Moving evicted tenants is lucrative

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Property owners across the U.S. bear a burden from the recession: paying a fortune in moving and storage costs to evict tenants who fail to pay their rent.

But the owners’ losses are a boon for the companies that clear out homes. Their business has skyrocketed, “making money out of people’s misery,” said David Robinson, an attorney for Legal Services NYC, which helps low-income New Yorkers navigate the eviction process.

Hardest-hit are ethnic urban neighborhoods, where about twice as many renters are forced to leave as in the general population, according to housing experts.

Low-income black women, often single mothers, are the most likely to be evicted because they can’t afford their rent, recent research showed.

For the movers, “it’s a lucrative business, absolutely,” said Eli Navon, owner of Eagle Van Lines, a New Jersey-based company that executes eviction moves in the greater New York area.

Such jobs typically bring extra money because “you have to pack every single thing, from the dishes to the furniture, and sometimes even garbage; we’re not allowed to throw anything out,” said Navon.

His clients pay an average of about $2,500 to clear out a two-bedroom apartment, Navon said. And that’s not the end of eviction expenses for the property owner, who then must pay for a storage unit to hold the tenant’s goods for 30 days.

The annual cost of evictions to property owners is in the millions of dollars, according to Chester Hartman, an urban planner with the Poverty and Race Research Action Council in Washington.