Once ‘Very Good Rent Payers’ Now Facing Eviction

They borrowed $2,000 from relatives and friends and racked up $8,000 in credit-card debt. Mr. Armstrong withdrew about $4,000 from two pension and retirement accounts, and Mr. Brewster-Streeks started working as a hospital clerk for less than half of his previous pay. But they could not keep up: after two bouts in housing court, they moved out in February, owing nearly $7,000 in back rent.

“It’s kind of dehumanizing,” Mr. Brewster-Streeks said of the experience. “They see you as a certain kind of person. We’ve never been that certain kind of person.”

Mr. Armstrong stopped attending classes at LaGuardia Community College for two semesters and took so much time off from work to deal with the court case that he earned a negative job review. Along with legal help from District Council 37, of which Mr. Armstrong is a member, the couple got an emergency loan from the city’s Human Resources Administration.

They moved from a two-bedroom unit with ample closet space near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to a one bedroom with two small closets at the edge of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The rent is $500 less, but they still have to pay off what they owe on the previous place, along with the $5,650 loan.

CNBC Slideshows

• Biggest Kinds of Personal Debt
• Most Affordable Metro Areas in the US

“It’s going to take us a couple of years to get back from this,” Mr. Armstrong said.

For months, Christine A. Lewis, 46, has been living a kind of nomadic existence in her own apartment, using borrowed furniture, wearing borrowed clothing. Her own belongings — bed, clothes, computer, television set — were put in storage after a city marshal knocked on the door of her one-bedroom apartment in Co-Op City in the Bronx in June with an eviction order. She managed to quickly negotiate a return, but has been unable to raise $1,600 to pay off the storage company and get her possessions back.

So when her son died from bone cancer in December at age 18, Ms. Lewis had to borrow a suit to wear to the funeral.

Ms. Lewis said she lost her job as a $52,000-a-year hospital lab technologist because she was unable to concentrate during her son’s illness, and has been surviving since on unemployment benefits. She paid off $2,800 in back rent, but still worries about keeping up.

“It’s horrible and all, but I try to look at everything as if the glass is half full, as a learning experience,” she said.

This story originally appeared in The New York Times

---

< Prev | 1 | 2