Each year, about 40,000 people in Essex County, New Jersey, get evicted. Almost half of them are in the city of Newark, where more than three-quarters of the population are renters.
As housing in Newark, spiked by a surge in interest from priced-out Manhattanites, grows more expensive, evictions keep getting filed—“sometimes arbitrarily; sometimes because of poor management,” said Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, who’s trying to balance his city’s reviving fortunes with the needs of its many low-income residents. And sometimes, “simply because landlords want to lease it out in order to raise the rent for other folks.”
