Renters Are Getting Evicted Despite CDC Order — 'I'm Scared'05:40

Sheila Ambert lies awake at night wondering if her family is about to get tossed out on the street.

"As a mother, you feel like you failed your kids," Ambert says. "You don't want them having to go through that or even knowing about it, which they do."

Ambert thought she would be protected by an order issued back in September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that is supposed to stop people from getting evicted and forced into homeless shelters or crowded living situations where COVID-19 spreads more easily.

Already, one study has found that evictions may have caused thousands of additional deaths because of displaced families catching or spreading COVID-19.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, which is following the issue in many cities and states, says it has tracked nearly 250,000 eviction filings since mid-March. The CDC order is preventing many of those people from losing their homes. But many others are being evicted regardless.

The CDC protections haven't been working so well for Sheila Ambert.

The family lives in Lake Mary, Fla. Because of the outbreak, Ambert lost her job as an administrative assistant. She says her husband is making a lot less money, too. Ambert faced long delays receiving unemployment. And though she found sporadic part-time work when her savings ran out, she couldn't pay her $1,600-a-month rent.

"I need to keep the electricity, I need to buy food," she says.

In November, her landlord, Sun Lake Apartment Homes, filed an eviction case against her.

One criticism of the CDC order is that to be protected, renters have to be aware it exists and know what to do.

But Ambert did know about it and says she followed the rules. In a court filing, she said she gave the required paperwork from the CDC to her landlord.

"And I thought, 'OK, so I'm OK, I'm good,' " Ambert says.

Renters are also supposed to try to make partial rent payments. She did that too, she told the court. Tenants are supposed to try to get rental assistance money. She told the court she did that too— $4,515 paid to the landlord.

But none of that seemed to matter. The landlord pressed ahead with the case, and she got an email from the court, saying it was issuing what's called a writ of possession — giving the landlord the green light to go ahead and evict her family once the sheriff posts a notice on their door.

"I saw that email coming in, and I was like here shaking," Ambert says. "I'm scared."

There's nowhere else for the couple and their two kids to go, she says. "All our family's in Puerto Rico."

In a statement, the landlord tells NPR that evictions are "a last resort." And that "we turn to the courts for cases where eviction is legal and warranted by the facts."

After NPR contacted a local legal aid group to ask if the landlord was following the CDC rules, one of its lawyers ended up taking her case.

"If I could have an angel client for this matter, she is it," says Breezi Hicks of Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida.

Hicks now represents Ambert and filed an emergency motion to stop the eviction. She says that in a hearing, she helped Ambert show the judge that she checked all the necessary boxes and requirements to be protected by the CDC order.

"She also was able to testify to the judge that before the pandemic, she was never late on her rent," says Hicks.

The judge put the eviction on hold for now.

But most people facing eviction don't have a lawyer. Studies show only about 10% of renters facing eviction have an attorney, while 90% of landlords do.

"Landlords in some cases are just pretending that they didn't receive the declaration and moving forward with the eviction process," says Shamus Roller, the executive director of the nonprofit National Housing Law Project.

He says the CDC order should be strengthened to be a blanket eviction ban.

Now, he says, there are too many requirements and loopholes. If at any step in the process, the renter fails to show up at a hearing or join a hearing Zoom call, the landlord is often able to evict.

"Eviction courts are conveyor belts," Roller says. "And so the loopholes in the CDC order mean that many people are being evicted who should be protected under the order."