More Maricopans are being evicted than ever before. Who are they?

Katrina Sandoval moved to Maricopa in 2010. She rented a home on Cahill Drive in The Lakes at Rancho El Dorado. Her rent payment was $1,800 per month.

No one disputes whether the mom of 10 was rightfully evicted Feb. 17 — she was. Her husband, the breadwinner, lost his job in the finance sector and couldn’t pay the rent.

It’s hard for a family of 12 to save money. Fair enough.

But was holding her belongings for ransom at $2,500 — the landlords cited “storage fees,” although they did not store the items — fair enough? It may be legal, according to two landlord-tenant attorneys, or such an overtly unpayable sum could burke a requirement that the storage fees be “reasonable.”

“The charge you impose must bear a relationship to the cost of self-storage,” said landlord-tenant attorney Steven Warren Smollens. All the property left at the Cahill Drive home was in the garage. Does a self-storage unit cost $2,500 for 14 days?

It gets worse.

Among the belongings were a wheelchair and shower chair belonging to Sandoval’s disabled 7-year-old daughter. The family’s social security cards, birth certificates and medical documents. The children’s clothes.

Now, things have become legally dubious.

When Sandoval, 43, sat down for an interview Feb. 28, she was living in a hotel room at Maricopa’s La Quinta Inn with her husband and three of their children. Two of her relatives were paying for the room. The relatives didn’t have enough cash to release the family’s possessions and felt keeping a roof over their heads was more important, they said.

A junk removal crew was at the Cahill Drive home March 10, according to Sandoval and two neighbors. Next-door neighbor Michelle, who did not give her last name, spoke to reporters through tears at her home that day. She said the crew told her they were making their second trip to the dump. She saw children’s toys and clothes, stacks of documents and the disabled child’s wheelchair in the trailer and in garbage bins, she said.

She was not allowed to take custody of the items. An Arizona law makes it illegal for a landlord to demand storage fees for clothing, government documents or medical items.

“It killed me,” said Michelle, a disabled retiree who has lived there since 2015.

That day, InMaricopa contacted Lux Home Group at Keller Williams Phoenix, the property manager that filed the eviction paperwork in a Pinal County court. Within minutes, the website had been taken down: “There has been a critical error on this website.”

On March 17, a visit to ListingsByLux.com from the InMaricopa newsroom gave this message: “Sorry, you have been blocked.” Sandoval saw the same message. A third person, however, was able to access the website.

InMaricopa successfully reached Darryl Frost, the Keller Williams corporate spokesman in Austin, Texas. Once reporters mentioned the site had gone offline that day, he refused to answer any more questions. It appears he blocked us, too.

“The property management people are careless and evil,” said Michelle, “and I don’t throw the word evil around easy.”

Sandoval’s solution: “We’ll probably end up filing a civil lawsuit against them.”

Now, if only she had the money.

Not an isolated case

In December 2023, four people were evicted in Maricopa. In December 2024, 22 people were evicted in Maricopa. Then, in January, the numbers kept climbing.

Eviction filings in Maricopa and metro Phoenix more broadly set records that month even though the rental market had been cooling for years.

“Rental prices are down from 2022,” said Dayv Morgan, a prominent Maricopa real estate agent. “The first Maricopa apartments were completed in 2021 and there’s been a lot more since then, so I think that is also a factor.”

Valley rents fell between 3% and 5% annually since that year. Yet, Valley landlords evicted renters a record 87,197 times in 2024. The previous record had been set in 2005 when landlords filed to evict 83,687 renters.

Experts say building more apartments is doing little to solve the housing shortage that has beleaguered the Phoenix area. Especially in Maricopa, where the few available apartments are billed as “luxury” and cost hundreds of dollars more per month than Phoenix apartments on average, according to Apartment List.

Indeed, evictions have ballooned since the advent of apartment living in Maricopa, according to William Lee “Bill” Griffin, the constable for Western Pinal County who lives in Cobblestone Farms. He has observed evictions going up month-over-month since he was appointed to the office in October.

Bearing the burden

Roughly half of the Maricopa evictions in January were served at apartment complexes. Those tenants were most often middle-income earners. The rest of the eviction filings were associated with single-family homes like Sandoval’s.

“One trend that we know is happening is the rise in housing cost burden. We consider a household ‘cost burdened’ if rent exceeds 30% of your income,” said Lorae T. Stojanovic, an Eviction Lab researcher at Princeton University who is tracking data in metro Phoenix. “The levels of people who are cost burdened have risen to their highest levels since the Great Recession.”

From 2001 to 2023, the share of middle-class renters who were cost burdened more than doubled among those making at least $45,000 annually, according to Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University tabulations of U.S. Census Bureau data in December.

“I thought your observation about rising evictions in the middle class in Maricopa was alarming, but not necessarily surprising given some baseline facts we know about residual income among renters,” Stojanovic told InMaricopa . “Even the middle class feels a crunch. It would be interesting to see whether places like Maricopa have seen larger losses in residual income or larger increases in the cost-burdened share than the national average.”

The Sandovals were cost burdened. They took home $3,800 every month, meaning their rent payment represented 47% of their income. Renters who divert half of their income to rent are considered “severely cost burdened,” according to JCHS of Harvard.

“When we first moved into the house [in mid-2023], we were not cost burdened at all,” Sandoval said March 18. “Everything was fine for a year and a half. Then, everything went to sh*t.”

Landlords filed to evict 22 renters in Maricopa from November 2023 through January 2024, according to data released by the Western Pinal Justice Court in February. Then, during the same period a year later, there were 60 evictions.

Scott Davis, the Maricopa County Justice Court’s spokesman, said “late summer is typically the heaviest time for landlords to file their cases … winter is usually the lightest.”

Maricopa set a record in January. What does that say of the months ahead?

“I would say this is really starting to affect the middle class,” said Stojanovic. In Maricopa, the middle class means virtually everyone.

Balancing act

Unromantic as delivering court documents may seem, Griffin carries a firearm. Some evictees, especially at apartments, are truculent, he said. For an hour, he recounted horror stories from his career — one had a humorous twist, another was heart-rending.

But there was something different about the Sandovals.

There was love in the air. The children were happy and well fed. Griffin, a one-time sheriff’s deputy in Orange County, Calif., had to make sure he was at the right house.

“This is a family with young children. One of them is disabled. I understand what they’re going through,” Griffin said. “The [landlords] wanted $2,500 for them to go back inside to get their property. I said, ‘They’re charging you?’ I did not know that was allowed.”

In an unlikely alignment, the conservative Republican Griffin agreed with the tenant’s rights attorneys that the Keller Williams franchise had lodged unreasonable storage fees against the Sandovals.

March 4, the constable said he was still studying the law, having returned to Maricopa from a legal training program in Kingman the day prior.

He had been seeing more cases like that — middle-class, two-parent households — and fewer of the capricious encounters to which he had at one time become accustomed in low-income Southern California in the 1980s and ’90s.

“I want to be able to help somebody who’s got two mortgages that they’re now paying because somebody’s not paying their rent,” Griffin said. “At the same time, I want to help somebody who’s having a rough time. I don’t want to see you living out of your car.”

What’s a girl to do?

During the week, it’s $240 a night at La Quinta Inn. On the weekends, anywhere from $275 to $300, Sandoval said.

That’s about $8,000 every month for the cramped hotel room one-seventh the size of the Sandovals’ old house on Cahill Drive.

On March 18, they were still living there.

“I’m basically hemorrhaging money to stay here,” Sandoval said.

“We’re going to have to file bankruptcy before we can even look at renting again,” Sandoval said.

Two bills were proposed in January to assist renters. Senate Bill 1178 would have limited the amount landlords could charge for late fees, while House Bill 2921 would have mandated landlords inform tenants at risk of eviction about the resources available at AZCourtHelp.org.

Both Democrat-sponsored bills died on the second reading. Sandoval, a conservative, had hoped for their passage.

“Arizona and the Phoenix metro area are what we would consider landlord-friendly jurisdictions,” said Stojanovic, the Princeton University evictions researcher. “This is a story that is affecting more than just the very bottom portions of the income distribution.”

Either the laws will change, or the renting middle class will collapse under its own cost burden. In Maricopa, the question is this: Which will come first?

Editor’s note: Katrina Sandoval is a pseudonym.