The morning of Aug. 17, Travis Champion was lying in bed playing a game on his Xbox, when he heard a knock at his bedroom door through his gaming headset. At first, he ignored it, thinking one of his seven housemates was yet again bugging him for a ride.
“All of a sudden, I heard a cracking sound,” Champion said in an interview. The door burst open, spraying wood shards across the floor, and in walked two fire marshals from the Morrow Fire Department. They were there to evict him.
But this was no normal eviction. No one had filed a dispossessory action against Champion in court; he was current on his rent. The longtime Morrow resident had just moved into the small, single-family house on Navaho Trail a few months earlier.
No one had even told him that the city had previously raised concerns about the building’s safety, or that he was at risk of being kicked out. All the fire marshals said was the house had been deemed uninhabitable, Champion recalled, and that he and the other tenants had to go.
In just 15 minutes, Champion went from relaxing in bed before work to standing in the yard, watching city authorities board the place up and wrap it with yellow caution tape. And he was not alone.
A fleet of Morrow city vehicles first arrived at the house where Champion rented a room with seven other tenants shortly after 9 a.m. Fire marshals cut the power, boarded up the windows and doors, and removed the tenants who were at home. (The rest wouldn’t find out they were evicted until they returned later.) Then, the city team drove to a home on nearby Patricia Drive and another on Oxford Drive, and did the same thing.
By the end of the day, the city had uprooted 22 low-income renters living in properties managed by the housing startup PadSplit, which rents individual rooms to tenants on behalf of homeowners. The city instructed the displaced tenants to go to a local motel, a Days Inn, where it would put them up for two nights. Then, they…
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