Renters in Miami need greater protections from abusive slumlords and evictions | Opinion

I never thought my life would be like this. Being a single mother is hard, even more when you have four children. But, I have gone through things no mother should have to go through.

My oldest son died when he was 23 years old, leaving me with three girls to raise. Finding a job wasn’t hard, the real problem was keeping a home for me and my kids. Every time I got an apartment, I always lost it because I had to juggle misery wages and pick what to pay that month: rent, car loan or school supplies.

Little by little, things started getting worse. The first time I was evicted because I couldn’t pay rent was the beginning of a downward spiral that still feels like it’s never going to end. Past evictions make it harder for families like mine to qualify for housing programs or any other kind of rent assistance.

Not having anywhere else to go, our last resort was my car, the only safe space we had. My daughters and I have lived in our car several times; the longest one was almost four years ago when we lived there for more than two months.

It was right before Hurricane Irma hit Miami in 2017. I had asked my landlord if I could pay rent at the end of the month because I had to buy uniforms for my daughters, but we were evicted three days before the hurricane hit. We did the best we could: we would get clean with baby wipes and sometimes we would wash our clothes or brush our teeth in the sinks of public bathrooms. Thanks to my job, we were able to buy food and pay for gas to keep the AC running.

I was always depressed, and the only way to make it through the day was by thinking that there must be a bigger plan for me.

All I wanted was to find a safe place for my daughters, a place they could call home.

The crisis I’ve been living is not just my own. There’s a housing crisis in this state in which almost two out of every 10 Floridians living at risk of eviction. And, even though the pandemic has deepened this crisis, the truth is we can’t blame that alone. This crisis has been years in the making. Almost 30,000 Floridians already were experiencing homelessness before COVID-19, and 1.8 million Florida families were just a paycheck away from losing their homes.

Also, it’s mostly mothers who are losing their homes, and not just in Florida. Study after study show that 80 percent of the people being evicted throughout the country are Black or Latino, and the majority are single women with children. In fact, having children is the single greatest predictor of whether someone will be at risk of eviction. How can our country turn its back on the women who are raising our future and the children who will shape it?

During the past three years I have been able to secure a home for me and two of my daughters. But the situation is far from perfect, especially because slumlords manage the apartment complex. These kinds of buildings usually receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus money to stop evictions of families that are falling behind on their rent because of COVID-19. Legally, they can’t kick us out. But they are neglecting their properties, and we are forced to live in unsanitary, unlivable conditions.

The air conditioning in my daughter’s room is broken, leaking so much water that I have to put buckets to stop it from flooding her room. I have been asking for weeks already to get this situation fixed, and nothing has happened. Several of my neighbors who are veterans or people living with disabilities are forced to live in conditions that put their health at even greater risk.

I’ve become active with the Miami Workers Center, organizing meetings with tenants. Many who come to the meetings are also Black women with children who live in horrible conditions and fear they will not be able to keep a roof over their families’ heads. It’s become that we are not the problem; the problem is millionaire landlords who are getting away with treating us like this without any consequences or accountability.

Miami is a city of renters, and we deserve more protections. No one who is working as hard as I do should be forced to live in a car with their children. We need our elected representatives to listen to our needs and fight for us, to finally hold these landlords accountable to respecting our rights and not treating us as if we are disposable.

I may have not chosen the struggles I’ve endured, but I am deeply committed to making a change for all the mothers out there like me. When people come together, there isn’t anything we can’t do.

Vivian Smith lives in Miami with two of her daughters. She is a member of the Miami Workers Center.