I did not know these laws existed, though god knows I should not be surprised. But I was! People are amazingly horrible.
They're talking about "right to petition", but shouldn't it also be an equal protection issue? Equal protection of the laws should include equal access to police/emergency services.
I dispute the notion that 319 out of 503 is a vast majority. Given the percentage of blacks in the population, I would agree that they are "vastly overrepresented." Precision, people.
2: The First Amendment right to petition claim is one of several in the complaint, they make an equal protection claim as well.
My mother was a fair housing lawyer in a previous life. One of the cases she dealt with was a woman who was evicted for having cancer. More specifically, a woman had end stage cancer, and had set up a hospital bed in her living room. Her brother had come to be her caretaker for her last few weeks of life. Her landlord evicted her, as she violated the "no overnight visitors" rule. The real reason was the landlord decided he didn't want the woman to die on his property, so I guess he would rather she died homeless in a gutter. Anyways, the "happy ending" my mother was able to forestall the eviction long enough for the woman to die (on Christmas!), though the last days of her life were filled with stress of possible impending homelessness, and my mother was just super pissed off.
The real reason was the landlord decided he didn't want the woman to die on his property
Was he superstitious?
People are amazingly horrible.
Your mom sounds great though.
Her landlord evicted her, as she violated the "no overnight visitors" rule. The real reason was the landlord decided he didn't want the woman to die on his property,
The "real reason" is so grotesque that it distracts from the real issue here, which is that even the stated reason is totally illegitimate and would be impermissible in a sane world.
Shit is fucked up. And bullshit.
Not applicable to Britta's mom.
I really recommend Matthew Desmond's research on this, cited in the Lithwick piece. The situation really is fucked up. I'm glad Desmond and others are making some headway in getting attention for the issue and trying various tactics to fix things.
Matt Desmond's ongoing work on this is really good.
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Arguably, the eviction was illegal under the Americans w/ Disabilities Act, which requires "reasonable accommodation" on the part of landlords. Cancer patients aren't automatically considered disabled, so it's a whole lot of rigamarole for someone dying to have to go through. But yeah. People are assholes.
What I really don't get about this is, even leaving the domestic violence issue to one side, in what context it makes sense to use 911 calls as a measure of who should be evicted. Obviously, if someone's calling 911 all the time, there's some kind of problem, but identifying the problem as the person who's calling in the police seems wrong. Eviction after a third call that had been identified as frivolous, somehow, maybe? But other than that, why?
I'm not seeing what the people who devised this system thought of as it working properly.
If you only worry about city spending, it works properly as it is.
Also if you think that people with problems are inherently dirty, then you want to make life harder for them.
It operates just like Greyhound Therapy, except this way you don't need to pay for bus tickets.
What happens, basically, is if there are too many 911 calls from a property, it gets designated as a nuisance property. Depending on the local ordinance, this brings an escalating series of consequences for the landlord -- often a letter from the local police saying there's a problem and asking what the LL is going to do to solve it. Many of these ordinances require the landlord to file a nuisance abatement plan with the police, who typically rubber stamp it. Oh, and "property" is defined not per unit but per building. So obviously the easiest way for the landlord and/or the police to get rid of the problem is to evict the tenant who's making all the 911 calls. The genius of the ordinances is that all the government is doing is saying "there's a problem at this property, and the LL needs to fix it." How the private landlord takes care of it is mostly out of the government's hands.