In one of the worst cities for evictions in the US, North Charleston, South Carolina, state representative Marvin Pendarvis’s push for more tenant protections is personal.
When he was just 12, his family was evicted from their North Charleston home and the memory still haunts him.
“I can remember being served with an eviction notice,” Pendarvis said. “I can remember having our belongings put out on the street.”
The 30-year-old Democrat has worked to improve renter protections since entering politics, but the issue has taken on new urgency because of the coronavirus pandemic, economic crisis and racial injustice protests.
Housing advocates across the country are bracing for a surge in evictions after the expiration of federal programs to help the unemployed during the pandemic. The firm Stout Risius Ross predicted 185,000 evictions could be filed in South Carolina in the next four months. Those most at risk of eviction are low-income women of color.
After Pendarvis was evicted in the early 2000s, he and his sisters moved frequently to live with different family members and friends.
“It’s hard to be engaged in academics, it’s hard to be engaged in anything, when you know that all of your friends are going back home at the end of the day and you don’t know where you’re going yet,” Pendarvis said. “Sometimes you wish the school day would last as long as possible … just because you know that for those few hours, six, seven hours of the day, that you’ll be fed, you’ll be housed and you’ll feel safe and comfortable.”
Pendarvis said after he spoke publicly about being evicted, a handful of politicians contacted him to share similar experiences.
Ultimately though, South Carolina’s political class – like that of much of the US – is more representative of landlords than renters.
The state’s governor, Henry McMaster, is a landlord and has collected rent from his more than 200 tenants through the pandemic, according to the Post and Courier newspaper. It was the state supreme court, not its politicians, that passed a now-expired coronavirus eviction moratorium.
“It’s just not gotten the attention it needs to address it in a meaningful way through politics,” Pendarvis said. “That’s what I look at as my role: to try to bring awareness to people and show them evictions are happening.”
Pendarvis has been publicizing individual cases of eviction to local media, advising residents in his capacity as a practicing attorney and pushing legislation to address issues which disproportionately affect the city he represents.
“I get a call every day – literally – a call or an email or a text or a Facebook message or a tweet from someone in my district, and even beyond my district, that is dealing with eviction,” Pendarvis said. “Or someone who has been laid off from their job and they’re looking at what to do with unemployment and what’s going to happen with that.”
As a representative for a 41,000-person district, which is 51% Black, the racial injustice protests that have roiled America this summer further focused his efforts to fight for improvements to housing law, healthcare and food insecurity in the state.
Pendarvis participated in the protests and said they inspired him to re-evaluate his work. He also became a father for the first time in April and asked himself what he wanted to tell his son he was doing in the summer of 2020.
“I came to the conclusion I’ve got to do more,” he said.
This summer’s racial equality protests formed in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it was the police killing of another Black man, Walter Scott, that catalyzed Pendarvis’s entry into public service.
A few months after Pendarvis graduated law school, Scott was shot dead while running away from a police officer who had pulled him over for a traffic violation. Three months later, a white teenager killed nine black people in a church in downtown Charleston.
“You had two really, really traumatic events that took place in our city that shook me and forced me to think about my role in addressing some of the issues that led to what happened,” Pendarvis said.
He ran for city council, lost, and decided to try again in 2019. But a statehouse representative resigned in 2017 and Pendarvis successfully campaigned for the seat. He was re-elected in 2018 and decisively won the Democratic primary in June. He does not face a Republican challenger in November.
Pendarvis thinks the US needs to do much more to be sure that after the virus is under control, citizens aren’t further burdened by lingering health disparities, unemployment and food insecurity.
Pendarvis said: “My community is going to be decimated after this virus from an economic standpoint and even a health standpoint, and the question is how do we ensure they are able to recover properly?”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
