It’s early in the morning, and Constable Mahogany Kennedy is driving across south Phoenix with a stack of legal paperwork and a list of apartments to visit. As the number of eviction filings has climbed in Maricopa County, her days executing writs of restitution have gotten busier.
“I can only do so many in a day. I’m one person,” Kennedy says.
She arrives at a big complex — more than 300 units. Today, there are four writs to serve here for tenants who haven’t paid rent.
Kennedy says by the time she comes to execute an eviction, usually the tenant knows they have a court judgment against them, so they’ve already moved out. Kennedy knocks on three doors in a row with no answer.
“As soon as I walk in and see that it’s empty, I fill out my paperwork, and another one we’re off to,” Kennedy said.
But sometimes, tenants are still home. She knocks on the fourth door. Inside the two-bedroom unit are three adults and six children. The littlest one is still in diapers. There’s also a dog and a guinea pig. There are no suitcases, no moving boxes; nothing is packed up.
A maintenance worker begins changing the lock on the door. Kennedy tells the family they have 20 minutes to grab whatever they need for a few days — cellphone chargers, work clothes, medications. They’ll have two weeks to arrange with building management to come back for the rest of their stuff.
As the family hurries to pack, the children's grandmother arrives to help and she turns her frustrations toward one of the adults inside.
“I’m so mad at you. It’s because of you my daughter is in this position,” she yells.
A teenage boy walks out of the apartment. His arms are loaded with a computer monitor and other belongings, tears are streaming down his cheeks. Kennedy reminds the family to grab jackets for the smaller children — it’s chilly outside and some are still in pajamas as they emerge into the stairwell.
Kennedy says she sees her job as an opportunity to offer compassion to people a horrible situations. But, she acknowledges: “The hard part is the kids seeing you and knowing what’s happening. It sucks.”
These often traumatic scenes are becoming more frequent across metro Phoenix. Maricopa County landlords filed 87,130 cases in 2024 — an all-time record. According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, that means about 14% of rental households in Maricopa County had an eviction filed against them last year. It was the highest the county’s eviction rate has been since the years leading up to the Great Recession, and it's nearly double the current national average eviction rate of 8%. And from courtrooms to homeless shelters, the uptick in evictions is straining resources.
Population growth and a shortage of affordable housing are contributing to the eviction trend. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University reports more than half of renters in Maricopa County are now cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their earnings on rent.
“I have a hard time believing that people can get anything for 30% of their income,” said Judge Anna Huberman, Maricopa County’s Presiding Justice of the Peace. “I think, in general, tenants are very stretched, and people mostly live paycheck-to-paycheck.”
As the volume of eviction filings has swelled, Huberman has seen court staffers scrambling to keep up.
“It does have to be processed very quickly,” Huberman said. “They come in with a stack of 50, 80 files at the same time, and the staff has to drop everything they’re doing, take in the cases, open the files, take in the checks.”
Huberman’s workload has increased, too. Arizona’s whole legal process between a tenant missing a rent payment and being removed from their rental can happen in as little as 17 days, according to the Arizona Supreme Court. Huberman said the third week of the month is typically when she sees a peak of eviction cases on her schedule.
Eviction hearings are typically done by phone. They’re booked back-to-back. Judges hear dozens of cases at a time; each one may last just a minute or two.
Huberman said she hears heart-wrenching explanations for why people fall behind on rent.
“You hear once in a while that someone got cancer; someone had some kind of accident that needed surgery,” Huberman said. “But just because someone tells me they lost their job, I can’t make the landlord allow them to continue living there without paying.”
She can only rule on what Arizona law says.
Most eviction cases in Maricopa County are for non-payment of rent. In 2024, about a third of eviction cases were sealed, which happens when tenants pay the amount due before the judge renders a verdict, the judge rules in the tenant’s favor, or the landlord agrees to vacate and seal the case after the judgment is entered.
In more than a quarter of cases last year, the tenant failed to appear for their hearing, and judges ruled automatically in the landlord’s favor. But court records show judges ruled in the landlord’s favor even in the majority of cases where tenants did appear for their hearing. Often, judges issued a writ of restitution, meaning the constable would knock on the door about a week after the hearing to remove the tenant from the property. On average last year, tenants also owed a monetary judgment of about $3,385 following an eviction case.
Not everyone who is evicted will end up without a home. But according to the Maricopa Association of Governments, for every 10 homeless people finding housing in Maricopa County right now, 19 people are becoming homeless. Amy Schwabenlender, CEO of Keys to Change, Phoenix’s central hub for homeless services, said evicted tenants are part of that influx.
And Schwabenlender said people who have been evicted and are facing substantial monetary judgments can be much more complicated for charitable organizations to serve.
“Coming to any one of our organizations and, for example, seeking $4,000 or $5,000 worth of assistance — we don’t have the funding capacity to help all the people that have that level of need,” Schwabenlender said.
A past record of eviction can also make it more difficult for someone to find new housing.
Schwabenlender said preventing people from falling into homelessness would be much more cost effective, and easier on social services, than trying to help people who have already lost everything.
“By the time you get a court hearing date, it’s too late,” Schwabenlender said.
From a lack of housing, to a fast eviction process, to a shelter system beyond its capacity, Schwabenlender said something is broken in Maricopa County.
“It feels to me like we keep setting people up for failure, because we haven’t found a way to help them be successful,” Schwabenlender said.
Need help? Here are some Arizona eviction resources
🔗 Maricopa County evictions legal process info
🔗 Community Legal Services
🔗 AZ Court Help
🔗 Maricopa County rental assistance
