By Sarah Holder, Pacific Standard, June 26, 2019.
Each year, about 40,000 people in Essex County, New Jersey, get evicted. Almost half of them are in the city of Newark, where more than three-quarters of the population are renters.
As housing in Newark, spiked by a surge in interest from priced-out Manhattanites, grows more expensive, evictions keep getting filed—"sometimes arbitrarily; sometimes because of poor management," said Newark's mayor, Ras Baraka, who's trying to balance his city's reviving fortunes with the needs of its many low-income residents. And sometimes, "simply because landlords want to lease it out in order to raise the rent for other folks."
Last year, Newark became one of only three cities in the country to pass legislation that provides free legal assistance to all low-income renters facing eviction through an Office of Tenant Legal Services, with the ultimate goal of reducing the number of evictions citywide by a quarter. Now Newark's anti-eviction program is getting a boost that Baraka hopes will help the city aim even higher: The city is one of 10 in the United States that will participate in an 18-month national economic mobility initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Ballmer Group.
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