GOVERNMENT
My Strange Eviction More Maricopans are being evicted than ever before. Who are they?
BY ELIAS WEISS
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.
Editor’s note: Katrina Sandoval is a pseudonym. The writer’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
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ATRINA 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.
Katrina Sandoval holds her La Quinta Inn room key Feb. 28.
InMaricopa.com | April 2025
April 2025 | InMaricopa.com
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