Kansas City has a crisis of homelessness and housing insecurity affecting thousands of residents that is directly tied to the massive loss of employment due to the pandemic. Tara Raghuveer is founding director of KC Tenants, an organization dedicated to ensuring everyone in the metropolitan area has a safe, accessible and affordable home. Alongside others on the KC Tenants team, she tirelessly campaigns to create and pass effective public policy, respond to residents’ crisis housing situations, and correct misconceptions about those affected by evictions.

“In general, people who are housing insecure or experiencing homelessness are really good people, sometimes with two or three jobs, who have been let go or their employers have shut their doors, so they are losing one position after another,” said Raghuveer. “The working poor take pride in providing for themselves and their families. They are doing all they can to make ends meet, keep up with their bills and childcare and whatever the school situation is. COVID-19 has created a problem outside of their control and now they are desperate for help.”

Initial moratoriums on evictions put in place at the onset of the pandemic have lapsed and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s temporary halt to residential evictions ends December 31. While otherwise the federal government is silent on the issue, local governments feel the impact and have to step in as thousands of their residents fall into homelessness. 

Raghuveer grew up in the Kansas City area. Her Harvard senior thesis was on evictions. She moved back to Kansas City after organizing in Chicago for five years to build power with tenants.  

“We know that evictions are a cause and condition of poverty,” she said. “They have cascading impacts for families and the communities in which they live with downstream effects on health and education. After an eviction there is more than housing insecurity that impacted families deal with – it can mark every aspect of their life, for good.”

Raghuveer and others determined that moratoriums, rental assistance and like measures were limited and temporary. Effective public policy, while difficult to enact, has the best opportunity for long lasting change.

In December 2019, KC Tenants wrote and passed a Tenants Bill of Rights for Kansas City. Among other things, it establishes a Division of Housing and Community Development (Office of the Tenant Advocate) to assure implementation and enforcement of basic tenant rights.

On a federal level, Raghuveer said there were two dozen sponsors of legislation relating to rent and mortgage cancellation introduced last spring but it did not make it into the $1.13 trillion HEROES Act providing emergency supplemental funding in response to the pandemic. “Even now it is not too late to develop federal policy that forgives accrued tenant debt and also considers others in the tenant economy,“Raghuveer said. 

Raguhveer said there are very few protections for tenants in Missouri and while there are good local landlords there are too many who are bad actors, some from out of state with no investment in the community who get away with abusive behavior toward tenants, evicting them from places uninhabitable in the first place.

“We cannot rely on the good will of private landlords as sufficient to solve the eviction crisis,” she said. “For every landlord doing the right thing for their tenants, there are many more who are not. The bad actors need to be held accountable.” 

Raghuveer said that there is more action that can be done to make a difference in Kansas City’s homelessness crisis –investment today in converting and rehousing families in vacant properties like hotels and schools; more coming together to call for the city to take action to protect tenants and remedy abusive situations caused by bad landlords; support organizations like KC Tenants and the Kansas City Eviction Project; educate yourself about the eviction crisis here and across the U.S.

“The cost of homelessness and housing insecurity is substantial,” said Raghuveer. “We have to address it, or we will all pay the price one way or another.”