‘Didn’t even know my name’: After evicted in viral video, Kansas City mom now homeless
Last week, Krisi Eiland Googled how to be homeless.
She found a list suggesting “15 essentials” she’d need. It included cleaning products, towels and toiletries to take wherever she went next.
Eiland, a 35-year-old single mother of three, is now staying at a hotel after she was evicted from her south Kansas City home.
A landlord representative with Reliable Properties based out of Independence was recorded during the eviction saying she was “not (his) problem.” The video has been viewed by thousands.
Her youngest daughters, ages 4 and 6, are staying with her ex-husband and her 18-year-old daughter is staying with a friend as Eiland tries to figure out what’s next.
She’s one of hundreds of Kansas Citians facing eviction as the coronavirus pandemic grinds on, at times leaving millions of Americans without stable jobs or income.
“Being evicted I think is one thing, and being evicted during a pandemic is another thing,” Eiland said as she stood Tuesday outside a south Kansas City hotel. “They want everybody to stay inside and social distance and be in your home as much as possible, but then they boot us out the first chance they get.”
The eviction notice
Eiland was laid off from her job working the front desk at a local construction company in March, when everything began to shut down.
She found a new job within the week at Family Dollar, though she had to take a $4-an-hour pay cut compared to her old job.
At the time, Eiland didn’t consider going on unemployment. But if she had, she estimates she’d be getting about three times as much money each month.
Just weeks earlier, she and her daughters had moved into a new rental home in the 9200 block of Wallace Avenue.
Because her credit score wasn’t high enough, she had to pay triple the deposit to get in, plus the first and last month’s rent. She said the total was nearly $6,000.
Eiland put her stimulus check toward April’s rent, but by May, she wasn’t able to make the full payment. She asked to set up a payment plan, but the landlord said no.
The day Jackson County’s eviction moratorium was lifted in late May, someone knocked on her door and served her an eviction notice.
The Star left numerous messages for Reliable Properties that went unanswered. When a reporter stopped by the office Tuesday, a sign on the door indicated the agency was temporarily closed due to COVID-19 exposure.
‘I knew it was coming but it didn’t make it any easier.’
Three weeks after she was served, Eiland appeared in eviction court for the first time.
Blue dots on the court benches indicated where to sit to maintain social distance. But the number of people outnumbered the dots, Eiland said, recalling the room full of diverse faces. Elderly couples. Young women clutching babies.
At her second court appearance, a judge told Eiland she had 10 days to come up with $2,555 to cover the rent due, plus fees and penalties.
She sold her furniture and waited on her next paycheck.
But by day eight, she knew she wouldn’t be able to come up with the money.
She sent her kids away. She didn’t want them to see their belongings packed up and taken out to the street.
The deadline passed, and 10 days later a landlord representative knocked on her door. By then, all Eiland had left was a couch, TV, her dog and a fish tank.
“I was overwhelmed, really,” she said. “I knew it was coming but it didn’t make it any easier.”
‘I don’t have any feelings for these people. None.’
She immediately called KC Tenants campaign manager Wilson Vance, whom she describes as a “little mighty mouse,” to support her during the eviction.
Vance came right away. Soon after, Vance recorded her own exchange with the representative.
“I don’t have any feelings for these people,” the representative said in the video. “None.”
The recording also shows the representative saying he thought Eiland spent her stimulus check on a flat-screen TV, not rent.
“I was raised you pay your way,” he said in the video, which has been viewed more than 33,000 times. “You don’t pay your way, you pay the price. That’s it. But today people are so privileged; they don’t feel they have to do anything.”
Eiland saw the video for the first time after it was published by The Star. She called the man’s comments “heartless.”
“He didn’t even know my name, my story. He didn’t know what happened,” she said. “He just knew that he was there to evict me, and that I was some trashy stimulus-cashing, flat screen-buying girl that needed to get evicted.”
After she closed the door, Eiland remembered she left cash on one of the shelves.
“Please let me in,” she pleaded with the representative. “That’s the only $15 I have. Like you don’t understand how important this $15 is.”
He eventually let her back in.
The representative began changing the locks before Vance drove Eiland away.
Demands for a new eviction moratorium
Eiland learned about KC Tenants on the news. When she lost her eviction case, she reached out and they offered to fund her temporary stay at the hotel.
“I’m sure there’s many families that have the same story I do, probably even worse off,” she said, adding that she considers her situation lucky in some ways.
But she said there has to be a better answer than lifting the eviction moratorium, causing many people to find themselves navigating homelessness for the first time.
“The summer of 2020 is going to be just etched into thousands of tenants memories as some of the most traumatic and hard moments of their life, and to think that that was inevitable is just a lie,” Vance said.
According to the Kansas City Eviction Project, more than 1,600 eviction cases have been heard in Jackson County since the eviction moratorium expired on May 31.
“If we think that this looks scary and terrible and sad in the middle of summer, just wait until it’s cold outside,” Vance said.
Though it’s too late for those who have already been evicted, Vance said there’s still time for the government to help.
”It’s frustrating to see our leaders acting like this is something that happened out of thin air,” she said. “Because we’ve been telling them that this is going to happen since March, since we went into lockdown.”
On Thursday, KC Tenants sent a letter to Presiding Circuit Court Judge David Byrn, Mayor Quinton Lucas and city council members demanding the reinstatement of the eviction moratorium — which the organization has been calling for since May.
In a statement issued in response to the request, the Jackson County Circuit Court said the court can’t “selectively choose which laws and statutes are to be enforced and which laws and statues can be ignored.”
The statement says the court would enforce a moratorium order if given by the executive branch of government.
An eerily quiet hotel room and uncertain future
Eiland’s kids visited her hotel room Sunday. They made dreamcatchers and gave one another temporary airbrush tattoos beneath a strand of colorful Christmas lights hung along one of the walls. Trash bags piled beneath the opposite wall, filled with her belongings.
When the girls left, she cried.
“It’s hard to say when they are going to come back at this point,” she said. “I mean I want them to come back now, but like I also want them to be in a stable living environment …”
She misses cooking. She misses hearing her kids run around the house.
Instead, her hotel room is eerily quiet. She eats microwaveable dinners and her 120-pound dog sleeps beside her at night.
Eiland is supposed to enroll her youngest two in school by Friday. Instead of sending them back to the school district from last year, they will probably enroll in a new district, where their dad lives.
“This is the first time in my life where I really don’t have a plan for what I’m going to do tomorrow,” she said.
She doesn’t know what’s next after her hotel stay is up Friday. She’s started calling shelters, just in case, but she said most are already packed.
She hopes by then she can instead access money that’s been donated to her through a GoFundMe account she set up. Eiland would like to put it toward purchasing a trailer. As of Tuesday, she had raised $11,000.
“And I won’t have to worry about getting evicted ever again,” she said.
The Star’s Cortlynn Stark and Tammy Ljungblad contributed to this reporting.
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
