1
The View from Eviction Court
At first, when my students and I stood up in front of eviction court judges to announce that we represented our clients on behalf of something called the Health and Human Rights Clinic, the name didn’t sound quite right. After all, we were in eviction court, and all the cases we handled focused on housing. Should our clinic’s name, a vestige of years working on access to health care programs, be reconsidered? Maybe we should call ourselves the Housing Clinic.
But, soon enough, we learned the old name still fit. We found that health problems cause housing problems, with illness and disability making it hard if not impossible to pay the rent on time.1 Our client Gloria checked herself out of the hospital after thirty-seven days of treatment for COVID complications, to come to court hoping to prevent her and her paralyzed son from being evicted. Another client, Reginald, was in a car accident while driving to work, and his injuries kept him from collecting a paycheck for several weeks and caused him to fall behind on his rent.
We also learned the directional arrow goes the other way, too: bad housing leads to bad health. Felicia’s children are sickened by the mold, rodent droppings, and sewage backups that her landlord won’t address. Effie is a senior with multiple disabilities, and she struggles with her apartment’s excessive heat in the summer and drafty cold in the winter.
When we meet our clients, they are in the thick of their eviction process, which by itself has well-documented negative health impacts. Evictions are affirmatively linked to a horrifying list of crises: premature birth, low birth weight, depression, suicide, hospitalizations, and the ultimate data point: all-cause mortality.2 Evictions trigger a domino effect of higher costs of living, setbacks in employment, family breakdowns, and subsequent evictions.3
For many of our clients, their next stop after court will be doubling up with family and friends, often sleeping on floors. Those overcrowded, unhealthy housing conditions harm children in the short term and also lead to the kids experiencing long-term behavioral and physical health issues.4 As Alieza Durana of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University told me, “Eviction is not just a condition of poverty; it is a major cause of it.”5
We are witnesses to that causation. Julia recently came to court wearing the pale blue scrubs from her home health care job. She was there to beg the judge to reduce the garnishment siphoning from her already meager paycheck. The source of the garnishment was a six-year-old eviction judgment against Julia and her ex-husband, complete with court costs and the landlord’s attorney fees. Julia’s ex is long gone, and now she is facing another eviction because she has so little money left over for current rent. Like so many others, Julia left the courtroom in tears.
Our clients are not the only ones feeling the stress. Some of my students come from privileged backgrounds, and they struggle with the shock of seeing firsthand the despair of poverty in their community. For other students, their clients’ trauma unearths painful memories from their own families’ troubles. Clients cry; students cry.
During a class discussion, one student described a conversation with a client who was making plans for his family to live out of their car. The student stopped for a long moment, then spoke again. “This is just horrible. I don’t know what else to say. This just sucks.” No one replied.
He was right. For months after our eviction courts first returned to in-person sessions after COVID isolation measures, I went home from court each day with a throbbing migraine. Headaches and sleepless nights are still a regular feature of this work. They are reminders that our clients deal with pressure that is immeasurably more intense than anything I struggle with.
“They Can’t Go Anywhere”
One of the most dispiriting aspects of the eviction court experience is realizing that our clients’ suffering is inflicted on them by a handful of people who profit from their misery. The iconic mom-and-pop landlords still exist, but they are a vanishing breed. Most of our clients pay their rent to corporate landlords, who are also known as “institutional landlords,” because sometimes their businesses are structured as massive partnerships and trusts. These mega-landlords own the majority of all US rental units, 80 percent-plus of the properties with twenty-five or more units, and are gobbling up single-family homes at a rapid pace.6
In eviction court, these corporate landlords’ presence is even more dominant than these numbers suggest. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank showed that these mega-landlords evict more often and more quickly than smaller landlords.7 A recent analysis of our local eviction records by the Indianapolis Star showed that a full 88 percent of the eviction cases were filed by corporate landlords.8
Many of these court filings are not even aimed at reclaiming the rental property from the tenants. As we discuss more in chapter 5, our clients’ experience dovetails with the national research showing that many of these cases are so-called serial filings. Serial filings are multiple evictions filed on the same household in an effort to shake down the tenants for late rent.9 At first glance, the court cases may seem like a costly annoyance for landlords. But they are not, because the landlord-written leases include provisions that require the tenants to pay several hundred dollars in court fees and penalties each time a case is filed. Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers shows that landlords in low-income neighborhoods earn greater profit—on average $300 per month per apartment—than landlords in middle-class and rich neighborhoods.10 Serial filings are one of the reasons why, along with the limited bargaining power of tenants with poor credit histories or the Scarlet E of past evictions.
Landlords don’t try to hide the fact that their goal is to squeeze maximum profits out of renters. Bob Niccols, CEO of one of America’s top corporate landlords, Monarch Investment and Management Group, gleefully told investors in the midst of the COVID pandemic that big rent hikes were coming. “We have an unprecedented opportunity … to really press rents,” Niccols said. “Where are people going to go? They can’t go anywhere.”11 Sure enough, the six biggest property management companies in the United States made a whopping $4.3 billion in profits the year after Niccols’s prediction, citing “pricing power” and “strong rent growth” as the source of their windfalls.12
As you might imagine, mega-landlords are not eager to reduce their profits by devoting money and personnel to ensuring that their properties are well maintained. Studies have shown that corporate landlords are more likely to neglect pressing maintenance needs than smaller landlords.13 (To be clear, smaller mom-and-pop landlords often exploit and abuse our clients, too. But they are far easier to track down for conditions complaints. Like most cities, ours does not have an effective landlord registry, so even finding out the true owners of some properties can be impossible.)14
In our community, tenants have endured several corporate landlord nightmares. One apartment complex with a murky out-of-state ownership group accumulated a stunning three thousand housing code violations in a six-year period, including eight fires in two years.15 The same ownership group racked up hundreds more violations and an unpaid $1.3 billion water bill that caused eight-hundred-plus residents in another complex to have their water shut off.16
A few months later, we saw some of these same residents in court. They had withheld their rent because of the water shutoff, trash being allowed to accumulate, and multiple other problems. Once these tenants’ rent was not submitted, the same landlord who could not be found to respond to poor conditions quickly emerged—to file evictions against them.
Sometimes, corporate landlord abuse is inflicted on a house-by-house basis. Investors have swooped down on communities to buy up single-family homes, which they often rent out even when they are in bad shape.17 We have had clients in these homes live with several feet of standing water in their basement, no heat, major rodent infestation, and gaping holes in exterior walls and windows.
There is an industry term for the practice of investors buying a big stock of low-quality properties and renting them to desperate families: “milking.”18 The term is supposed to refer to the extraction of the remaining value of these homes. But our clients feel they are being drained dry, too. The largest corporate landlord of single-family homes in our community has been accused of milking thousands of properties by renting them out in poor condition and then neglecting maintenance.19 The same company has been sued by our neighboring Midwest city of Cincinnati for repeated code violations and illegal eviction practices.20
My students and I find these single-family home rental cases to be particularly sad, because the corporate landlords are benefiting from the very same crisis many of them created. Our clients tell us they fled to these homes hoping to escape the filth and chaos of the multifamily complexes where they used to live. Some clients even signed exploitative rent-to-own contracts where the landlord-seller tries to pass off the trouble and expense of dealing with poor-condition homes as our clients’ responsibility.21
Given the low quality of this rental housing, you might think that it is inexpensive. Usually, it’s not. Landlords know that our clients and their neighbors have few options: many are branded with the Scarlet E of a past eviction or other poor credit history that disqualifies them from higher-quality rental properties. Others can’t pay multiple months’ advance rent and the big deposits or application fees those properties require.
So, landlords of low-quality housing capitalize on their tenants’ limited options by charging surprisingly high rents. A study of our community showed that median rents in high-poverty areas were only 17 percent less than the overall community average.22 Factor in the savings these landlords get from buying the properties on the cheap and dodging maintenance costs, and you understand how data have shown that landlords in poor neighborhoods can make double the profits of landlords in wealthier areas.23
“If We Get Evicted, We Lose Everything”
One day, Jessica and her family came to court in a panic. Jessica had contracted COVID and missed several weeks of work, which caused her to fall behind on the rent she owed to a mobile home park. She and her elderly mother and disabled brother lived together in the family home. All were facing eviction.
The good news was that Jessica and her family came to court with several folded and dog-eared money orders they had managed to cobble together over the past few weeks. The amount they had collected added up to the rent due. The bad news was that the landlords said they wouldn’t dismiss the eviction case unless Jessica paid for their attorney’s fees, too. Jessica agreed to do so. Oops, the attorney said, we forgot to add on court filing fees to the ledger. Under your lease, you have to pay those as well, he told her.
I was getting angry. This was more of a shakedown than negotiation. But Jessica saw no choice but to agree. “We’ll just have to figure out how to get the money,” she told me. “We can’t risk getting evicted.”
But the dismissal of this case didn’t eliminate Jessica’s risk. The landlord refused to let Jessica or any other park resident sign a long-term lease. They insisted on keeping everyone on month-to-month terms, meaning the residents can be forced out with as little as thirty days’ notice.
For Jessica and her neighbors, that is an even more disastrous prospect than it is for our clients who live in traditional apartments or rented homes. Jessica and her mobile home park neighbors own their homes. Jessica paid $37,000 for hers fifteen years ago. Since then, she and her family have put thousands of dollars and countless hours into improvements, including an attached wooden deck on the back. But they don’t own the land under their home, the so-called lot it sits on. For that space, the landlord charges them $470 per month.
The dirty secret about so-called mobile homes like Jessica’s is that they are often not very mobile at all. It can cost as much as $14,000 to move a mobile home, assuming the home is sturdy enough to move at all and the owner finds another place to site it.24 Jessica’s home has sat on the lot for more than three decades, which means she is not at all confident it can be relocated intact. “If we get evicted, we lose everything we have worked for,” she says.
Jessica is in a can’t-win position, and her landlord knows it. In court we see mobile home park residents who report that park owners have refused to renew leases by the dozens. That leads the mobile home owners to abandon their houses, which the park owners snatch up and resell or lease.25
Jessica and her family are among the twenty-two million people—one in every fifteen people in the country—living in mobile homes, also known as manufactured housing.26 Those homes are far cheaper to buy than traditional single-family homes, making them the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States.27 Like Jessica, most of those people own the homes—80 percent of manufactured housing is resident-owned.28 But, like Jessica, many of those people are economically vulnerable. The median income of manufactured home owners is less than $35,000, half as much as the income of more traditional homeowners.29
Owning a manufactured home does not bring with it the same kind of stability associated with traditional homeownership. If the purchase was financed with a loan, that loan is likely a so-called chattel loan, with high interest rates and a shorter payoff period, terms that resemble a car loan more than a traditional home loan.30 Lending companies factor in the instability caused when the land underneath a manufactured home is owned by someone else, making the home depreciate in value, nearly unheard of in traditional homes. The personal finance radio host Dave Ramsey calls manufactured homes “a car you can sleep in,” bluntly declaring them a terrible investment.31
“Sell to the Masses, Eat with the Classes”
History shows that when low-income persons have a desperate need, exploiters will soon step in. As one mobile home park owner says, being the landlord for people like Jessica provides an enticing “sell to the masses, eat with the classes” opportunity.32 These particular masses are all but forced to pay whatever price is charged. Frank Rolfe, whose 250 mobile home parks make him one of the top five owners in the industry, boasts, “We’re like a Waffle House where everyone is chained to the booths.”33
Rolfe and his partner also operate Mobile Home University, which provides training and materials to aspiring mobile home landlords. A feature of the pitch to sign up for their courses is the gun held to the head of residents like Jessica: “The fact that tenants can’t afford the $5,000 it costs to move a mobile home keeps revenues stable and makes it easy to raise rents without losing any occupancy,” says the testimonial on the Mobile Home University website.34
Some of the world’s wealthiest people have noticed. Investment firms like Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, the Carlyle Group, and Stockbridge Capital Group all have bought large interests in mobile home parks.35 Warren Buffett owns both the largest manufacturer of mobile homes and some of the largest holders of the high-interest mobile home purchase loans.36 Equity Lifestyle Properties, a real estate investment trust founded by the multibillionaire Sam Zell, who has been accused of “gouging grandma” via rent increases, is the largest mobile home park landlord in the country.37
For these wealthy investors, part of the attraction is that mobile home park landlords have far less obligations than landlords of traditional housing. All the maintenance and upkeep of the actual structures is the sole responsibility of the mobile home owners. Mobile home park investor Michael Torres told NPR in 2022, “It’s just basically resurfacing roads and having a shared community center. You don’t own walls and roofs.” This largely passive income flow, added to the inability of Jessica and other tenants to easily move, makes being their landlord “the gold standard of investing in property,” Torres says.38
Yet those park landlords often shirk even their minimal obligations. The NPR story and many others have chronicled neglected maintenance that led to flooding, power outages, and sewer backups in parks. That neglect is not exactly accidental: at least one landlord company gave its park managers bonuses based in part on keeping repair costs low. The bottom line, Rolfe claims, is that mobile home parks have the highest yield in real estate.39
Remarkably, the federal government is helping contribute to those profits. A 2021 NPR story unsubtly titled “How the Government Helps Investors Buy Mobile Home Parks, Raise Rent, and Evict People” revealed that the government-backed mortgage finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provide billions of dollars in low-interest loans that huge investment companies use to buy the parks.40 The Lincoln Institute for Land Policy told the Associated Press that Freddie Mac, whose mission is to make housing more affordable, has provided nearly $10 billion in financing to purchase over nine hundred mobile home communities in the last decade.41
Worse, when a company spikes the rent in one set of parks, it improves the company’s chances to get more government-backed loans, because those rent hikes boost the company’s cash flow. “What’s ironic about it is that one of the missions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is to help preserve affordable housing,” Lincoln Institute’s George McCarthy told NPR. “And they’re doing exactly the opposite by helping investors come in and make the most affordable housing in the United States less affordable all the time.”
For me and my students, this housing injustice is painful to witness. For our clients, it is far more painful to endure. The good news is that there are ways to prevent the suffering we see every week, and models to follow that are proven to be effective. Most of this book will be devoted to showing how our housing system can be far, far better. But first, it helps to show how we got into this mess. The next three chapters will explain.