Deputies from the Richmond Sheriff’s Office had a packed schedule of 126 evictions to oversee this week.

“As far as I can tell, this is a new weekly record” for the city, said Martin “Marty” Wegbreit, director of litigation for the Central Virginia Legal Aid’s Richmond office.

The previous peak for sheriff-conducted evictions in Richmond had been 79 evictions in the first week in October.

Lawyers from Legal Aid and the separate Legal Aid Justice Center continue to be swamped with cases as people face evictions now that a federally funded state rental relief program has run out of money.

Since July 1, landlords have filed nearly 4,000 cases in Richmond seeking evictions, according to data compiled by the Legal Services Corp.

“Richmond faces the exact same eviction crisis we faced when the New York Times exposed the problem in April 2018,” Mr. Wegbreit noted. The filings and court-awarded judgments for evictions “are near, and sometimes above, pre-pandemic levels.”

Most of the evictions have so far involved private complexes.

A prime example is the 500-unit James River Pointe complex on German School Road in South Side.

The new owner, AION Partners of New York, has been moving to evict 255 households – or more than half – from the complex for rent arrears. Tenants in court have claimed that the previous owners failed to credit their accounts for rent relief, but the majority are expected to lose their units.

One of the city’s biggest landlords, the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, has largely avoided evictions of some of the area’s poorest families. RRHA reported that only five families have been evicted since the restart of lease enforcement last January.

RRHA’s new chief executive officer, Steven B. Nesmith, was to brief City Council next Monday, Nov. 7, on the agency’s plans on that front.

Still, hundreds of families are at risk. In October, when Mr. Nesmith took charge, RRHA reported 1,795 families, or 61 percent of the nearly 3,000 households occupying RRHA apartments, were in arrears on rent.

Of those households in arrears, 96 owe $5,000 or more in back rent, while another 523 households owe $1,000 or more in back rent and 372 households owe $500 or more, according to RRHA.

While rent relief has helped some, at least 400 households who had applied and were counting on help from the state fund learned Oct. 10 that the $1 billion in rent relief had been exhausted and there would be no further help.

RRHA has spent the past 18 months urging those households in arrears to get on a repay- ment plan, but reported that as of October only 49 plans were active.

According to RRHA’s fact sheet, the authority planned to issue 30-day last notices this month and to begin the process of going to court in the coming months.