Vice
@VICE·19.1M subscribers·4.4K videos
Arkansas: The Worst Place to Rent in America
Posted
June 24, 2014
Views
4,630,330
Likes
29,368
Comments
12,193
Engagement
0.90%
June 24, 2014
4,630,330
29,368
12,193
0.90%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
See what was published immediately before and after this episode.
Subscribe to VICE News here
Arkansas is one of the worst places to be a renter in America. It is the only state in the US where tenants are treated as criminals for paying rent late and landlords are not required by law to maintain their properties.
Its failure-to-vacate law lets landlords give tenants a 10-day eviction notice if they are even one day overdue. Tenants who can't or won't leave within that span face fines for every day they remain on the property and up to 90 days in jail.
This makes things difficult for the third of Arkansas's residents who are renters and have legitimate concerns about the properties they are occupying. The combination of failure-to-vacate and the lack of warranty of habitability make it almost impossible for tenants to challenge their landlords for legitimate reasons. It's estimated that criminal evictions occur everyday in Arkansas, resulting in over 2000 failure-to-vacate cases being filed each year.
VICE News visited Arkansas to learn more about its draconian eviction laws. From the courthouses to the porches of some of the state's poorest residents, we documented first-hand accounts from one of the country's most underreported stories.
Debtors Prisons Are Taking the US Back to the 19th Century
Check out the VICE News beta for more
Follow VICE News here:
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
