A Baltimore City Council committee heard from housing advocates and officials Tuesday to discuss the scope of the city’s eviction crisis and strategies to overcome it.
Tisha Edwards, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success, said that just before the pandemic — in March of 2020 — one in 10 city residents were already behind on rent.
Since then, those numbers have gone up. By April that year, one in five residents were behind, she said. Two months later, that number was one in three.
By October, more than 11,000 households were in arrears and that number more than doubled by March of this year.
“This has been a challenge that we’ve been trying to work through for more than a year,” she said.
In total, more than $37 million have gone into eviction prevention assistance. Those funds come from a combination of federal, state and local allocations.
“I think that we’ve made some progress,” Edwards said. “But unfortunately the demand and the need continues to grow.”
To read more about the City Council’s discussion on the eviction crisis, go to WYPR.
