Marcel Slag has been fighting evictions for 28 years as a lawyer with Central Virginia Legal Aid and its now independent Justice Center.

But for him, it’s like sweeping against the tide.

“It doesn’t make a dent,” he said. “It just seems to get worse.”

He offered his comments Wednesday in the wake of a new study that ranks Richmond as No. 2 in the United States among large-size cities when it comes to evictions. North Charleston, S.C., holds the No. 1 ranking.

Four other Virginia cities are in the top 10, according to the study — Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk and Chesapeake.

Mr. Slag and others already knew that evictions were a huge problem in Richmond based on their experience in the often clogged Richmond General District Court’s Civil Division, where landlords routinely go to seek approval to evict tenants from their homes and apartments. The study, conducted by sociologist Matthew Desmond and the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, quantified the situation.

The study provides data on a horrific problem that hammers the poor, with low-income African-Americans among those who are disproportionately affected.

Dr. Desmond’s lab collected tens of millions of court records to provide the first comprehensive look at evictions, a subject the federal government and most states have ignored.

“The breadth and depth of America’s eviction epidemic — and its data trail —requires wider attention,” according to Dr. Desmond, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” a look at evictions in Milwaukee.

According to the 2016 data his team gleaned from 900,000 eviction records, 5,800 tenant households were evicted in Richmond that year. That represented 11.4 percent of such households, or one of every nine households paying rent.

It could have been worse. The data shows that one in five tenant households in the city were threatened with the loss of the roof over their heads in 2016, primarily for missing a rent payment but also for a host of alleged violations of their leases.

Richmond was just barely ahead of Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk, where evictions top 10 percent of renting households. It was far worse in North Charleston, where one in six renting households were evicted in 2016, or 16.5 percent.

“The information in the study is distressing,” Reginald Gordon, director of the Richmond’s anti-poverty agency, the Office of Community Wealth Building, stated Wednesday in response to a Free Press query.

“The eviction rate in Richmond and other cities in Virginia is a prime example of a systemic or structural policy of inequity embedded in state law that has a debilitating impact on the ability of many members of the community to reach economic stability,” he stated.

“It not uncommon to hear stories of people working two jobs in Richmond, yet they still need around $750 to catch up on one month of rent in order to maintain their housing and avoid eviction,” he noted.  

“Once evicted,” he continued, “that family falls further into financial distress, and it might take years for them to regain any financial momentum,” a key issue that is a main focus for his office in seeking to help people train for and secure employment that pays a living wage.

Mr. Slag and other lawyers see the damage that evictions inflict. A tenant who is removed often finds it difficult to rent elsewhere as landlords or their associations enter the information in a shared database.

The result benefits slum landlords, Mr. Slag said. They end up having plenty of applicants to choose from despite failing to maintain their properties, he said.

Eviction is highly stressful for all involved. Children often have to change schools because of a forced move, disrupting their educational experience. The loss of a permanent address also can prevent people from receiving government aid, such as food stamps and Medicaid.

Jay Speer, executive director of the Richmond-based Virginia Poverty Law Center, said rising rents are wreaking havoc with people at the lower end of the income scale. His organization sees many people who are paying 50 percent to 80 percent of their income for housing, “which is unsustainable,” he said. 

People making the minimum wage or subsisting on government disability payments are increasingly finding themselves priced out of the housing market as rents rise, Mr. Slag said. These days in Richmond, $500 a month is cheap rent for a one-room apartment. People who stay week by week at hotels are paying $180 a week to more than $200 a week.

In Mr. Slag’s view, stemming evictions would require the government to invest more heavily in housing subsidies.

“At least 25 percent of Richmond residents need housing subsidies, but subsidies are only available to about 6 percent,” he said.

One of the mainstays is the 4,000 units of aging public housing that the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority is struggling to maintain even as it pushes for money to redevelop its properties into mixed-income communities. Still, as many as 9 percent of RRHA’s tenants end up being evicted annually.  

However, lack of money is just one reason for evictions. Renters may pay the rent and still be evicted for violating a “no pet” provision in their lease or for having the lights cut off because people run out of money trying to pay for rent and electricity. People with physical or mental challenges can be booted out for failing to meet cleanliness standards.

And unlike New York City, the first city in the country to provide attorneys to people hauled into housing court on a par with people charged with crimes, most people in Richmond and Virginia cannot afford or cannot get to a lawyer in time, including the Legal Aid staff, which often is submerged in clients.

At least half of those who receive eviction notices move before the matter goes to court to avoid getting a mark on their record.

Mr. Speer said the new data is helping to spur a renewed effort to focus on the policies that undergird the “grim realities of eviction.”

The Poverty Law Center is seeking to galvanize a new coalition of lawyers and housing advocates under the umbrella Campaign to Reduce Eviction, or CARE, that is scheduled to meet for the first time on May 22 in Richmond, he said. The time and place are still being determined.

“The excessive number of evictions stems from so many different factors. They range from a shortage of affordable rental housing to the low minimum wage and even the way some of our laws seem to favor landlords over tenants,” said Christie Marra, the attorney leading the CARE effort for the Poverty Law Center.

“We plan on taking a careful look at all the factors, determining which factors contribute most to these numbers, and begin making every effort to change or eliminate them. It’s simply unacceptable for this many people to live in fear of losing their homes.”