 Good afternoon, everybody. And thank you for joining us today. My name is Yulia Panfill. I'm the director of the Future of Property Rights Program at the Think Tank New America. Today, we will present our findings of housing loss in Winston-Salem and surrounding Forsyth County, a study we were lucky enough to partner on with the Center for the Study of Economic Mobility at Winston-Salem State. The Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Wake Forest Law School and the Department of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. I'd like to give a special shout out to Scott Shane, the head of Wake's Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, who really is the reason we selected Forsyth County for our case study, and also to acknowledge Craig Richardson, our partner from CSUM, and Sherry Lawson-Clark, our partner from Wake's Department of Anthropology, as well as our student researchers, Jack Portman, Alex Catermull, and Roger Exceltzer. Finally, I'd like to thank three community stakeholder organizations that volunteered to be our local marketing sponsors for this event, United Way of Forsyth County, Habitat for Humanity of Forsyth County, and Neighbors for Better Neighborhoods. So what will we talk about today? Today, we're going to see who is losing their homes within Forsyth County, where this loss is occurring, why, and how this is tied up with poverty and economic mobility, and opportunity across the county. I know that this topic hits particularly hard right now in the context of COVID and the predictions of a tsunami of housing loss. But I want to stress that in Forsyth County, just like in the rest of the country, housing instability was a crisis even before COVID. And while a moratorium might stop the bleeding in the short term, we need systemic fixes to make sure that everyone has access to a safe and stable home. So with that, I'd like to just give you a quick run of show for our event today. I'll kick us off briefly to present our report findings with my colleague, Tim Robustelli, a policy analyst for the Future Property Rights Program and the report's lead author. And then I'll hand it over to Dr. Lawson-Clark, who will lead a fantastic panel discussion that zooms out from our findings and talks about how housing relates to economic mobility and poverty across the county. So with that, we'll transition into a short presentation of the report findings. Fantastic. So our work in Forsyth County is part of a larger study called Displaced in America, which really tried to understand the totality of how people are losing their homes, both through evictions and foreclosures across the country. Next slide, please. And why did we want to do this? We know that millions of people lose their homes every year, but actually very little is known about where housing loss is most acute and how it happens. The two primary mechanisms of housing loss in the US are eviction and mortgage foreclosure, but they're typically looked at in silos. There's a very robust eviction conversation led by the eviction lab and others. There had been around the 2008 crisis and afterwards a robust foreclosure conversation, but really these forms of housing loss are talked about very differently and by different groups of people, even though often the causes and the results are very similar. So we tried to visualize the scale and breadth of these two types of housing loss holistically. And finally, partway through our study period, of course, the world turned upside down under our feet with the arrival of the COVID pandemic and the economic shocks and job losses and expected impacts on housing. And what we realized was that by looking at where housing loss had historically been the most severe and who had historically been the most impacted, we could start to predict where and who housing loss as a result of COVID would most likely impact. So that became a really important additional dimension to our study as we moved into the second half of it. Next slide please. So the scope of our research, we worked at the same time at the national level and at the national level, we ranked more than 2,200 counties on their eviction rates, foreclosure rates and overall severity of housing loss. And at the same time, we took a deep dive in three US counties, Forsyth County, Marion County, which is where Indianapolis is and Maricopa County, where Phoenix and Tempe are. And in those counties, we drilled down to the census tract level so we could visualize housing loss by neighborhood. And we conducted dozens of key informant interviews to get the context behind the numbers and understand why this housing loss was occurring, why it was impacting some differently than others, what were the consequences of displacement and what could be done to combat it. Next slide please. So this is just a quick view of our methodology. On the quantitative side, we worked with a data science firm called DataKind to develop a single metric of housing loss that would combine evictions and foreclosures. So for every given county, or in the case of Forsyth County, for every given census tract, we took the eviction rate, which is basically just the number of evictions divided by the number of renter households and combined it with the foreclosure rate, which is the number of foreclosures divided by the number of homeowner households with a mortgage. And that gave us a housing loss rate. We could then compare that rate to the national average to see where a certain county fell in relation to the national average. And then on the qualitative side, as I mentioned, we conducted key informant interviews. We spoke with lawyers, housing experts, social workers, landlords, tenants, everyone in between to try to understand the story behind the numbers. Next slide please. So this is just a static index of our housing loss index, which is quite interactive. And I encourage you to go to the study site and play around with it yourselves. The index includes about two thirds of all U.S. counties. And you can see how they're ranked. So as you can see here, for example, Petersburg city is an unincorporated city in southern Virginia. And it had the highest overall housing loss rate in the country at just over 12%. So what that means is that every 12 out of 100 households in Petersburg city are losing their homes every single year. And you can see that the housing loss index is six, which means that it's about six times the national average. So if you go down to the very bottom of this slide, you can actually see Forsyth County, which is 89 out of a sample of 2,200 plus counties with a housing loss rate of about 4%. And this is between the years 2014 to 2016. And as my colleague, Tim, will explain later in the presentation, when we drilled down to the census tract level, we were actually able to expand our data set to include the years 2017 to 2018. So we're able to have some more current data as well. Next slide, please. So what we did is we converted our numbers into a heat map that shows really where across the country, housing loss is the most acute. And I'll only show a heat map for overall housing loss, but we also developed heat maps specifically for eviction and specifically for foreclosure. And you can see the states with the highest rates of housing loss. North Carolina actually had the ninth overall housing, highest housing loss in the country and had the seventh highest eviction rate in the country. So again, quite high. And based on our national findings, we were able to conclude for the very first time that nearly 5 million people every single year are losing their homes through eviction and mortgage foreclosure. So that's about 2% of the sample that we were able to look at of total households. And now I will hand it over to my colleague, Tim, to take you through what we found specifically in Forsyth County. Over to you, Tim. Thank you, Yulia. Next slide, please. So as Yulia mentioned, we examined evictions, mortgage foreclosures and overall housing loss at the census tract level in Forsyth County from 2014 to 2018. Next slide, please. And we did not want to only understand where loss was happening, but we want to tell the whole story, the who, the why, the how, and then the consequences. So we dug a little deeper. Looking at the drivers of displacement in Forsyth County, based on the interviews that were conducted on the ground, it really came down to the combination of low wages and a lack of affordable housing. Rent costs have increased in recent years while wages for about a third of county residents have actually decreased. There's also a 16,000 unit shortage of extremely low income rental housing, which is a striking figure. And projects funded by the low income housing tax credit and other affordable housing development programs cannot make up that gap by any means. In the last 10 years, for example, LIETEC has only created about 1,000 units of affordable housing in Forsyth County. Next slide, please. So what you'll see to the left of this slide is a static image of our housing loss map in Forsyth County. This map and others are interactive in our report online. So I encourage you all to go check those out. But when it comes to housing loss in Forsyth County, between 2014 and 2018, the rate was 2.6%, meaning that about two and a half households will be forcibly displaced from their homes every year. And among our three case studies, Forsyth County was actually the lowest when it came to housing loss rate during the study period. But that still translates to roughly 3700 households losing their homes each year. And I will point out that the eviction rate was significant at 4.4%, and that translates into evictions accounting for 80% of all housing loss in the county. Next slide, please. So when you look at the housing loss rate in Forsyth County, the overall rate is 2.6%. But what you'll see is that there's a number of census tracts that experience a loss rate six to seven times the county average. And you can see that in the north of Winston-Salem and also in the east side of the city. Next slide, please. To break things down a bit further, looking at evictions in Forsyth County, again, the county average is 4.4%, but we see census tracts to the north and then in the east side that show rates two to three times the average. Next slide, please. And finally, when it comes to mortgage foreclosure rate, the county average was only 1%, but to continue the theme or the trend that we saw, some of the hardest hit tracts with rates three, four, even six times the county average are located on the east side of Winston-Salem. Next slide, please. So all this to say, which perhaps is a bit obvious and maybe unsurprising for our audience that housing loss is most acute in East Winston. Based on our analysis we saw for overall housing loss, for evictions and for mortgage foreclosure. Next slide, please. But we also wanted to go a bit deeper and find out who exactly was losing their homes. And we were able to do this by running correlation analysis using American community survey variables at the census tract level. And of all the variables we examined, census tracts with more households that lack health insurance were most strongly correlated with both evictions and overall housing loss. And that gives credence to some of the anecdotal and qualitative evidence that we heard that people are often flat tire, medical emergency away from being unable to pay their rent or mortgage payments and suffering from displacement. I'll also just add that census tracts with predominantly black households and census tracts with predominantly Latinx households had higher rates of eviction in mortgage foreclosure than predominantly white tracts. And finally, the last finding that we found quite interesting was that census tracts in which a high percentage of workers take public transit to work had higher rates of housing loss. Next slide, please. So I'll just quickly touch on something else that we really only scratched the surface on within our report. And that's heirs property and partition sales in Forsyth County. So according to a study by the USDA, Forsyth County has roughly 1500 heirs properties. And that's the fifth highest number in North Carolina. And what we heard anecdotally and qualitatively was that there was a number of issues around heirs property related to building of generational wealth, the agency of landowners to develop and invest in their land. And it also leads to neglects when descendants of original owners move away and don't care for the property. It falls into disrepair, taxes aren't paid and that sometimes can lead to tax foreclosures as well. But certainly an avenue of further research for our program. Next slide, please. And then just to quickly touch on the consequences of displacement. What we heard from the interviews is that after people are displaced, neighborhoods often suffer from their neglect. People often have to move into less desirable neighborhoods which means reduced access to public transit, which in turn leads to reduced access to jobs, healthy grocery stores, education and the like. And finally homelessness and not just the stereotypical view of people living on the streets, but also living in substandard or overcrowded housing. Excuse me. And I'd just like to downshift a bit on the consequence of neighborhood neglect. So according to a 2017 study, the economic impacts of one foreclosure on an entire surrounding community is $170,000. And that comes through to decrease values of nearby homes, increase in crime and fires and also a loss of property taxes for the community. And I'll also add that we found, according to city reports in Winston-Salem, that there are over 6,000 vacant properties, mostly in the Northeast and Southeast planning sections of the city. Next slide, please. And quickly just to touch on our policy recommendations to the left, you see some general policy recommendations that we speak to at length in our report. We felt that those were applicable across the United States. We also touch on some policy recommendations unique to Forsyth County. I'll mention a few. The first is to expand home ownership programs, such as the County's home ownership program. We think that that's a successful model. And at the moment, it's just not possible to help everyone who could benefit from programs like that. We also think that local decision makers should promote affordable housing development as a catalyst for growth, creating mixed income, mixed use neighborhoods that are high in resources. And that sort of takes me to our last point as well. Housing, stable housing is only the base, but for a community to really thrive, you need neighborhoods with good schools, with access to good jobs, with access to healthy grocery stores. And again, that all comes through for many access to reliable public transportation. Next slide, please. And I will end it there. That's the end of our slide deck and throw it back to Yulia. Thank you. Thank you so much, Tim, for that presentation. And I'd really just like to underscore that last piece that Tim shared, which was the interconnected and fundamental nature of housing. And we saw this across all three of our case studies that a loss of housing was a trigger for a downward spiral that an investigative reporter at the Indianapolis Star actually called Entering the Toilet Bowl, which is sort of a crude, but I thought very striking image. Housing loss often leads to children having to bounce between schools. Housing loss may mean moving far away from your job and eventually losing that job or having to get a new job because you can't make the commute work. One of our interviewees cited spending more than 100 hours trying to look for new housing. Those are hours that you can't spend working, you can't spend studying, you can't spend with your children. And an eviction on your record or a foreclosure on your record is really such a financial red flag that it can throw a family's credit and financial health into long-term disrepair. So we really see housing as a fundamental, just a fundamental right that when it gets disrupted leads to severe overall disruption in many other parts of life. And I know that this is nothing new to the audience, but just wanted to underscore that. So with that, I wanted to take this to our fantastic panel discussion that's going to sort of zoom out and take the study findings as a jumping off point to talk about economic mobility and poverty across the county. As we know, Forsyth County has been found to have some of the lowest economic mobility rates and some of the highest poverty concentration rates in the country. And housing is really bound up with some of those stark findings. So here to speak about that, I will introduce our moderator, Dr. Sherry Lawson-Clark, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. And with her will be Wanda Allen-Abraha, the director of the city's human relations department. Steve Virgal, professor and executive director of experiential education at Wake Forest Law School. And finally, Valene Franco, managing attorney at Legal Aid of North Carolina. I would encourage you to please post your questions and comments either in the Q&A function on the bottom of the screen or directly in the chat. And we will get them to the panelists and we will try to answer as many of them as we can. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Dr. Clark. Thank you so much, Julia. And thank you, Tim, for your overview of the findings at Forsyth County. What I'd like to do for the next 30 or so minutes with the panel is actually to offer to the end reflections to the Forsyth County findings. And I'd like to organize this part of the discussion in four areas and I will open it up to the three panelists that are here to respond. And I also encourage viewers to also submit your questions Q&A and we will get to those as well. And so the four areas that I'd like to discuss and break down sort of the report, the findings in Forsyth County are to focus on wages and housing instability in Forsyth County. Also with respect to the report, looking at disparities on legal representation between landlords and tenants. A third area I'd like to look at specifically what's happening in East Winston and we could sort of uncover some of the things or discuss some of the things that were voiced in the report. And then the last is looking at sort of crises around evictions and mortgages as it relates to the COVID and post COVID era, what's happening there. So the first question I'd like to pose is how do low wages and wage stagnation impact housing stability in Forsyth County? So I'll offer some thoughts. I think super interesting report and I think looking at our city as it's seen by other people, people outside the cities is really sort of high opening, right? One of the things I think is really telling about the wages part that the timeframe that people are looking at here 2014 to 18 was a time of really boom in economic growth for a lot of people. And yet somehow we see wages stagnating in Winston are going backwards. And I think a lot of it in Winston has to do with the economic development strategies that we're pursuing, right? We have an economy that is focused heavily on tech type businesses, startups, things that exclude a lot of people and the growth of wealth that's happening in them is sort of limited to a number of people as a result. And I think when folks are making within a dollar or two of minimum wage, the idea of affording decent housing or any housing with a family is really, it's a significant stretch. And so if you could speak a little bit more about sort of the stagnation, my thoughts are throughout the country, there are probably the same issues happening, right? With low wages and the inability to afford housing, what is special about or specific about Forsyth County? You think? I don't want to dominate, but I think that Winston has always been a company town, right? It's just the company has changed over time. And so we went from tobacco to finance textiles to now higher education and healthcare. And the entry levels for jobs that pay a living wage in those sectors, it's just difficult to move into many of the jobs that are being created right now and the keystone institutions that are shaping the city without higher education, without access to training in very specialized ways. And our education system doesn't seem to be aligned very well with the public education system with the areas where we have economic wage and wealth growth in our local economy. Okay, good. So let's move on to our next area and looking at legal representation. And I think this is something that came out across the United States and looking at the legal representation with disparities between landlords and tenants. And what do we know or what is the role of legal aid in supporting low-income tenants in North Carolina? So legal aid of North Carolina, of course, represents tenants throughout the entire state. And here in Forsyth County, our local Winston-Salem office supports those tenants that are living and working here in Forsyth County. We provide advice, counsel, and direct representation in all levels of our courts, whether it be the magistrates court, district court appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, depending on the length of the case and the issues involved in the case. We also provide education and outreach to those tenants that are here in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County that are needing information about their rights and responsibilities under the laws with respect to landlord-tenant issues. We are even literally at the courthouse right now. We are, they are handing out flyers before magistrates court hearings so that people can understand the impact of the CDC moratorium, the CARES Act and the different things that are really impacting tenants right now in the context of the global pandemic. So there are a number of ways that we do support tenants here in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. And they also include financial assistance as well. And I can talk a little bit more about that later. Yes. Comments around representation between attorney, I mean, between, I'm sorry, landlords and tenants? You know, I would say that the odds of keeping someone in a house, in their housing, go up substantially if an attorney is involved for the tenant. And if we think about the work of legal aid and what that means, it's just profound. And I think we should think about finding ways to equal the targeting power of both parties and expand access to attorneys in these proceedings. And so I'm looking at some of the questions and I'm gonna come back to some of the questions I think that are overlapping with our discussion as we are having them and putting them in sort of areas of interest. The next question I wanted to move us to is East Winston. And if we could talk about, we saw in Tim's reporting that sort of the disparities in the high housing loss indices in East Winston. And if you could speak to any of the things that you know or that's happening around housing in East Winston, employment opportunities or other types of development that's occurring. Dr. Lawson and Clark, I would like to tie back in with what both Valine and Steve just discussed and kind of liaise that with what you just posed. Basically, I agree 100% with the fact that it is really a very good thing for tenants and landlords to have options when it comes to landlord tenant disputes whether the disputes are based on nonpayment of rent, repair issues or whatever the case may be. And so with the city of Winston Salem in the human relations department, we do exactly that we mediate landlord tenant disputes. We brought an opportunity for either the landlord or the tenant to file with us to request mediation services. And when they do so, we have trained mediators who sit down to try to have a meeting of the minds, so to speak. We try to get them to consider compromise and other alternatives that will save both parties money in the long run when it comes to having to retain legal counsel, pay court fees and so forth. And so even now we have a brand new partnership with the Forsyth County Courts to be able to mediate cases that are based on nonpayment of rent. And right now those cases would be because of the effects of COVID-19. And so again, the goal is to make sure that all persons are able to have their rights protected and to have their voices heard and not be blocked or encumbered by the fact that they don't have the necessary funds to secure legal counsel or to pay those court fees. And so I just wanted to tie that in. There are alternatives here in our local community. The service that we provide is free and we are partnering with both legal aid and the Wake Forest University School of Law. And so that is something that I think should be an asset to most in our community. And now, segueing into the East Winston question that you just posed. Definitely the findings that were disclosed earlier by both Tim and Yulia from the New America Wake Forest WSSU study findings definitely match with what we find every day in our office which is that most of our cases, especially the landlord tenant cases do tend to originate in the Eastern side of the city whether that's the Northeast, the East or the Southeast. Even currently with the new fiscal year, 60% of our landlord tenant cases right now are from the Eastern boards in the city. And it's been pretty much that way. It's been a trend and it's been pretty much that way during the almost 20 years that I've been the department head for the Human Relations Department. Also, we enforce fair housing law. And so that means people can file complaints based on housing discrimination. And again, we see a little more variance there where those types of complaints come from various wards and sections of the city but we do know that race discrimination is definitely a prevalent basis for housing discrimination here in Winston-Salem. And usually the race that is from the protected filing class tends to be African-Americans. So we do definitely see that and it is definitely a match with what they have just shared with us as a result of the study findings. Great, Landa, can you also, I see a couple of questions that are coming up on the board about in your role for the city of Winston-Salem, what activities, what projects are currently underway to address this issue? Because I think you mentioned that there are things that your office is doing that around sort of landlord, tenant and evictions, et cetera. Are there other things that are happening within the city of Winston-Salem that are addressing housing loss, wage stagnation, et cetera? Right, I know that there are a few projects that are going on and this is sort of beyond my wheelhouse but I'll take a stab at sharing some of the city's projects with you but I do know that there are a couple of developments of affordable single family homes, for instance, in the Bridgewood neighborhood that is a partnership between the city of Winston-Salem and SG-Atkins CDC. So that is one such project and then also there are others underway that are east of Highway 52 that are partnerships between the city and Liberty Atlantic Group and United Metropolitan to redevelop areas around the church itself. So yes, there are efforts underway and there are also some mixed use, mixed income development projects that are underway on the east side too. So again, that's not really my forte and my knowledge base but I just wanted to share with a little bit that I do know about some of those city projects. And part of sort of the question is that, that there are projects happening and so that we are, so that not just folks on the panel but that individuals who are listening and that may be listening to this in the future that there are programs that are underway to address this issue. And so this is part of what we hope that the report will also do is to spur action, right? And so it's one thing to talk about it but like what is it that we're doing at all various levels, right? Throughout the county. Exactly. And so are there other concerns around sort of the intersections of SES and care housing that you want to discuss that you could discuss or bring light to? Certainly. I did note that when Yulia and Tim were discussing the results of the study that there was a correlation between health and race with their housing. I know they said that typically when they see the higher eviction rates, those rates tend to be amongst those who already have health access challenges. And that is certainly what we see but through a different lens. With us when we're enforcing fair housing laws, of course disability is one of the seven protected classes of persons under fair housing law. And so we do know that disability based discrimination claims are on the rise nationwide. And certainly that is true for North Carolina and for Winston Salem. And so a lot of people probably do not realize that they do have those rights and protections under fair housing law. If they're asking for reasonable accommodations or if they have disability based issues that prevent them from being able to work and other aspects of their life that they need to do then we would like to hear from those people so that we can conduct a fair housing investigation. And our investigations typically are in concert with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. So those investigations are dual filed. So they are considered both federal cases and local fair housing cases. But we do know that there is definite correlation between health access and fair housing accessibility. Also they mentioned there's a higher eviction rate amongst African-Americans and Hispanics. We definitely see that not only fair housing cases but with landlord tenant. There tends to be a higher rate of eviction threats and evictions period amongst those two particular protected classes of persons. And again with the African-American population that is a protected class category under fair housing law. It falls under race and with the Hispanic population that falls under our national origin protections under fair housing law. So it really is just a matter of people knowing that they do need to make us aware of any kinds of challenges that they may be having not promising that they will automatically qualify and meet that threshold for being fair housing cases but at the very least we could look at it from a landlord tenant perspective to see if we can provide any assistance. Thank you. And I'd also like to if possible jump in just about the correlation between healthcare access or access to health insurance and also evictions. And just mentioned that of course another way that legal aid, it's an interesting correlation when you really think about it. But another way that legal aid supports tenants is that we are a leader in the North Carolina navigator consortium that seeks to provide access to health insurance for those people in North Carolina that have lost health insurance for a particular reason or are needing to seek it. And so that's one way that we also help as well. It's really as Wanda said about making sure that people in the community are aware of the various programs that are out there and that they have as much knowledge about the different rights that they have based on whatever moratorium might be going on or whatever orders are coming down from our Supreme Court. And again, we are grateful to actually to Dan Rose and Housing Justice now for what they do on a daily basis in the courthouse, handing out the flyers that we've asked them to hand out and the ones that they also hand out as well to make sure that people are aware of things that are available to them, including Wanda's programs that help with healthcare access as well as legal aid's programs that help with that as well. Great, thank you. There is a question in the Q and A around if you have any specific numbers, how many landlord-tenant disputes have gone through your office? Well, any given year, I can speak for our department, any given year, let me just preface this by saying we have two full-time mediators, landlord-tenant mediators for our entire 250,000. So we typically have more than 100 landlord-tenant cases that those two mediators have tried to resolve over the span of 12 months. And so each landlord-tenant mediation on average is resolved within 30 days. Usually it doesn't even take quite that long, but we typically, that number fluctuates of course, but I'd say on average, we probably have a little over 100 per year that qualify as being a full-fledged landlord-tenant complaint. Now, does not include those that can be resolved within a day or so or over the course of maybe just a phone call or two, that does not capture those types of situations. So when you count the inquiries and those matters that can be resolved rather expeditiously, we typically have about five to 600 housing-related calls that are handled in that manner per year. Great. So, and this is for all three of you, can you talk specifically about the moratorium that has been placed with the county, how effective that has been, how many clients you have seen as a result, or just the overall impact, general impact of evictions, and not just what's happening now, but also what's going to happen once the moratorium are lifted? Well, I know Lee Laid is doing a lot of work in this space right now. And I will say it's been my limited experience of only a couple of instances involving this at this point, but it's my limited experience that people don't really know what to do with it or what it means. It just seems to be completely new. So there's a lot of room for education. I do think that it solves an immediate problem, right? Keeping people in their homes for another several months. I think what we're doing though is we're creating a bigger problem down the road. I think the tenants end up, they're going to owe this rent. There's no relief from that. And it's pushing pain up higher. You know, there's a deal that I, ten and I'm working with now, the landlord will likely lose the house that they're renting due to the lack of this revenue. And so there's no winner here, you know? And I think that if something is not done, but more money into the hands of tenants to pay rent, it's just going to push the pain up higher into the chain of investors and then banks and the secondary market. And then, you know, you're looking at things that lead to big systemic failures. So I know, I know that Lina is much more about the moratorium and how it's actually being applied than I do so, I'll leave it at that. Okay. So of course, I think many of us were shocked when we realized that the CDC could actually issue something like this that would have an impact on tenants in our local communities. And as Steve mentioned, it has created a lot of questions about how it should be implemented or how it should not be implemented, whether you're talking about at the clerk's office or with the sheriff's department. And so we are doing our best to try to provide as much information about the impact of loss of your home on our clients and to try to as much as we can have a space in what is going to be done with respect to how this is going to be implemented. But Steve makes a good point right now, what people have to understand is that it covers cases that relate to non-payment of rent, mainly. And so there can be other means for you to be evicted during this period of time, whether it be due to criminal activity or some other kind of violation of your actual lease contract. And so people are going to have a lot of questions about what to do and how this is really going to work. We wanna make sure that people are at least aware of what the actual moratorium says needs to happen with respect to the declaration that you need to give to your landlord to hopefully be able to access coverage under the moratorium and also with respect to what the court system might do when you show up with that declaration or when you show up in court trying to basically fight the eviction based if it's for non-payment based on the moratorium. So it's still in such an early stage that it's really hard to know of the true impact on our local community. We are grateful that there is this moratorium out there because that lease provides some level for us to have discussions in court and arguments in court that can hopefully keep people in their homes, particularly in the context of the global pandemic. So there seems to be in the Q&A, there are several questions and I'm going to bring them together under what do we do? Where do we go from here? And so if you were to think of or having to think of recommendations, whether for policy development, et cetera, could you speak to just your overall thoughts about where do we go from here? Well, Dr. Lawson-Clark, I know that in terms of the city of Winston-Salem, we are exploring ways to work with tenants to make sure that they understand what their rights and responsibilities are. We have a couple of very potentially big ways of conducting that type of outreach and education, hopefully in the near future, but we are exploring various ways of being able to do that, particularly right now when we are challenged with doing things virtually and we have to ensure that we are cognizant of the fact that not everyone has access to the internet or Wi-Fi. So we are exploring different ways that we can do that. However, we want to also make sure that we are working with landlords and property managers as well. And so that is something that we actively are working on and we've always conducted landlord and tenant trainings for free out of our department. But I think, again, as we've said a few times during this conversation, it is very important for people to know their rights and for people to be educated about things like the moratoria, things like what to do if you're faced with eviction and is because of the COVID-19 related reason and so on. So people need to understand where to go and what to do. And it is incumbent upon all of us, all of the community stakeholder organizations in particular to work together to make sure that we're getting the word out in a manner that is not just one dimensional because people have language barriers. They're all types of barriers that we have to overcome. I think also that we have somewhat started with the where do we go from here? And one of the key things that Professor Virgil mentioned is assistance for tenants with respect to being able to pay their rent. Legal Aid has received funding from the Local United Way, Winston-Salem Foundation, City of Winston-Salem COVID-19 Fund to help with rental assistance for any case that we're involved in and there are settlement negotiations. You really need to be able to have the leverage of being able to provide some kind of rent for the landlord. And fortunately, that fund has given us funds to be able to do that and all of those monies are being used solely to negotiate rental payments. And then I'm also aware there may be some people on the call today that the Experiment Self-Reliance has some rental assistance as well and they have publicized that through the United Way also. So continuing to look at other possible funding sources might be another place that we can go from here. But the fact that some have been provided in our community is also wonderful as well. And Valene, let me add that financial pathways of the Piedmont also has a program that we'd be able to help tenants who are in distress. Yeah, and I think that the immediate response that is happening now in the community is necessary. It strikes me that the need is well beyond what our community can do. And it sort of highlights for me, we look at housing as a thing in itself but I think a lot of times housing is a proxy for something else, right? I've never met a client facing eviction who wanted to be there. You just don't have someone say, I'm not gonna pay rent and be thrown out on the street. So what is happening is the economy just isn't working for a lot of people. And we have folks who are even folks working full time, playing by the rules, doing what they're supposed to do as a good neighbor and citizen. And then as the examples of an unforeseen medical bill or blown tire or something and you're thrown off, you're doing everything you're supposed to do and the economy still doesn't enable you to live a life of economic self-sufficiency. That's wrong. And so we have to think about how we build more inclusive resilience economies. And along those lines, I don't think that anyone familiar with Winston is surprised at the demographics and location of where the density of evictions and foreclosures are. Our city is physically built through a history that reflects a lot of racial divide and has always done that. And so I think there's a lot of big issues here that housing becomes a proxy to see and understand but at the end of it, we just have not built an economy that works for everybody in our city or our country. And people are facing horrible, horrible situations because of that. So there are various questions. And one that just came up that I think, may sort of follow up on sort of what to do, where do we go? So there is a question around, is there assistance for individuals who have been displaced and are facing price gouging by living in extended stay hotels that are about $500 per week? And it's very specific. And I'm just thinking, is there, in your expertise, what would you recommend this individual or this family do? The United Way funding that I mentioned also can cover situations where a person is in a hotel motel situation also. They're all, depending on how long the person stays and depending on the kind of hotel motel that they're staying in, they could eventually qualify as being a tenant as well under the law, under a specific case law, and perhaps be entitled to some of the protections that tenants have under our laws as well. Yes, and I also would just take at this point to say there are some very wonderful questions that are in depth, some of which we don't have the expertise to answer, but I'm going to sort of throw them out to the panelists to see if in fact, if we don't have the answer where we might go to find those answers for you. So there are several questions around development and gentrification. Anyone would like to speak to those in those areas? What's happening here? Well, I'd like to start, this is something I spent a lot of time thinking about. You know, I think that the classic notion gentrification is displacing folks from housing communities that have historically been, you know, primarily communities of color or African-American communities. I frankly, I think that we have very minimal gentrification in that sense. In Winston, I think there's some emerging. I think though, what we are seeing is gentrification in our economy. We have an economy that is displacing workers and I walked through the tobacco district last night and you think of the history of that district creating opportunity for workers, you know, people who were coming out of our public education system into the workforce could have a life that was, I think, you know, fairly middle class in many respects. The jobs that are being built there now do not allow for that entry. You know, we have an economy that is being rebuilt to provide opportunity for folks who have high degrees of education and technical ability and high degrees of acceptance of risk and assets that allow that to happen. So I think the economy is actually displacing workers and making it more difficult for folks to move into middle class and economic self-sufficiency. And Steve, just like you mentioned earlier, we do have to factor in the history of Winston-Salem and we would be remiss if we did not mention that gentrification here, the bit that we have experienced has largely resulted from past practices that were once legal. When we're talking about redlining, when we're talking about the fact that when Highway 52 was built several decades ago, it was built straight through what was then a very thriving middle class African-American community. And we are still feeling the reverberations of that to this day because so many people were displaced residentially speaking. And a lot of those families, generations later, still have been unable to completely overcome what happened as a result of that type of displacement and quite frankly, gentrification. Not just gentrification from Highway 52 itself, but Highway 52, as we know locally, became a dividing line in the community where basically African-Americans were not allowed to own or purchase land or houses west of Highway 52. They had to stay east of Highway 52. And went over in the Winston-Salem State area on up and down. So it is just very important that we always remember, as you mentioned earlier, that systemic factor and to know that perceptions and realities still exist in the community to this day as a result of that. There is definitely a very strong perception in the community that gentrification has occurred downtown and in other parts of the city. And so there are many people who feel like they're being priced out of neighborhoods that they may have been in all their lives or may have been in historically speaking with their families. And now with the advent of all of the new projects and development and so on, there are a lot of pluses and advantages to having such projects. But then for those who aren't able to afford rent in these new areas and these newly developed areas, they certainly feel gentrification is already here, is already happened, and is continuing to happen. But as we've learned over the past few years with our gentrification symposium that we've held in partnership with Winston-Salem State and others here in the community, we definitely are on the front end and being proactive in a lot of ways as compared to other communities. Most communities are reactive when it comes to gentrification. But we have tried to confront it in terms of talking about it and exploring solutions and other things that we can do to lessen that impact on the community or at least lessen it a little bit more than what's already happened, which we can't do a whole lot about at this point. But I just wanted to say that. I really wanted to emphasize or re-emphasize your very valid point about systemic racism and the discrimination that has gone on and continues to go on, not just in East Winston, but in all of the city, as in all of the cities in the United States, not just us. And another point I wanted to make here at this point is looking at the report in Forsyth County and throughout the United States. We were talking about displacement. So displacement due to housing loss. And one of the things that I have found in the research that I do is that when we're talking about gentrification, et cetera, that the notion of progress comes to play. And with that is also progress for whom, right? You ask for whom, who benefits from the efforts of development and who doesn't benefit? And that becomes, therein lies sort of the link between the displaced, right? Through development efforts. And I am interested in sort of where do the displaced go? So in the efforts for displacement, if we're thinking about Forsyth County, as we have various development projects that are happening, whether it's downtown around Innovation Quarter or throughout the city, where are families going? Because in many cases, they are priced out, right? They're priced out of these areas. And so that leads us to questions around what the Housing Authority of Windsor-Salem, how many public housing units are available for families? Where are those units? Are there other projects that are happening? Whether it's with Habitat for Humanity housing that's being built, or Hope Six Housing, if it's still happening in the county, where are families who are being displaced? Both, whether it's West Winston or East Winston, whatever part of Winston, where are they going? What opportunities? And so if we have any other sort of comments or that we can add to this discussion, not just in the city of Windsor-Salem, because this particular report was for the entire county. Are we seeing the movement of people, right, throughout the county, that is negatively affecting children and families? We know that when children move often, we see lower health outcomes, educational outcomes for families, for adults, we see income, lower income outcomes, et cetera. And so what happens, what's happening throughout the county, this movement? Because I don't want this report to seem static, right, in place that there's not a movement of people, because there are, people are being, when people lose their housing, they have to go somewhere, right? Are they, you know, are there homeless rates going up, or do we see overcrowding in housing, or people are doubling up, or families being split up, because children are not able to stay in the same household as, you know, the family. And so they're being split across family members, et cetera. If there's anything around those issues that any of you'd like to speak to, that would be great. Well, I do know that there have been some completed senior housing projects. I know you just mentioned about families being split up and the Emmanuel Senior Retirement Apartments and 757 North Apartments, those are, that's an example of how oftentimes there could be alternatives for people who would qualify for that housing if they are senior citizens. And then there's also the Southgate Apartments that are being presently rehabbed. But the bottom line is, there are projects that are ongoing in which the city is involved. But again, not my area of expertise, but just that's what I'm aware of. And I know that there's work going on to rehab a lot of the blighted units that are around the city to make those affordable or mixed-use housing options for people who may be displaced or being priced out of where they currently reside. And Dr. Lawson-Pluck, you make a really important point because I don't think that people realize that you are actually more likely to be evicted if you have children in the home, which I think is just a very sad fact of how eviction can impact whole families. And of course, when you have a child who is displaced from their home and they often are gonna have a higher exposure to lead poisoning, they may have negative educational impacts as well. There are some legal protections when children are displaced in this way and anyone who might be experiencing that or knows someone who is experiencing that should feel free to contact Legal Aid so that we can do what we can to help, particularly the children that are experiencing those negative educational impacts. But it is a tough thing because there is a true impact on the entire family whenever there's an eviction or a loss of a home due for closure that really can continue on well beyond the initial time period of the eviction of closure. And I think this is some related on sort of the resources for new development, for new options for people. The light tech has come up a couple times as a mechanism for financing new housing, low income housing and it is in fact the biggest pool of money available each year to build new housing. In my opinion, a very flawed program. It doesn't reach the poor, the really poor. You have to have some income and it only allows for housing to exist for so many years. So you invest in sort of a short-term access to housing. And I think the thing that's probably the most significant challenge coming up is that it only works when there are people who have a tax liability who need tax credits and when corporations don't have a tax liability like they will probably not have for this year next year to do the recession. They're not gonna buy this tax credit so you don't have as much money. So as we think about what is out there for people to move to, the biggest pile of money we have every year for low income housing is the life, the low income housing tax credit, which is just filled with problems and probably even if it were working at 100% capacity would not be giving, creating housing for the people that many of the people are talking about. And just as a point of clarification, I was talking about 57 apartments. I was not intending to say that they were senior apartments or anything like that but I was just saying that that is one of the projects that the city has been involved in that does consider itself to be a moderate income option for people, just to clarify. Okay, let's see. I think we have some other questions here around. One of the things I wanted to say, there's a couple of questions around the conversation of displacement and where individuals go after displacement. I will say for this particular project due to the COVID restrictions, we were not able to interview individuals who were actually experiencing evictions and foreclosures. That is qualitatively to conduct semi-structured interviews with individuals due to COVID restrictions and not being able to meet with people face to face due to the health, the hazards that exist within that. And so what I have proposed going forward is that this information is really a starting point for us, this report and what I expect is that we will continue to look and follow families who are experiencing foreclosures and evictions to get at not just where things are happening but what's driving, what are the drivers of instability? How do people actually lose their homes? Is it just wages or losing jobs? Is it employment focused or are there other areas? And I will say with research that I've been doing for the last two decades, I will argue that it's more than just employment. And so there are other drivers of instability around housing that I would like to focus more on here across the county and not just in Winston-Salem but throughout the county. Let's see what else we have here. Can I just a note on that? Oh, absolutely. I think that sometimes landlords will, because it's so, our eviction process is so landlord friendly in North Carolina and many, many states, I think landlords will use a non-payment reason or rationale but what they're really complaining about is some behavior or some perceived behavior. I'm not saying they're, yeah. So I think that you may see the eviction process as being driven heavily by income and the ability to pay rent. But I think in many cases, there's another underlying dispute that has more to do than rent. And so, and also I'm just looking here through questions. There's questions around affordability and what is considered housing affordability and what anyone like to speak to that. I think obviously it's sort of, when you think about how much it, and I think that this was also brought out in the report, sort of what the average two bedroom unit goes for across the county was around 780 and what the income is for individuals who are meeting those needs that we saw, there was a gap between the affordability and the actual wages that individuals were making that it was part of the first point that we were making here. And so there is a good deal of data that has been captured throughout the New America report that outlines these hard facts around income, eviction numbers, mortgage foreclosures, tax foreclosures, et cetera. And so I do think there's a lot of data here. There's a question around why do this report or why do this particular event if we haven't talked to people? We have a good deal of data that support this. My thoughts are with going into a deeper dive and getting into the why and the how and getting more concrete information of how to address the issue of looking at individual lived experiences that is going to be the next step. But I would not ever throw out the data that has been collected because I think it gives us a great foundation of where to go. Let's see, I might have one other question here. And this goes back to sort of the quality of housing and how do tenants hold their landlords accountable for quality things that are happening within the household that are not up to code and inspection? Oftentimes we hear from tenants in our department who are having issues like that. And we will attempt mediation it is a non-code violation when there are just things that need to be repaired and that the landlord is responsible for or perhaps even appliances that need to be replaced. But if it is triggering housing code protections then we work very closely with our community development department because they enforce the housing code and they have inspectors who will go out and will inspect to make sure that there are no housing code violations. And if there are housing code violations they will then take over that particular case and pursue it with the landlord. Well, I want to take this time, it's 1.15 and I'm going to be cognizant of everyone's time and wrap our discussion up before doing so. I want to thank everyone who's come out to listen to this conversation. And again, it's the beginning of a conversation that we will continue to have. This session is being recorded and we have also copied all of your comments and questions. And so we will take those and move to the next level of responding. I also want to take time right now to thank the folks at New America, Yulia, Pamphill and Tim Robistelli and many others who have put this together, responsible for putting this together, our great panelists, Wanda Allen-Abrajas, Steven Virgil, Valene Franco, also shout out to Craig Richardson of Winston-Salem State University's Center for the Study of Economic Mobility and Scott Shang, a professor of practice and director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic at Lake Forest University. Thank you guys so much, I appreciate it. And we hope to continue this conversation.