Shortly after 11 a.m. on Thursday, January 30, 2025 in downtown Tucson, Arizona, I sat waiting on the hard, church-like pews of the county courthouse. The clerk called the court to order, and we all stood to our feet as the black-berobed judge suddenly appeared from somewhere backstage, behind the Great Seal of the United States of America.
I, like a smattering of others in the mostly empty courtroom, was waiting for my eviction hearing to start.
On any given day, there are 60-80 eviction hearings in this one courtroom on the fourth floor of Tucson’s gigantic Pima County Consolidated Justice Court complex—a recently completed development project 11 years and millions of dollars in the making.
The first defendant on the docket that afternoon was a woman who didn’t show up to court. The case ended in less than a minute after the attorney, representing the landlord, listed off for the judge, dollar for dollar, the debts owed by the woman, which was the basis for filing the eviction lawsuit against her. The monetary justification for taking her house? She was $300 in arrears—the bulk of the debt not rent but court costs, attorney fees, and late penalties. Maybe the woman didn’t have a job to be able to pay such a small rent—plus more than half the difference in fees—all of which I would’ve paid in an instant to keep my home.
My mind wandered from pole to pole along the gradient continuum of poverty that separated luck from lucklessness. For me and a next-door neighbor whom I would meet that day (also being taken to court by our slumlord), our debts were in the low $1,000s. Our cases lasted longer than the absent, evicted woman with $300 in debt. We each pleaded, in vain, presenting the reasons we should stay housed.
For me, it was not having heating the entire winter and claiming that the landlord was liable. For my neighbor, it was a gash in his roof during the rainy season that he said the property manager failed to fix, which resulted in his living room flooding with water. We were both late on rent due to struggling to resolve the basic habitability in our apartments on top of being low-wage workers. In my case, I am a freelance journalist beholden to inconsistent income; in my neighbor’s case, he earns a middle-school teacher’s impecunious salary. Non-payment of rent is the most common charge in eviction court and counterarguments often hold little to no weight inside courtrooms swayed by laws in many states that favor landlords over tenants.
“While great rental markets exist in every state,” observes FortuneBuilders, a real estate advocacy and training firm, “landlord-friendly states tend to place the rights of homeowners ahead of their tenants … These states tend to favor landlords in the eviction process and offer low property taxes.” A report by DoorLoop, a property management software company to help landlords with their real estate portfolios, adds, “In 2025, landlord-friendly states are those that simplify property management, reduce administrative hurdles, and maximize profitability.”
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In court on the day of the eviction hearing, the sudden influx of court costs, attorney fees, and late penalties was like being overrun and carried away by a flash flood. Whether the hearings lasted one minute, three minutes, five minutes—and whether defendants showed up in court or not—the outcome was often the same. But were we lucky compared with the $300-indebted, no-show evictee? Sure, we had full-time jobs (for my part, 2024 was the most successful in my career in terms of mainstream publications, fellowship titles, prestigious awards); but it wasn’t enough anymore to keep a permanent roof over our heads. Luck doesn’t live here anymore—if it ever did—not in this unholy land of unforgiving grace periods (five calendar days for overdue rent in Arizona) between an eviction judgement and an enforceable eviction, plus a mountain of fees.
Were we people who were just “down on our luck”? Or were we more like two pegs stuck beside each other, held up by a well-greased machine working by design to keep us out?
Eventually, a county constable enforced the eviction and I, like my neighbor, had to find alternative housing. Now with evictions on our records, we’re considered “toxic tenants” wherein most landlords decline rental applications. The only options available to us are short-term rentals—including cheap Airbnb listings offered under questionable terms and conditions—along with a small number of landlords that are often difficult to find. We each chose Airbnb as our landing pad.
The day after I received my eviction judgement in court, colleagues at the Arizona Agenda published a story headlined “Short-term thinking: Long-term problems,” detailing how Airbnb has captured the market of short-term rental housing. The most recognizable of short-term rental companies, Airbnb has been thriving in Arizona for nearly a decade since it was legalized, giving tech lobbyists free reign beyond the regulations of hotels and motels, which are normally designated as “transient lodging facilities.” Airbnb enjoys no such regulation. Only recently have the same Republican politicians who allowed Airbnb to use Arizona as a laboratory for “regulatory disruptors” of the free market—initially prohibiting cities from restricting short-term rentals of rooms or properties at all—now have begun to introduce bills (which have not yet matured for passage) to restrict companies like Airbnb to the same legal footing as hotels and motels.
After crashing with friends for the weekend after the eviction, I rented an Airbnb two blocks away from my old place because I wanted to stay in my neighborhood, where it still felt homey and comfortable. My unit is a small furnished room with a bathroom; a sink in the main room serves both for hand washing and washing dishes; there is a small refrigerator with a freezer; a toaster oven on a shelf above a dual-burner hot plate, next to an electric tea kettle. A washer and dryer—which my old apartment lacked—are accessible through a shared room between another unit, also an Airbnb, on the property. In some ways, this unit is cleaner and more comfortable than the apartment I had just been evicted from. I can now take showers in a tub that didn’t fill with back water to my ankles; I can wash my hands in a sink that doesn’t fill with crusty sediment after taking overnight to fully drain.
My total bill for the week included paying exorbitant “cleaning fees” that equaled the week’s rent of the unit itself, effectively doubling the listing price. But after the first week, the landlord—amicably referred to as the “host”—offered me a cheaper plan, off the books. No longer booking the room through the Airbnb app, I was now signing a week-long “Short Term Rental Contract.”
The section in the lease that stood out to me was headed by a clause entitled, “No Permanent Residence.” The terms were like an ominous pronouncement that spoke directly to me as if they knew my situation: “You agree that your use of the Property is on a temporary and transient basis only; that you may not use the Property as a permanent residence; and that your permanent residence is and will remain elsewhere than at the Property.” Something in the sternness of the language suggested to me that I would have more rights if it was a permanent residence, which is perhaps why the owner worded the terms this way.
Most people who stay in rooms like the one I’m in never see contracts like this. Many (if not most) people who use Airbnb tend to be out-of-town tenants—or “guests,” Airbnb prefers to call them—who can afford vacation rentals while traveling. In my current “transient” residence, some two dozen entries in the guest book, dated as early as 2022, hailed from as far away as Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada to Hong Kong and Shandong, China; obscure places like Lewisville, Texas, and Port Allegany, Pennsylvania; to Coachella, California, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Bangor, Maine; to major cities like Seattle, Miami, Houston, Chicago. I identified with some of these travelers, although I had forgotten why.
My Airbnb history in the app informed me that, before now, the last instance I used Airbnb was more than two years ago—in a bygone era when I had extra money from reporting work to spend on short-term vacation rentals out-of-town. If anybody like me ever stayed in the Airbnb while still living within Tucson, they didn’t sign the guestbook. I don’t imagine why they would. Situations like this are no vacation. A housing stay like this one is closer to the saying, “Any port in the storm.”
During my stay, I got a brief glimpse into the arguably greater power wielded by the owners of short-term rentals to shut people out sooner than owners of longer-term rentals can, as the latter must often go through a court process. (There appears to be a gray zone when it comes to whether Airbnb can evict someone through a court process and a constable or whether they can simply call the police and report someone as trespassing.)
There was a two-hour period between when my Airbnb tenancy lapsed, and my short-term lease had not yet officially kicked in, since the landlord had sent me the lease to sign while I was two blocks away in my favorite independent movie theater in town (one of the reasons I enjoy my neighborhood so much). Until I could answer the text, the landlord automatically changed the “smart” lock on the front door (operated by key code). The landlord and I had never met in person nor spoken on the phone; we only communicated through the app, and lately through text message to begin renting the unit directly.
“The contract is in your inbox,” he texted. “The door code has been updated, and I’ll get you the code as soon as everything goes through. (No offense and nothing personal, I had a nightmare situation in the past, and this is now policy). Hope the movie was good!” Later, he explained the “nightmare situation” in more cursory detail: “Got in, refused to pay. The policy before was to allow continuing guests to keep their codes. No more of that!”
Remaining calm, I asked if I could pay through the cash app Venmo, since my laptop and other personal belongings were still in the room. He promptly granted my request, giving me the code as soon I Venmoed him the money: $314 for the next six days plus a refundable $150 deposit.
Of course, the Airbnb landlord didn’t know that I had just been evicted. I was counting my blessings with the arrangement since I did not have to submit a housing application (and pay the “junk fees” associated with it); there was no background check where they could learn of the evictions on my record and turn me away. This arrangement was just money for a room, and I was fine with that.
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In the first weeks of the second Trump administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—a product of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which built off prior policies like the New Deal that recognized housing as a human right—was slated for elimination by the unconfirmed “agency,” DOGE, that slashed half its staff. Despite technically lacking the power to shutter agencies like HUD without Congressional approval, DOGE has applied this tactic to numerous other public welfare agencies that millions of people depend on to survive—in step with the Presidential Transition Project (a.k.a. Project 2025), created by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Meanwhile, more people than ever need to stay housed or need to find housing desperately. Nationwide, tenants’ advocates are making their own inroads to push back against that worldview that the mighty (property owners or managers) do as they wish while the weak (tenants, renters, residents) endure as they must. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), a grassroots organization half a century old, has tracked the passage of tenant protections in more than 52 states (this includes Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico) and 226 localities since the pandemic. NLIHC’s “Tenant Protections Database” culls together more than 708 tenant protections passed or implemented to date.
Taking the form of administrative political conflicts in a constant tug-and-pull across the country, bills are introduced in legislative sessions, sometimes passing and sometimes failing—living to fight another day—including those that directly affect tenants like me and my neighbor. Laws like strengthening code enforcement procedures and habitability standards, “Just Cause” eviction protections that limit ways for landlords to evict a tenant or refuse to renew their lease, and sealing or expunging eviction records so that tenants do not face discrimination when searching for future housing.
In Arizona, still one of the most “landlord-friendly states,” withholding rent until landlords make the desired repairs to maintain habitability is technically possible in some cases, but the overwhelming burden—as I would find out the hard way—is on tenants to follow a complicated process that leaves them with very little benefit or power. By then it’s easy to be perceived as a “problem tenant” who complains about every little thing. Like my neighbor, in the months after complaining about the incessant leakage in his roof, despite living at the apartment complex for more than two years without incident, the property management company declined to renew his lease the month before hauling him to court. The company then summarily converted his lease to a month-to-month term—without needing to provide a reason—making it easier to evict him.
If me and my neighbor had been residing in any number of localities or states where “Just Cause” ordinances were passed in recent years, according to the NLIHC’s database—Concord, CA in 2024; in St. Paul, MN in 2020; Albany, NY in 2021; Philadelphia, PA in 2018; and statewide executive order in California in 2019—he would have had more protections under the law to stay in his home because the landlord or property manager would have been required to prove good cause to break the lease or evict him.
To reach a future where homelessness is abolished, massive social housing—publicly financed and provided to everyone regardless of income—would need to be implemented. A widespread movement of tenants rights unions has emerged since the pandemic, crucially supporting people like me and my neighbor who otherwise would be both isolated and gobsmacked by the labyrinthine legal system of judges, bailiffs, lawyers, clerks, constables and others. Staring down a system that feeds on people’s confusion and counts on their inaction, tenants rights organizations and mutual aid groups across the country provide a different vision for how we should care for each other.
Food, shelter, and water are the basic building blocks of life. Our society and culture need to change so that we don’t see housing as a commodity, but rather as a human right. Such qualities are the first steps to a safer, more dignified future.