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A day before her youngest son’s birthday, LaKisha Scott found herself packing up her family and all their belongings in a Ford Taurus.

Unable to pay the rent for the past two months, LaKisha Scott, 24, had been evicted. A Guilford County Sheriff’s deputy delivered the court order Tuesday to Scott’s Hunters Glen apartment.

She’s moving in with her mother while she looks for work.

“I want to get two jobs this summer,” said Scott, who hopes her recent interview with an information call center pans out.

Just as home foreclosures have risen with the faltering economy, the number of evictions from rental units is growing in Guilford County.

Five years ago, deputies received 4,162 court orders of eviction to deliver, Sheriff’s Lt. C.L. Piner said. That rose to 5,412 last year.

Through June 30, there have been 2,899 orders of eviction, data shows. The number of evictions usually picks up later in the year, Piner said, meaning the county is on track to best last year’s total.

Eviction notices increasingly are going out to more upscale apartment complexes and newer facilities, Piner said.

There could be a couple of explanations for that rise and its effects on the middle class, said Bob Williams, professor of economics at Guilford College.

For one, housing costs are going up while new jobs being created often come with lower wages.

“People end up getting squeezed” between the two, he said.

Also, movement between social classes is fluid, Williams said.

“People are trying to move into nicer neighborhoods,” he said. “Then something might happen where their income gets disrupted, then that forces them to have to be evicted.”

Deputy G.D. Austin spent Tuesday crisscrossing the county delivering “writs of possession,” a duty that deputies refer to as padlockings. At each stop, he met maintenance workers or locksmiths who changed the locks after Austin secured the rental unit.

In many cases, renters leave before deputies arrive with a locksmith in tow. Such was the case Tuesday, when only a handful of nearly a dozen scheduled padlockings involved tenants still at home.
In one apartment, a dark blue sofa and love seat greeted Austin and maintenance workers. Tenants also left a pile of clothes in a back bedroom, and towels, laundry detergent and bleach in a closet.

They have 10 days to retrieve anything left behind, Austin said. After that, the items belong to the property owners, who can trash it, sell it, use it.

“A majority of places just want the people to move out so they can re-rent it,” Piner said.

A change at her job led to Scott’s troubles.

Scott says she returned to Wal-Mart from maternity leave and found her hours cut and her job given to someone else. No longer able to afford daycare, she had to stay home with her sons, Isiah, 4, and Jeremiah, 6 months.

On Tuesday, Isiah repeatedly popped out of the car to ask his mom what she was doing.

“Get back in the car,” Scott said as she trudged up the concrete steps for another load of belongings, which had been crammed into bags, boxes and laundry baskets.

A couple of trips to her mom’s had whittled the stack down to a few more pieces, including her sister’s bike and Isiah’s Fisher-Price basketball hoop. The belongings sat along the balcony next to Scott’s old home, Apt. G. The front door had a fresh lock.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com