana

In late 2019, our team founded the Tucson Tenants Union to address the alarming housing crisis growing rapidly within our community. At the time, the number of forcibly displaced families was staggering, with hundreds of evictions taking place every single week in Pima County, Arizona. The lack of safe, affordable, and secure housing has become an existential threat for many tenants in Tucson--and the crisis has only deepened since the pandemic began.

Between 2015 and 2019, across Pima County, more than 50,000 tenants were displaced from their homes. In 2018 alone, more than 13,000 evictions were filed. Shockingly, 95 percent of those eviction hearings were ruled in the landlords favor. Most tenants do not appear in court for eviction hearings, and those who do seldom have legal representation.

Meanwhile, the availability of affordable housing is continuing to decline across Southern Arizona, in line with national trends. In Tucson, 60,000 more affordable housing units would have been needed to meet the demand in 2019. And the number of landlords willing to accept subsidized housing voucher programs is dwindling. In short, with evictions expected to spike drastically after the August repeal of the federal eviction moratorium, Tucson already faced extreme housing instability.

To make matters worse, 23 percent of Arizona's nearly one million tenants are considered "extremely low income," and Tucson's poverty rate, which has increased during the pandemic, is roughly 9 percent above the national average. Arizona's unemployment rate has also grown since the pandemic. But even before COVID-19, Tucson's poverty rate was worse in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities.

Overall, according to an analysis by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renters in Pima County would have to earn $18.44 per hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent of $959, but the average renter's wage here is only $15.22.

The displacement of families has also been exacerbated by tax incentives that exert upward pressure on rents by incentivizing large developers to move into historic neighborhoods. These efforts single out

Tucson's most vulnerable residents as they gentrify swaths of low-income and historically Black and brown neighborhoods and barrios.

Here, lifelong residents are being forced out of their homes through indiscriminate rent hikes and rising property taxes. For retired seniors and adults on a fixed income, hikes in...