Patrick Braxton is overwhelmed with gratitude.

He’s been juggling a yearslong legal battle to serve as the lawful mayor of his hometown, Newbern, Alabama. After years of harassment, his rural town enters a new chapter: Its first Black mayor will finally get to serve. 

Braxton will be reinstated as mayor of Newbern, according to a proposed settlement reached on June 21. The settlement awaits the signature of U.S. District Judge Kristi K. DuBose. After 60 years of no elections, residents will get to exercise their right to vote. The town has also pledged to hold regular municipal elections beginning in 2025.

In nearly a year since Capital B was among the first to report on Braxton’s fight, he has garnered support locally and nationally.

On a recent morning in May, he traveled nearly three hours from his hometown to Mobile for a preliminary injunction hearing, asking the courts to demand the town hold regular elections in November.

When he and his council members arrived, they were met by a busload of more than 30 residents who also traveled nearly three hours to showcase their support.

In 2020, Braxton became the first Black mayor in Newbern and experienced harassment and intimidation for doing so. However, the previous majority-white town council blocked him from the post.

He and his council filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against them in 2022 for conspiring to deny his civil rights and position because of his race, challenging the racially discriminatory voting and electoral practices in Newbern in the process, Capital B previously reported. 

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Read More: A Black Man Was Elected Mayor in Rural Alabama, but the White Town Leaders Won’t Let Him Serve

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For at least 60 years, there’s been no elections in this 80% Black town of fewer than 200 people, which Braxton’s attorneys argued is a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Act provides an avenue to challenge states and jurisdictions using racially discriminatory voting policies.

Since 2020, when Braxton ran for mayor, he says some white residents have moved away.

Though the court denied the request to hold an election in November, Braxton didn’t feel defeated. In fact, he felt optimistic.

“I knew I was gonna be able to serve again, you know,” he told Capital B in a phone call last week. “It’s just how long it was gonna take for us to get some kind of resolution first for this.”

This week, that long overdue resolution came.

When he received the news that he’d get reinstated, Braxton shared it with his pastor, who exclaimed, “Finally. It’s been a long time coming. You know if you pray, change will come.”

This win in Newbern is important because it shows citizens nationwide can still use the courts to be heard, despite the attacks on the Voting Rights Act, said Morenike Fajana, co-counsel on the case and senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund Inc. 

“It’s important just to highlight Mayor Braxton’s tenacity, and the fact that this is a four-year battle that he’s had to fight in different courts and at different levels — and now finally, a court is going to say, ‘Yes, we agree. You were wronged. And you were the mayor,’” Fajana told Capital B. “I think that is very inspirational and important. And it’s also very sobering, just the amount of work that it takes and time that it takes to have your rights vindicated.” 

Setbacks, frustration, and the will to keep fighting

For the past few years, it’s been a heap of long nights and early mornings for Braxton, a volunteer firefighter for years.

Not only was he locked out of the town hall and forced to fight fires alone, but he was also followed by a drone and denied access to the town’s mail and financial accounts, he told Capital B last year. Rather than concede, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, the former white mayor, and his council members reappointed themselves to their positions after ordering a special election that no one knew about. 

“It hurt my heart because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do,” Braxton said. “We had some plans to do some work in Newbern. … It might not have been the time for us to do it.”

The setback didn’t stop him, he said. He’s hosted several community events for the youth and the town’s elders. Two months ago, he used his personal funds to feed more than 125 people at his church, First Baptist. This week, he helped plan a Fun Day Out, a type of summer reading program, at the local library. 

He’s also been working overtime to build a racially diverse city council amid the lawsuit. He wakes up early in the morning, knocking on doors and “running down people” to talk to him. In 2020, no white person seemed interested. 

That has changed. 

He will submit his list of interim council members to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey for confirmation. If the governor does not affirm the positions, she must notify the Hale County probate judge to declare a special election, which Braxton will administer, the settlement states.

One of those people: his “ride or die” Janice Quarles, a Newbern native and plaintiff who volunteered to serve on Braxton’s council in 2020.

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Read More: How Some States Are Responding to the Worst Attack on Voting Rights in Decades

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The most stressful part of this journey for Quarles has been finding adequate legal representation and a listening ear to hear their concerns. 

“It seemed as if we weren’t moving. It seemed to me as if we weren’t being heard,” Quarles said. “By being from such a small little town, I kind of felt like we weren’t getting enough attention. But eventually, we kept pushing and got into the courts.”

With the recent news, she is beyond “elated” and hopeful it will bring together the community across racial lines.

“We don’t do a lot of integrating. We don’t do too many things together. But I just feel that it’s gonna be a change because sometimes it has to work on both sides,” Quarles said. “I’m just filled with joy because … there always comes a time for change — everywhere in every country, every state, every city. And now the time has come for us here in Newbern.”

While this chapter is closed, the fight is not over, Braxton said. He’s hoping his journey will inspire others.

“Like I told the pastor, I’m not fighting for myself,” Braxton said. “I’m fighting for all the younger generations coming up behind me. They can do the same thing and be successful in this town. You don’t have to move away from your hometown just to accomplish something. We finally got the door open for me, so y’all can come in. I don’t want to hold this seat forever.”

The post After Years of Litigation, First Black Mayor in Rural Alabama Town Gets to Serve appeared first on Capital B News.

Ben Brubaker, a row crop farmer on Comer Road, said this summer’s prolonged heat and drought have substantially impacted his day-to-day operations.

“We’ve been having to run irrigation pretty much around the clock to just try to stay ahead of the heat and lack of rain,” he said. “What’s called (our) dry land, basically the land that doesn’t have irrigation, has just been withering up to nothing, essentially.”

There has been a concerted effort by the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns to woo the Black vote during recent efforts in metro Atlanta, other Georgia cities.

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

Voter turnout is highest when a future president is on a November ballot and is consistently lower for all other elections. 

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

Marquitrice Mangham never imagined that she’d open a grocery store in her hometown of Webb, Mississippi. 

She left in the 1990s after high school. But in 2016, she inherited her family’s farm, splitting her time between the majority-Black town of fewer than 500 people in the rural Delta and her current home in Atlanta.

Webb had changed considerably and was regressing, she said. Businesses had closed, and the housing situation got worse — but the food desert still had a Dollar General. Like many counties across the Delta region, Tallahatchie County, where Webb is, is situated in a food desert. Though the town has had the Dollar General since 2009, it only provided frozen and processed foods. Here, the residents never had a grocery store, forcing many to travel more than 20 miles to the nearest one.

Mangham, a military veteran and planning expert, saw a solution. In October 2022, she opened Farmacy Marketplace, a 2,500-square-foot neighborhood grocery store that sells fresh foods and meats sourced mostly from local farmers. Instead of the traditional for-profit store, she used a different model: her nonprofit, In Her Shoes, works at the intersection of farming and food access. 

Mangham is one of many Black entrepreneurs nationwide working to improve health outcomes and food accessibility in rural communities or Black neighborhoods. And as hundreds of dollar stores are closing, more Black entrepreneurs are opening grocery stores anyway — whether it’s Neighborhood Grocery in Detroit, All-In Grocers in Waterloo, Iowa, or Sherman Park Grocery in Milwaukee. 

Research shows that when dollar stores show up in communities — particularly areas that are low-income, rural, and Black — it results in grocery store closure, job loss, and declining sales. From 2000 to 2019, grocery stores experienced a nearly 6% decrease in sales, 4% decline in employment and 2% increase in grocery stores closing. The outcomes are three times larger in rural areas than urban areas, according to new research released by the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. These negative impacts waned after five years in urban areas. In rural areas, however, the effects continued.

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Read More: The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores from Suffocating Black Communities

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Back in Webb, only a few weeks before Farmacy opened its doors, the Dollar General caught fire and closed down, which served as an opportunity for Mangham to offer household items in the store, too. The dollar store has since reopened.

Opening a grocery store isn’t the only, or best, solution to address the root causes of food insecurity, she said. Affordability, transportation, and lack of education create additional barriers to healthy lifestyles. Mangham is looking to do more: drive a mobile produce truck to other towns and provide financial incentives to encourage families to buy more fruits and vegetables, through programs such as Double Up Food Bucks. It allows people who receive SNAP benefits to earn up to $20 a day when they buy fruits and vegetables.

But what does it really take to open a local grocery store? 

Capital B wanted to understand more about the challenges, the benefits beyond Mangham’s community, and her plans for the future. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Capital B: Why a grocery store? How did you get into this work?

Marquitrice Mangham: There was only one grocery store in the whole county, and that was 15 to 17 miles away from most residents in the county, and some even farther. In Her Shoes, we work closely with farmers and help them to grow their business or at least sustain their business over time. One of the biggest ways to help them is to access markets. We work with farmers who are growing but not able to reach those populations that need it … because the populations are sparsely populated, everything is stretched out over 600 square miles. They’re throwing their hard-earned food away because it’s rotting, meeting its shelf life prior to them actually being able to sell it or reach people who want to buy it. The grocery store was the answer to a number of things.

Why a nonprofit model?

We decided to do it under the In Her Shoes Inc. umbrella or do it as a part of our nonprofit because over time, we felt that it would be more sustainable. There are a lot of resources out there to help address food access. There’s a lot of resources out there to help farmers, so we felt by doing it as a nonprofit, if the sales were short or [there were] issues with trying to maintain over time, there were other programs or resources that would help us to be able to sustain the store longer. Fortunately for us, we’ve been able to sustain ourselves even though there is a dollar store in the community.

What are some of the challenges or startup costs you’ve experienced since opening?

We bought the brick-and-mortar store a year or so prior. We applied for a grant to buy the equipment to do some renovations and upgrades to the mechanicals. It took us maybe four or five months to make the renovations and upgrades.

Most of these wholesale vendors require you to order a minimum amount each week, and if you’re not selling it you can’t buy it — having to order $10,000 or $20,000 a week just to maintain your vendor. That alone would shut down a lot of smaller community grocery stores. Just the overhead outside of that is fairly steep when you’re talking about refrigeration and coolers, electricity and other things. So the price tag not only starts up, but the ongoing or monthly price can get pretty extensive. You’re looking at your small, independent store, so you’re not getting your products at the price that a chain retailer gets. 

Not only are you having to buy more, but you’re having to sell at a higher price because you don’t get the discounts. You don’t have the amount of sales volume that the Family Dollar or the Dollar Generals have, and they’re buying in bulk for hundreds of stores at a time. There are a lot of challenges that we saw in the beginning. 

As far as variety, we have a national wholesale distributor, and we partner with them. They helped us out a lot with relaxing some of their standards to be able to allow us to partner with them and supply our grocery store. For us, the best outlet was to basically open under the nonprofit and do it as economically as possible. 

What should people take into account before going on this journey? Are there alternatives to a grocery store?

After opening Farmacy Marketplace, I’m getting quite a few requests from other local governments and other entities to help build a grocery store in their community. I’m doing the research to see if it’s doable, and if it’s economically feasible over time. Every community is just not able to support a standalone grocery store over time, not as a business. It may be more sustainable as a nonprofit. 

Most elderly people, most people, are going to go to the local pharmacy. You could partner with a local pharmacist to offer a food display for fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s one of the reasons why we’re called Farmacy Marketplace because it’s good, healthy food options that promote good health. Rather than building a brick-and-mortar building, look at those retailers that people visit that are already in place that you may be able to partner with. 

We looked at gas stations and other stores that are existing that we may be able to partner with and make some upgrades to their electrical and plumbing to offer what I call fresh food kiosks, and in those outlets they already have the consumers that are visiting out of necessity or easy access. Why not put a refrigerated display case with fresh fruits and vegetables and some meat options?

Try and address the issue with what’s there, meet people where they are, and build up to that. The idea isn’t to just have a brick-and-mortar. The idea isn’t to just build a grocery store. The idea or the hope is to provide fresh food access in whatever form that might be.

The post Dollar Stores Force Local Grocery Stores to Close. This Woman Opened One Anyway. appeared first on Capital B News.

After a sharp rise in the number of women dying in childbirth, which was likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, new data shows that the mortality rate is returning to pre-coronavirus levels and the racial disparities in who’s most likely to die remain. 

The rate for 2022 was 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, a significant dip from the surge in 2021 that hit 32.9, according to the report, published Thursday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. For Black women, the rate decreased the most among racial groups, lowering from 69.9 to 49.5. 

Still, the numbers are concerning experts who say, despite the decline, the U.S. maternal mortality rate is far worse than other high-income countries. 

“We’re leveling back out to where we were, which is still abysmal,” said Jennie Joseph, a British-trained midwife and founder of Commonsense Childbirth Inc. According to the report, 817 women died due to maternal health causes in 2022, compared with 1,205 in 2021, 861 in 2020, 754 in 2019 and 658 in 2018.

Without another year of data, it’s hard to draw any conclusions about whether 2022’s dip truly indicates a nationwide trend toward a steady decline in the number of deaths per year. It is possible, experts say, that some of the practices being put in place — like greater use of midwives and doulas and increased awareness about systemic racism — could be starting to scratch the surface of widespread impact. But, most experts speculate that the trends in the last few years are COVID-related, and that we’re now starting to see a return to the rates that persisted before the virus devastated communities across the country. 

Without another year of data to show the true, long-term trajectory of the maternal mortality rate, officials are hesitant to make assumptions and worry that this slight dip could convince folks that the crisis is less dire than it is. More years of data will offer more context and reveal additional patterns.

“I’m hoping 2021 is the worst we will see,” said Dr. Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, the founder and director of the MOTHER Lab at Tufts University, whose mission is to eliminate the racial disparities Black women face in childbirth. There’s a lot that will be affecting the statistics we see in the years to come, she said, from the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that reversed the constitutional right to an abortion to rural hospital closures and OB-GYN shortages. 

Black women remain at least three times as likely to die due to pregnancy related causes compared to white women.

Nationwide trends are hard to pin down, said Tiffany Green, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused on population health and obstetrics and gynecology. Conditions vary so much from state to state and the data tends to be relatively small. But what we know, she said, is that heart-related issues are the main cause of death related to pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. 

“There needs to be a big shift in how we talk about this,” said Green. A lot more focus should be on how we address preeclampsia and other disorders affecting the heart. Other top causes include mental health-related issues, like depression and substance use. By effectively addressing those underlying causes, we could see a significant reduction in deaths, she said.

For now, many experts are continuing to research and provide care for the families they work with without drawing too many conclusions about the most recently released data. 

“We don’t know until the next set of numbers come out,” said Joseph, the midwife. Still, “this death is preventable no matter which way we count them.”

The post The Maternal Mortality Rate Dipped For Black Women. The Reason Is Complicated. appeared first on Capital B News.

A feasibility study underway will help decide the new model for the facility. Randolph County lost its only hospital in 2020 after decades of it being in operation.

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

For years, Leon Hudson struggled to get high quality home internet in the countryside of Selma, Alabama. 

If he wanted the service, he would “have to get a petition, go to the neighborhood, and get people to sign it for them to put their stuff there,” the 50-year-old recalled last fall about what internet service providers told him.

Hudson lives in a remote area with few neighbors. It wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a petition, let alone persuade internet providers to build infrastructure that’s costly and not economically feasible. Communities in rural areas shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get a service that’s readily available in non-rural areas, residents have told Capital B.

The only two providers available to him were HughesNet and Viasat, and they only provide satellite dish service. He signed up for HughesNet, which cost $200. The service was slow, unreliable, and expensive, he said, so he cut it off. But, he needed the internet to get his business off the ground. 

Last fall, he applied for the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program through Xfinity, his mobile phone provider. The program, administered by the Federal Communications Commission, provides a discount of up to $30 per month ($75 for tribal households) toward internet service and mobile services, and a one-time discount up to $100 toward a laptop, desktop computer, or tablet for eligible low-income households. 

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Read More: Disconnected: Rural Black America and the Digital Divide 

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He now pays only $30 per month for mobile hotspot and cellular service, but he received a notice in March that his benefit will soon be suspended. Without the discount, he can’t afford to pay the monthly expense. When asked last week how he will pay for the additional costs, Hudson told Capital B: “I have no choice but to figure it out.” 

Hudson is one of the 23 million Americans who are at risk of losing internet access or forced to pay higher prices to keep subscriptions. The funds for the ACP program are drying up. With the program ending in May, it’s unclear whether Congress will reauthorize funding for the program.

Several organizations, including the NAACP, Color of Change, and African American Mayors Association, have urged Congress to pass the bipartisan Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act of 2024, which would provide $7 billion for the ACP program. The bill has been referred to the Senate Appropriations Committee. If it passes, it will move to the U.S. Senate for discussion.  

Brandon Forester, national organizer for internet rights at MediaJustice, fears the temporary lapse of the ACP could create additional hardships for individuals beyond being disconnected. In addition to the $7 billion, there needs to be more discussion about sustainability and addressing the root causes of the digital divide. Partly, how federal funds go directly to the internet providers who refused to make infrastructure investments in the first place.   

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have the ACP, but it’s a Band-Aid — not a structural fix — that doesn’t go towards addressing the core issue,” Forester said. “In some ways, it inflames the core issue and inflates the issue of affordability.” 

“It’s so much more than the internet”

The program has been particularly helpful for low-income households in the rural South, where about 38% of Black households don’t have home internet — a higher percentage than white people in the same region and the national average. 

Almost half of the households that enrolled in the program are military families, and nearly half were over the age of 50, according to a White House fact sheet. At least one in four households were African Americans.

Although 5.4 million rural households were eligible for the program, only 37% had enrolled, the lowest percentage of all geographies, an analysis by the Daily Yonder shows. Despite this, the rural South, where folks are least connected, had the best participation rates. About 41% of eligible rural households in the South enrolled, whereas about half of eligible urban households signed up. 

Through The Black Churches 4 Digital Equity initiative, Pamela Price, deputy director of The Balm in Gilead in Virginia, made it a priority to enroll residents into the ACP program. She recalled their eagerness and genuine desire to learn and engage digitally. It wasn’t just about having the internet, but using it as a “launching pad” to connect with the larger world and improve their lives, she said. 

“They were extremely excited to see all that could be done with a fully functioning laptop and quality broadband. They then could be able to improve their well-being and economic statuses for their family,” she added. “We showed them just by having one digital skill — knowing that 92% of all jobs today require you to have at least one digital skill — increases your earning potential. It’s so much more than the internet.”

Despite the program’s success, outreach remained an issue. 

Whether the program dies or gets a new life, organizers caution that the suspension of the benefits will erode trust they’ve worked so hard to build with Black communities, who already don’t trust the government. 

“This was one that they volunteered for … and to now perhaps tell them, ‘Well you can keep it, but you’re going to have to pay what everybody else will be paying for it’ … it’s extremely disheartening,” Price said. “[We] consider how we will exhaust funds and find ways to pay for certain programs and activities for certain people in this country, as well as people outside of this country, but when it comes to something like the ACP, we can’t do it.” 

They also wonder whether people will reapply for the program — a process that is tedious and requires participants to share sensitive information. Individuals must complete verification, find a provider who accepts ACP, and apply the subsidy to the internet plan.

The process can take up to 45 minutes. In some instances, it can take longer to get approval if the applicant runs into issues with documentation, said Danielle Davis, director of technology policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Capital B submitted a FOIA request to the FCC requesting the complaints regarding the Affordable Connectivity Program from January 2022 to November 2023. Of 7,000 complaints filed, Capital B reviewed a sample of 900. We found that customers had challenges verifying documentation, receiving the subsidy, or reapplying for the benefits. Some people mentioned their internet service provider tried to upcharge them for the service.

“Approval is not always immediate; about 45% of applicants are actually rejected,” Davis told Capital B. “Additionally, many applicants just abandon their application before submitting them.” 

Other options to consider 

Although affordability is one of the largest barriers to broadband access, there hasn’t been enough focus on it, said Alisa Valentin, broadband policy director for Public Knowledge. It wasn’t until the coronavirus pandemic hit that Congress instituted the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, a short-term emergency program to give up to $50 on internet service. That program ended in 2021 when the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law created the Affordable Connectivity Program. 

Prior to that, the only program that existed for low-income residents was the Lifeline program, which was created in 1985 through the Universal Service Fund to provide monthly discounts to either telephone or broadband internet, or bundled services. But the subsidy, a $9.25 discount for eligible subscribers and up to $34 for tribal members, isn’t helpful for families, advocates told Capital B. 

Advocates, organizers, and public interest groups aren’t giving up, as there are other legislative avenues to pursue if the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act of 2024 doesn’t pass, Valentin said. One option: reform the Universal Service Fund and fold the ACP into the Lifeline program. On the state level, lawmakers can find ways to continue to fund the program.

The government isn’t alone in solving the problem. More pressure needs to be put on internet service providers, too, said Jillian Morrison, Delta Legal Fellow with the Delta Directions Consortium, a network of individuals, academic institutions, groups and foundations to create solutions and positive change for communities in the Mississippi Delta region. She has hosted ACP signup events in Mississippi.

Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $42.5 billion went to states through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program to build out infrastructure. The infrastructure is contingent on people affording the service.

“It’s not good enough to just have the actual infrastructure, people have to be able to adopt it. So affordability is key,” Valentin added. “We know that a new digital divide can occur in the future, especially when you’re talking about artificial intelligence. We do not want communities to be behind because they don’t have an affordable, reliable broadband connection. There’s a lot at risk.”

The post Millions May Lose Internet Benefits if Lawmakers Don’t Act appeared first on Capital B News.

Sonja Thompson Roach remembers the moment last year when a photographer took photos and interviewed her son and his friends for a Time magazine story on mental health and teens. 

 

The photo and interview shoot in her Northeast Georgia home required absolute quiet for the audio and the right time of day for the lighting. 

 

But one thing stood out the most.

 

Black rural Americans are still feeling the strain of the failed promises of the Reconstruction era and discrimination in lending, as redlining has pushed them away from homeownership into tenancy.

A new report illuminates the struggle: Southern Black counties have higher eviction filing rates than their white counterparts. In four states — Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina — rural counties have higher eviction filing rates that are near or above the national average. The rates are also higher than larger cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. 

In nearly every rural county, Black renters were overrepresented in eviction filings — even in majority-white counties. For example, in counties that are 20% Black, 50% of evictions are filed against Black households. In counties that are over 50% Black, around 75% of evictions are filed against Black households. 

About 17 million people in rural America rented homes in 2018, representing significant growth since 2000. During the same period, more than 220,000 evictions were filed against people in rural areas. White households made up 57% of evictions; however, the rates were four times higher for Black households, according to new research. The findings provide an analysis of the crisis in rural America using Princeton’s Eviction Lab national database. 

The crisis isn’t just about economics. It’s also about race. 

Poverty and racism in the housing and rental markets are major contributors to why the racial disparities persist, the report stated. Nearly 31% of rural Black residents live in poverty, compared to 20% of the urban Black population.

“While poverty leads to evictions, eviction has never been a strictly economic phenomenon,” the authors wrote. “The effect of race is so powerful that one can explain lower eviction rates in many rural communities in large part through the fact that so few Black Americans live there.”

The current day homeownership gap wasn’t a failure of the system, but an intentional result, said Christopher Tyson, president of the National Community Stabilization Trust, a nonprofit focused on creating affordable homeownership opportunities.

“The homeownership that is disproportionately experienced by white Americans was the result of intentional action by the government and was the result of specific policies that created the reality we have today,” Tyson said. 

Urgent call to address the crisis

Despite more affordable rent in rural areas, tenants are more likely to be cost burdened than rural homeowners, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs. Additionally, they pay more in utility and transportation costs.

With the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s affordable housing programs set to expire on March 22, experts project the crisis will worsen as development and gentrification pushes rural families out. Another issue is the lack of uniform data regarding evictions, which advocates say could benefit such programs to assist tenants. 

Organizers demand federal, state, and local governments address the structural inequities by creating new programs and policies to protect Black families. Tyson added that his organization supports legislation such as the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, a bipartisan bill that would create a federal tax credit to build new construction or rehabilitate affordable housing in distressed areas, which include rural neighborhoods. They are also working with other coalitions and federal agencies like HUD to build on existing programs.

Dara Gaines, a rural researcher and strategy communication engagement consultant, added that part of the solution is to increase wages, as well as provide education on tenants rights, more housing, and universal child care.

“People can then focus on working … and have more flexibility so that they can have money to pay rent instead of having to choose between paying for medical bills or paying for the rent,” she said. “During the pandemic we saw the eviction rate drop substantially, and we see it’s creeping back up, and it’s because a lot of the assistance programs are over.”

Without intervention, the report’s authors warn of continued negative outcomes of eviction on families, including job loss, deeper financial hardship, early mortality, and deterioration of physical and mental health. It also leads to decreased voter turnout and displacement, which increases likelihood of food insecurity, lead poisoning, and academic performance issues for children. By addressing the crisis, rural communities could increase economic growth and reduce population loss.

“We can continue to create opportunities to bring parity, to bring equity to the marketplace and that means we have to bring Black homeowners and others who were systematically excluded from the opportunity into the experience of homeownership,” Tyson said.

The post Rural America Has an Eviction Crisis, Too appeared first on Capital B News.