I’ve only spent a few months of my life renting rather than owning my own home. What I did not learn in a few months of renting, but what I learned from Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted, is that tenants can be evicted when they receive too many emergency response calls. Landlords can receive nuisance citations if police, fire, or medical first responders are called to a property they own more than a certain number of times within a given period. No one likes having sirens wake them up at night and no one likes having their street blocked by first responder vehicles. These laws are intended to help protect people living around homes that have rowdy neighbors that have police called for parties, drug dealing, or dangerous behaviors that result in fire and ambulance calls.
Unfortunately, innocent victims can also be caught up in these laws and evicted by tenants who don’t want fines from numerous nuisance citations at a property they own. Desmond first introduces evictions for nuisance citations with a character in his book who has a son with asthma. As a struggling single mother, she had trouble affording her son’s asthma medicine. If her son had an asthma attack and needed medical attention, the mother had to make a decision between calling an ambulance and trying to get her son to the hospital herself. If she called for an ambulance too many times, her landlord might get a nuisance citation, and if that happened, she may be evicted from the property. Essentially, the mother was punished and threatened with eviction because she was too poor to afford her son’s asthma medicine.
Another example of nuisance citation evictions that Desmond highlights are domestic violence evictions. If I were renting an apartment and my neighbors experienced domestic violence, I’m sure that I would be uncomfortable, especially if I could hear yelling and physical abuse. I would be grateful for nuisance citations which might help get the violent couple evicted from the unit next to me. However, while I might benefit, the couple involved in the domestic violence certainly would not, and society would have to deal with the costs of their eviction and their abusive situation sprawling into the street. According to Desmond, this happens frequently.
He writes, “In the vast majority of cases (83 percent), landlords who received a nuisance citation for domestic violence responded by either evicting tenants or by threatening to evict them for future police calls. Sometimes, this meant evicting a couple, but most of the time landlords evicted women abused by men who did not live with them.”
The vast majority of domestic violence victims are women, and when they risk possible nuisance citation evictions, they are put in the difficult position of deciding between housing and violence. Reporting domestic violence too often could mean losing housing. But choosing not to call the police to respond to domestic violence could mean remaining in a dangerous situation. What is worse, as Desmond’s quote shows, women often are evicted for domestic violence that comes not from a husband, but from a boyfriend or significant-other who is not married or truly committed to the woman. It can be hard for a single mom to make it on her own, and that may necessitate turning to a man for support, assistance with children, and extra income, but for some women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, that can also mean opening themselves to potential violence. Nuisance citations mean that they then have to decide between violence and eviction, a tradeoff that no one should have to make.
Novel Learning 