PHOENIX—On a recent afternoon, Rhys Torres crossed a partly shaded courtyard to a white stucco building. He tapped on a door and a woman in a fleece zip-up and sweatpants appeared.

“I understand what you’re here for,” she said. “You can come in.”

But she began to panic in the cramped living room that held a bed. “I can’t breathe,” she said.

“Take a slow breath,” Torres told her. “We’re good. We’ll give you some time.”

That meant about 10 minutes. It was enough time to put together an overnight bag with a few essentials, and Torres told the woman she could come back for bigger items later.

Torres, who works at one of 26 eviction courts in the county, has the job of removing people from their homes when they’ve stopped paying rent.

The constable has been busy this year. Court filings to evict tenants across Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, hit a single-month record of more than 8,000 in January. They have remained at higher than typical levels for much of the year.

Phoenix has emerged from the pandemic as one of America’s eviction capitals. Among U.S. cities, counties or metro areas for which regular data is available, Maricopa County holds one of the highest eviction rates, at 16 filings per 100 renter households during the past year, according to Eviction Lab, a research group at Princeton University that tracks evictions in 35 U.S. cities and 10 states. Some households receive multiple filings, and not all filings result in evictions.

That ranks Phoenix ahead of other big Sunbelt cities that in recent years have also seen an elevated number of eviction notices, including Houston and Las Vegas.

Evictions are one outgrowth of the U.S. housing shortage and lack of affordability. Filings went down across the country during the national pandemic eviction moratorium. They have risen everywhere since then, remaining below historical averages in some cities while surging far above those averages in others.

The elevated eviction filings also follow a sharp acceleration in rents, when pent-up demand during the pandemic flooded supply-short housing markets with people looking to rent. Those rent increases have pushed some lower-income tenants to the brink of what they can afford.

Housing affordability is a top issue in the presidential election and has become a focus for both major candidates. The ability to purchase a home is near its worst levels since the 1980s. And half of American renter households spend at least 30% of their income on housing, which is up sharply since 2000, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

With median home prices hovering around all-time highs and inventory below normal, first time buyers in particular have been squeezed out of the market. That leaves millions of middle-income Americans with little choice but to keep renting, helping to keep overall rents high.

Some cities and states are enacting new laws to aid tenants facing eviction. But Arizona provides fewer tenant protections, even as rents have soared.

“We are known as a landlord friendly state, and that attracts a lot of capital,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said in an interview. In Phoenix, she added, “we don’t control evictions.” Those rules are set by the state.

Apartment rents in Phoenix rose about 35% from 2019 to 2023, and home sale prices went up more. Both have cooled somewhat recently, but not enough to make a difference for Maricopa County’s population of 4.6 million, which has grown by more than 20% since 2010. Rising rents are one reason Phoenix had the country’s highest increase in overall inflation two years ago.

Anxiety over housing costs is especially strong in this election swing state.

“The availability of affordable housing in Phoenix has plummeted very quickly and very dramatically,” said Maxine Becker, an attorney at the Wildfire Community Action Agency, a group that advocates for low-income residents of Arizona.

Evictions are seen in virtually every community, from residents in their early 20s to retirees. While lower-income tenants are the largest group to be evicted, residents of brand new subdivisions where townhouses rent for nearly $3,000 a month have also heard the constable’s knock.

A yes-or-no question

In this place known for its breakneck expansion and the new nickname “Silicon Desert,” eviction is its own thriving economy.

Evictions make work for attorneys, for locksmiths, for self-storage centers, for moving companies and for government staff. It’s good business for extended-stay hotels, the housing of last resort.

To afford pay-by-the-night rooms (room rates are up 37% since 2021), some evicted renters scrape together extra money, sometimes for only $2 an order, driving for apps like Grubhub or DoorDash—essential jobs in the eviction economy.

Some real-estate brokers in Phoenix specialize in rental house-hunting for evicted people, whose background checks are marred by their court records. Clean-out crews make a living towing away whatever is left behind.

The removal of renters from their homes is also a topic of increasingly broad public concern. Every month the local ABC television affiliate highlights evictions on a large scoreboard, showcasing which buildings and parts of town see the most of them.

Homelessness rose sharply in Phoenix during the pandemic. A greater share of homeless individuals are now off the streets, however, after the city expanded shelter availability. The total number of homeless individuals in the city of Phoenix dropped 1% this year, according to government figures.

The time between late rent and an eviction filing in Arizona can be as few as five days. A court hearing can come the following week, and a constable can appear at the tenant’s door a week or so after that.

Few renters attend the court hearings, with many instead calling in by phone. Some hearings can be watched by the public online.

Around a third of cases get dismissed, often because the tenant came through with the money.

Tenants tell of medical emergencies and job losses, of the money that hasn’t come in yet but is expected soon. At the Maryvale Justice Court, one woman fell behind on rent, she said during a September hearing, when she became pregnant and her partner abandoned her.

“I got half of it. I’m working hard on it,” said another tenant who had taken on extra work for DoorDash.

Judges allow time for these explanations, but only for so long. There is in the end only one question, and it can most often be answered with yes or no: Did you pay rent? If the answer is no, that usually ends the hearing. The landlord wins the eviction.

Some tenants believe the judge is there to broker a deal. But as the judges routinely explain, the law doesn’t let them do that.

“You’re the judge,” said one man, during his morning eviction hearing at the Arcadia Biltmore Justice Court. “You can hit that gavel!”

The man fell behind on rent after a hospital stay, he said. He wanted 30 more days to pay. If his landlord was willing, he could try to make a deal soon, the judge told him.

“I can’t trust them,” the man said, referring to his landlord.

Another afternoon, at the Maryvale court, a teenage couple and one of their mothers discussed strategy in the hallway, fussing over a thick stack of documents. Some were photos that showed pink insulation hanging from an open ceiling. They didn’t have an attorney.

In court, the couple said a leasing agent told them they could get two months of free rent when they moved in. But the apartment lease the couple signed didn’t include that, and they never noticed. When they didn’t pay, they got an eviction notice. “They’re just kids,” the mother pressed.

If it wasn’t in the lease, the free rent didn’t exist, the judge informed them.

“Good luck to you,” he said, and he granted the eviction to the landlord.

Dreamy Draw jurisdiction

Constable Torres works for the Dreamy Draw Justice Court in a jurisdiction named for the closed mercury mine there. In that stretch of ocher and asphalt there are multimillion-dollar mansions and also some of the city’s most affordable rental apartments. The latter is where most of the evictions happen.

In his 20s, Torres lived hard in Las Vegas, sometimes sleeping in his van while working gigs in hazardous waste management. On two occasions he was evicted, he said. Now age 54, he experiences things from the other side of the door.

“You’re dreading that knock,” Torres said. “The frightening of the unknown.”

Sometimes tenants on his eviction list are already gone. Scattered across their floors and countertops are the evidence of their hurried departures: half-packed bags and unwashed laundry, children’s toys and textbooks, bills and paperwork, canned food and loaves of bread, pet cages and, in some cases, the pets themselves. Almost always, vacuum cleaners.

“You’re not taking your old dirt to your new place,” Torres said.

Maricopa’s constables, who also handle other court business such as serving subpoenas, are elected public officials who run in partisan elections. Torres is a Republican. The constables serve the lower level county courts where judges are known as Justices of the Peace.

Some Maricopa constables said changes in the way large corporate landlords do business are contributing to the increase in evictions.

“Even if the property managers on site want to work with the people, they have somebody else looking at their numbers, saying, ‘Why is this person still here?’” said Bridget Bellavigna, a Maricopa constable who previously ran a property management business for nearly two decades.

Landlords say they try to work with tenants and that population growth partly explains higher eviction filings. The end of pandemic rental assistance programs has also meant tenants have fewer resources to draw on.

“The rents increasing, high unemployment during Covid [and] the reliance on the rental assistance have all kind of culminated in what can be a difficult situation for some of our residents,” said Courtney LeVinus, president of the Arizona Multihousing Association, a landlord trade group.

Still, Torres estimated that a third of property managers in Dreamy Draw had abandoned lenient policies this year that allowed tenants to sign promissory notes, giving them more time to pay off owed rent. Building owners decided the unpaid rent mounting at their properties had become too much.

“If corporate feels they can make more money if they can get that person out and get somebody new in there, they can,” Torres said.

Eviction by golf cart

At the Cyprus Apartments complex, with rows of tile-roofed buildings and more than 500 units, evictions were conducted under the shade of a golf cart as the temperature crept to 109 degrees.

April Cordova, the property’s manager, surveyed the damage at an already empty unit. There was dinged up gray vinyl flooring and scrunched window blinds. The family there had owed $5,400 in rent and fees.

“People just can’t keep their heads above water,” she said. Rent wasn’t likely to come down much, though. “I think we’re relying more on other living expenses falling,” she said.

Back at the lobby was one of Cyprus’s longtime residents, Traci Swaw, who had been evicted two weeks before. She returned that afternoon to pick up the last belongings she could fit in her car.

After seven years at Cyprus Apartments, Swaw fell behind on the $1,430 a month rent, including fees, for the one-bedroom apartment she shared with her 19-year-old daughter, Ashley. The rent was about $900 when they first moved in, Swaw said. It went up a lot after the start of the pandemic.

The 54-year-old worked as a food delivery driver, but orders slowed down this summer. Then the brakes went out on her car. She spent several hundred dollars, all the cash she had left, to fix them.

“I had to choose the rent, or still being able to work so I could pay rent,” she said.

When she missed her August rent payment, management gave her time to catch up. But she missed September, too, and didn’t have enough to pay what she owed.

After the eviction, Ashley withdrew from a local college, where she was studying to be a teacher. She too was delivering food to help pay for their $80 a night extended-stay hotel room. For an entire month, the room would cost more than twice what living in Cyprus had.

“You know down the road is Bellridge,” Torres told Swaw. “They have single apartments from $900.”

Swaw recognized the name of the apartment complex. At her eviction hearing, several people were getting kicked out of Bellridge. It popped up sometimes on an app Swaw had that showed local crime.

“They’re getting better,” Torres assured her.

Until they had more money saved up, the hotel across the highway would have to do. It was close to the public library, where Ashley liked to borrow books and movies, and there was enough space for their clothes and kitchen wares and their cats.

The next day, before heading out for their evening shift, Ashley and Traci put their phones out on a table. Alerts pinged for Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub.

“I hope we get a lot of orders tonight,” Traci said. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do if we can’t afford the room.”

Ashley’s car had broken down, so they could only deliver together in Traci’s. The low sun nearly blinding them, they bounced between burrito joints and ice cream parlors, gated apartment complexes and big suburban homes. On the stereo they cued up a Taylor Swift playlist, songs about separation and loss and moving on.

Early in the evening an order came in from a Japanese spot. Traci focused on her phone. “I know where this is going,” she said.

“Disheartening,” she said next, as they approached the familiar gate of the Cyprus Apartments, their former home.

Phoenix, Arizona

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