Behind On Rent (Official Full-Length Film)

i'm regular normal everyday person i put my pants on one leg at a time just like they do but it doesn't seem like they've realized that there's no compassion no sympathy the people that on the other side of the fence that have access to decent health care and decent ways of keeping themselves unaffected from this situation well they don't feel my pain they don't feel our pain regular normal everyday people's pain because of the virus situation my financial situation kind of changed and i just been an ongoing struggle just trying to make ends meet it seems like the powers that be don't understand that this this is something that happens beyond everybody's control you know and you would think that they would try to give someone a little bit of lead way but you know it's all about the almighty dollar it seems like so it's like every man for themselves [Music] the volume of evictions is really fluctuated quite a bit during the pandemic from really high in the beginning as people started losing their jobs many people had a month cushion on the rent but when that was gone then we saw the evictions coming in so i think the problem with eviction in nebraska and really nationally has been there forever for as long as there's been a landlord-tenant relationship and as long as it's been an adversarial process to evict them mainly because of the imbalance in power and what we saw with the pandemic is it really just highlighted all of these imbalances and we saw all of these problems just blown up into such a greater magnitude people need to hear about like actually what's going on and how it's actually affecting people it's just it's just ripping people apart i was working at a dog kennel before the pandemic and then we had to shut down i was waiting for unemployment the unemployment took forever and then the stimulus check came and then that's how i was able to pay the deposit but the guy was like you know this is non-refundable like i'm gonna give it to somebody else so we actually moved in on a horrible note so then everything just kind of snowballed from there it was he was like well i don't know you and it's been your four days past due and putting an eviction notice out if they wouldn't have helped me it was it was ryan sullivan and his team if they wouldn't have been there to help me my kids and i would be in our car right now tennis assistance project is a grassroots program with the primary goal of providing tenants assistants who are facing eviction whether direct representation at the eviction court or providing them assistance in obtaining rental assistance some trends we've seen anecdotally we see a disproportionate amount of people of color people with disabilities and single mothers represent again anecdotally but it seems greater than 50 percent of the cases we see fall into one of those categories the landlord tenant act which was adopted in 1972 had really been stripped from it most of the recommended tenant protections one of those is tenants don't have a right to reschedule their hearing or to continue the hearing that really has made it difficult because a lot of times our tenants have defenses and that's really been surprising to a lot of people the assumption is well they didn't pay rent what's their defense well i would say greater than 50 of the cases where we've assisted tenants they've had a viable defense to the eviction but not having an opportunity to meet with an attorney or prepare a case in any way is is devastating to many of our tenants i came to an agreement that i would be out by september 30th at 3 pm if i'm out on or before that date there'll be no eviction on my record pride can be a hurtful thing in some ways i don't want to come off come across as i'm needy because i'm not i am a grown man and i accept that responsibility but sometimes we all need help you know everybody wants to make it race it's really not so much race it's economics it's the haves and have-nots i'm a have-not at this time and it's not because of a lack of trying it's from a lack of compassion and understanding from the powers that be [Music] growing up in omaha all my life i went to predominantly black schools 1978 they started a busting situation so i got bus to a predominantly white school and it was a culture shock [Music] but we survived it i think people regardless of wherever they live they want to be able to live in a safe community they want to be able to see people that look like them and have the opportunity of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness something that every american does not have you know i tell people a lot of times the empty lots and empty spots that you see throughout this community have been this way for 50 50-plus years you've got an area of the city that that has just become more dilapidated over time and very little investment back into the area well redlining is is where an imaginary boundary has been created that prohibits a group of people from access or moving out of that area and it's an area that's determined to be risk area for for investment purposes you know we tend to focus on the impact that red lighting has had on in particularly african americans from moving outside the red line but we don't address the true issue of how it impacts within the red line because it does prohibit home ownership and we know homeownership creates wealth it creates generational wealth well let's just say where i lived was within that red line 1968 was when they passed a fair housing act which basically abolished redlining i myself did not know that it was redlined or it was an area where only black people lived i myself didn't know that i was poor until i became an adult no one's poor because they want to be poor no one's homeless because they want to be homeless no one is getting evicted out of their home because they want want to have their children sleep in their car tonight when something doesn't impact you or affect you you you don't see a problem you know but if it impacts you and affects you and and you're wondering where you're going to sleep tomorrow then it's a different thing culturally as far as housing goes i've always had a roof over my head my grandparents and my aunts and uncles we are their own property we owned our homes so i never experienced any situation like i'm in now it just seems like you know you take two steps forward and you end up taking one back but instead of taking one back now it's like i took five backwards i just saw hope that me saying what i'm saying right now will not only help myself but can help other people my husband's from the santisoo tribe it's where he was taken back out to santee to be buried and i'm i'm blackfoot i've heard the misconceptions that uh natives get a lot of money for their land and all this stuff and i'm like where did you hear that it's all about the land it's not about the people on it then that's what it should be this is the trailer that they were trying to take from me when they took me to court they were asking for a seizure of property they were trying to get the title and seize this there is a lot of things impacting natives right now including you know with the housing and all of that the covet for myself as a native what's impacted me the most right now is just my finances due to you know the recent events that have caused me to take time off from work trying to get you know like unemployment going and other assistance stuff it's been slow going the route of problems for some of native americans and housing is i feel like you know if they didn't grow up with the mindset of you know you can be a homeowner or you're just going to rent the biggest housing concerns in nebraska i think is there's not enough housing there's not enough funding to help us get housing we provide affordable housing throughout 15 county service area of the ponca tribe of nebraska we take applications from all native americans our focus is you know to make sure that it's safe housing healthy housing you know our goal is to help tenants and applicants become self-sufficient i do believe that the problems stem from you know the history of how things you know were done in the past so at one time we weren't counted a tribe anymore so people had to kind of move out and do other things and find jobs and off their reservation because at one time they did actually have land but there's not sometimes a lot of stuff to go back to especially we went back to reservation for jobs and things like that a lot of that keeps them down or keeps them you know from not reaching out and doing better throughout my childhood and everything there was a lot of years that we didn't have a home i've spent winters in tents at campsites out at the lake the eviction it really opened my eyes so i decided to start a non-profit outreach program for homeless individuals natives native americans focused but not exclusive the name of the organization is going to be bob's place bob's my husband he was more than willing to help those that needed it to be able to carry something on in his name you know it means the world to me it's like a piece of bob is still living on that he's he's still doing what he he would have done in life you know getting his word out there that you need to stand up for yourself you need to be strong you need to go for what you want and not take pity on yourself [Music] when um the eviction took place on the the third i had nowhere to go then i didn't want to go to the mission you know i was in limbo just basically just going back and forth around the building spending my time in split places and then just i sleep outside sleeping outside at the bus stop you know just laying there you know still trying to figure out you know a few resources calling a few places i actually was supposed to start a job the next day i couldn't start a job because um the eviction was going on i believe the system is set up for people to fail and find their own way you know within their failure i came to lincoln when i was 17 from milwaukee wisconsin as a state ward being of the state basically it was the label now that label sticks with you you may want to go apply for a job and they probably seen you on the news for a case you've been found innocent of but they don't know that only thing they know is oh i seen him on the news you know what i'm saying it actually it has a big effect on your life i was labeled with onset schizophrenia i never did anything to be in the system i was just a product of my environment so being low income or considered you know mentally disabled or handicapped i feel like i never fit these modes i withheld rent due to maintenance concerns i felt through a hardship in which i could have caught up on rent if i wanted to but why catch up on rent when your maintenance concerns the things that's deemed as essential are not being given as far as my plumbing my water sewage coming out of the pipes what we've seen a lot down at the courthouse are retaliatory evictions and by that i mean evictions where the tenant filed a complaint with the city or even just ask for basic repairs to be made and the landlord in response evicted them either immediately or just gave them a 30-day notice or sometimes breached the lease because the landlord would rather have somebody in there who wasn't complaining or who wasn't asking for repairs to be made one thing that is a little bit disappointing is that oftentimes tenants only course of action for something that they've asked their landlord to fix and they're not fixing it is a 14 30 day notice which basically means that if you don't fix the issue within 14 days and 30 days i'm moving out and our lease is terminated that's really frustrating because a lot of the times tenants are continuing to endure conditions and situations where they don't have the affordable and adequate housing that they need on the flip side a lot of landlords are really lenient they will try to work with a tenant because evictions are expensive for landlords too that turnover is lost income on their part because of this it creates this really tenuous relationship where a tenant will not want to speak up because they know that they're getting a cut from their landlord or that their landlord lets them pay their rent late and they just don't want to cause any more trouble that would jeopardize their housing situation i don't feel as if it's just behavior to evict people who are going through a hardship i feel as if landlords should actually try to come to some type of mediation or agreement and try to see the bigger picture oh this person is going through a hard time hey let me let me help this person as much as i can let me see what his concerns are what complaints are and let me see how i can assist him within making his life easier so he can make my life [Music] easier things get lost in translation when i tell my attorney to tell their attorney to tell them we talked and we worked things out we wrote up a new lease we decided to do it month to month for a while just to you know make sure and she agreed to try to build a relationship and you know show them that i'm not what they think i am because of the way that things had started out the impact and benefit having legal representation in these cases is just significant it's critical it's night and day difference in so many of these cases once the landlord has filed an action and is coming to court there's often very little room to negotiate however when there's attorneys on both sides of the case that process becomes so much more seamless you know by the time these folks have come to court they've already gone through typically so many issues and so many crises in their lives this is one more stressor on them that makes things very difficult and very unbearable for them and so having someone there to kind of take that that task away from them and and to be able to communicate without all of the emotion i think is just absolutely critical my kid's status terminal with cancer so they have a lot a lot of weight on them they're 13 12 and 10 and they're they're dealing with the fact that they know that their dad isn't gonna be there when they're adults they've been through so much but they're still like just so loving and caring and they were finally in a place where they were all happy they had their own rooms i couldn't take that from them you know i couldn't i could not take that away from them and so i fought with everything that i had like it was very important to me for my kids to be happy [Music] [Music] what would justice look like wow you know i really can't say because i've never seen justice i have no idea i just know people need to be fair that's all i ask just be fair and i want to be understood about if something is out of your control then give a person an opportunity to make the situation right don't put me on the deadline and then say well okay and then now i'll become a even bigger part of the problem because now i'm out on the streets you know and i have i'm homeless or whatever that makes it even worse [Music] this isn't much but it's my home and i don't want to lose it [Music] if you know anything about omaha you know it's one of the most irrigated cities in the country we have all these inadequacies in our housing whose responsibility is it to fix it evictions have a far reaching impact way beyond a house it's a community it's a fabric of a people it's how families and friends and relationships are built i see the reclamation of public space being an integral part of how we think about housing and community because we recognize that we all benefit from when people have a place to be and live and exist that like helps them live a fruitful and productive life and right now it's a matter of selection and happenstance look and privilege and we have all of the tools available to us to address that inequity the pandemic has really heightened this need for affordable and adequate housing and so one of the biggest issues that we're trying to tackle is how do we make it so that people do want to invest in that social fabric of their neighborhood how do we make it so that they're feeling invested in the neighborhood and then in turn the neighborhood benefits as a whole because you've got this wide net of people who have relationships with one another so the first thing that comes to mind is this idea that housing is a human right and that if we're looking at our hierarchy of needs stable housing drastically affects someone's quality of life but a lot of folks are just not making the income necessary to keep up with all that life requires of you and that's really unfair so like if you want to talk about evictions aren't a problem it's that we don't get paid enough raise the minimum wage but no one wants to talk about that a living wage would really help a living wage or for real living wage it's hard for a person like me to make ends meet i'm a single black man and it's hard you would think it's not but it really is everything is not a person's fault we all have setbacks we all stumble it's not about how you fall down it's about how you get up it seems to me that if you can see that a person is trying and doing the best they can they should be able to get some type of assistance without having to jump through a lot of hoops and uh have a lot of questions about you know you know is it your fault this is not my fault this is a global pandemic so it's not my fault if my livelihood is being shut down i don't understand what it is that i'm supposed to do there is a real gap between the services that one would normally get from other organizations that support housing and so we seek to fill in that gap during this era of the pandemic in assisting folks with immediate needs that they have around being evicted and or they're homeless and in this climate of social injustice we really need to push for policy change and those that are most affected they don't have a voice around it and we can only achieve that if we get into the difficult conversations around social justice and understanding that people are treated differently just because of the way they look and who they are and until we work to eliminate all of that then we can't have a successful nation we can't have a successful community i think in order to end homelessness we do need to look at evictions and when someone gets an eviction on their record it it can be very difficult for them to find anyone who's willing to rent to them for the next several years that is a contributing factor to homelessness i believe as a community we have a need and i think we have a want to help those individuals in need and i think working and finding ways to prevent evictions is a way of doing that well i think this is important because the the right to housing and to be housed should be recognized as a fundamental right i can also say as a landlord myself i've been a landlord for over 20 years now we need to realize that these are human beings and this isn't just a business transaction but there's there's bigger questions that we should ask ourselves i may miss a month's rents but can i work something out with this person to where they can eventually get caught up is there somewhere in the middle maybe i make a little less profit but i keep a good tenant and i i would hope that more landlords see it from that perspective when you see statistics that show that greater than ninety percent of landlords have attorneys and less than five percent of tenants have attorneys it makes you really question the process is this fair and when you go down there and you see yourself you see no this is absolutely not fair and something needs done i don't think it's fair because at the same time to put eviction on my name that's going to make it kind of difficult and complicated what people can do is be understanding you know be understanding towards people because you never know what situation they may be going through without stability you have nothing you can't depict your next move you can't really focus that's what home is home is your sanctuary home is your comfortability as i say it's where your heart is for me the word home is here where me and my husband called home and if i was to lose this home i'd be losing him all over again home to me is is my children as long as i have them then i'm home and with all this going on and the fear that we're gonna be living in our car you know even my little tiny ones she said just like well as long as we have each other then then we're okay everyone's situation is different what my problems are may not be the next person's problems but i'm just asking to be treated fairly and to understand that things do happen in life until we can change the system and the heart of people then nothing's going to change [Music] essentially [Music] you

Channel: Civic Nebraska

Views: 168,230

Keywords: civic nebraska, gabriella parsons, behind on rent, short film, Nebraska, lincoln, omaha, eviction, evicted, housing crisis, affordable housing, tenants, landlords, pandemic

Id: DMDoztVwASw

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020