Members of the Madison County Tenants’ Union organized in Berea last weekend to call attention to a local housing and shelter crisis.
“We've lost many of our neighbors who don't have a place to sleep indoors anymore,” organizer and tenant Michael Harrington said. “So we know that when our neighbors are losing our lives, that's an emergency.”
The union wants to see local officials give more public funding for emergency shelter services and to oppose proposed state bills like the Safer Kentucky Act, which proposes a ban on street camping.
Organizers like Harrington argue such legislation would further criminalize homelessness.
“Every time that governments pursue this kind of criminalization approach toward addressing the homeless and shelter crisis, the only thing that it does is make it worse, and it makes everybody a lot more unsafe,” Harrington said.
Harrington says they’ve seen a big uptick in eviction cases filed after the federal moratorium brought on by COVID-19 ended in 2021. This year, the Tenants’ Union has counted a yearly high of 600 eviction cases filed in Madison County District Court.
“Each year since the pandemic, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal eviction moratorium, we immediately saw a 40% increase in evictions,” Harrington said. “2022 had more evictions filed than 2021. 2023 had more evictions filed than 2022. In 2024, we anticipate that number to be even higher than 2023, which is a real emergency, because of the number that we're describing.
A follow-up rally is scheduled in Richmond next month on January 16.
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