The Chicago Tribune, Sunday, November 16, 1997
J. Linn Allen, Tribune staff writer.

Then he had told an HIV-positive ex-drug addict who was the size and solidity of a Stonehenge rock that he should cool his temper or he'd be out on the street.

So he was moderately impatient with a landlord and a tenant, both neatly dressed and seemingly self-assured, squabbling over late rent payments. He didn't seem to be much taken with either side.

"We could get down to polishing hairs," he snapped. "If everybody fought over this kind of nonsense, you could have everybody insane."

Warning the tenant he was driving the landlord to a steady diet of Maalox by habitually getting his check in late, he gave the young renter, who had been reading a John Grisham novel about lawyers while waiting for his case to be called, another chance.

"No one's perfect, but if you do it again, it won't be good at all," Gordon concluded.

Perfection is far away and the future is rarely good in Chicago's Eviction Court, where life's wrong turns end up on the sidewalk and people are threatened with losing their homes at the rate of one every few minutes.

The Forcible Entry and Detainer Section of the First Municipal Division in the Circuit Court of Cook County--Eviction Court, for short--got filings of about 42,000 eviction actions in 1996, according to the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing.

And in 1995 the Cook County Sheriff's Office forcibly ejected from 6,000 to 7,000 households, or about 20,000 people, and their belongings from their homes as a result of these filings, says a 1996 report of the Lawyers' Committee.

While renters in luxury lakefront apartment buildings do get hauled into Eviction Court on occasion, the misery, of course, falls most heavily on the most vulnerable. Not surprisingly, eviction is a leading cause of homelessness among women and children, along with rent increases and abuse or harassment by a partner, according to the report.

In the Lawyers' Committee study of some 2,100 cases occurring over a six-week period, 72 percent of tenants appearing were African-American and 62 percent were women.

Of landlords who appeared in court, 51 percent were African-American and 33 percent were white. Some 33 percent of landlords appearing were women.

The study said interviews with 59 tenants during a 7-day period found that about half reported children and 29 percent reported one or more disabled people in the home. And 70 percent had incomes ranging from less than $800 a month to less than $1,200 a month.

Tenant defendants are almost always charged with not paying the rent, and they almost always lose. More than 98 percent of the cases in the Lawyers' Committee study resulted in eviction orders, though actual eviction occurs much less frequently, because tenants and landlords quite often end up settling their dispute after the judgment.

But if, indeed, their cases result in eviction, the impact is incalculable. It can only be guessed at from the tears on the faces of the suddenly dispossessed--tears that they slowly, distractedly wipe away.

One Eviction Court jurist, Judge Raymond Funderburk, routinely wishes a grave "Good luck to you" to losing tenants. After a while, the well-intentioned words come to have an almost menacing sound.

No court deals with a more central issue. "It's about one word--home," said David Harding, an attorney who practices frequently in Eviction Court. "It's one of the biggest words in the language."

And the emotions connected with that word mean landlords and tenants can live in completely different worlds. Tenants in arrears on their rent often appear to feel they have a right to their homes even though they're not paying for them in a way they wouldn't if the matter concerned a washing machine or a car.

"I really can't afford to pay anything; I'm a single parent," the woman with the baby, who owed $3,400 in back rent, told Judge Gordon.

And she went on to complain, in a voice of righteous indignation, about the owner of the property where she had stayed four months without paying. "She's trying to move me out with no money and no place to go." Judge Gordon gave her a week to vacate her apartment.

"The landlord and tenant can both be absolutely right in two different value scales," said Harding. "This is the tenant's home. But the landlord, on the other side, says, 'This is my future, I've wrapped up my life savings here.' He could be looking at a mortgage foreclosure. So everybody's right at the same time."

Despite the underlying drama, the courts on the 13th and 14th floors of the Daley Center operate in rapid-fire fashion. "We move fast around here, no delays," barks Judge John McElligott one morning as the 9:30 a.m. call begins.

Most cases are over in a few minutes. Usually, the judge ascertains whether rent is due and whether proper notice--five days in rent cases--has been given.

Quite often the tenant admits owing the rent and having gotten the notice. The judge then typically grants "possession" to the landlord, meaning the tenant has to get out, and orders the tenant to pay back rent and court costs--about $130.

It is mostly very business-like, and that's what bothers people like Katherine Walz, former head of the eviction defense project for the Lawyers' Committee.

"We want people to get a fair hearing," she said. "There's an assumption that all cases are about rent payment, and where that's a built-in presumption it's hard to articulate a defense. The tenant is up against the judge who assumes he knows what the case is about."

The Lawyers' Committee study reported that two-thirds of the tenants who appeared in court or sent someone to appear for them attempted to make some kind of defense, almost always in vain.

Most common defenses were substandard conditions, that rent had actually been paid, or that the notice wasn't properly given in some way. All of these can be legitimate defenses under the law, but they prevailed only 4 percent of the time when tenants, as is typical, appear without legal help, the Lawyers' Committee report said.

A follow-up study issued this summer and written by Walz reported that 98 percent of tenants represented by an attorney in a pilot project obtained a "favorable outcome," such as getting a case dismissed or reaching a compromise with the landlord that might mean moving but not having to pay back rent.

Even without attorneys, trials do get held, particularly when a tenant denies the rent is owed or the notice has been properly served. With no lawyers present, the judge does the questioning.

In one fairly representative case this fall before Judge Funderburk, a middle-aged woman who had been living in an Austin apartment for a couple of years said she did, indeed, owe $600 back rent. But she said she thought the landlady was trying to get rid of her mainly because she had called the city Building Department about a stopped-up bathtub.

She added she had tried to pay the rent within the five days allowed after being given notice, but the landlady never showed up to collect. "I couldn't possibly give her the rent. She wasn't there to give it to her," the tenant said.

The landlady disagreed on all counts saying she had tried to send a plumber to fix the tub but the tenant wasn't home to let him in. And she had come after the notice, she added.

"I came back the next day, and (the tenant) said she was going to move, and slammed the door in my face," the landlady said.

No other witnesses were called. The judge recapitulated the testimony, and then ruled the tenant and her companion in the apartment had to pay back rent and get out. "Oh, God," whispered the tenant, going back to her seat and slumping next to her companion.

No one can know whether the outcome would have been different if the tenant had had an attorney, though the Lawyers' Committee finding strongly suggests that might have been.

But the landlady, who also had no counsel present, bore no signs of being a hard-hearted fat cat. Landlords, in fact, come in all different colors and economic groups, and many are themselves just barely making it.

There are, of course, the infamous cases such as the recent one in which a New York landlord was arrested for plotting to give lethal drug overdoses to two tenants who complained about terrible conditions in their apartment building. But many are ordinary folk scraping by.

A recent Harvard study reported more than a third of all rental housing is owned by individuals or married couples who have less than 10 units. Among those small property owners, almost 50 percent of resident owners said they made less than $30,000 a year in total income and 35 percent of non-resident owners made less than $30,000. Many said they weren't making a profit and wouldn't buy a rental building again.

Since the Lawyers' Committee report came out last year, Cook County Circuit Court has agreed to take some administrative steps to try to make Eviction Court judges more aware of tenants' legal rights and more careful to make sure tenants understand what's happening to them in court.

Judge Brent Carlson, First Municipal Division supervising judge, said the reforms were "not necessarily" developed in reaction to the negative report. He said more legal representation or advice should be given both tenants and landlords, but the sheer volume of cases makes that a problem.

The Lawyers' Committee has a number of other recommendations for reform, mostly directed toward making it easier for tenants to present defenses and coordinating Eviction Court and agencies providing rental assistance, social services and homeless prevention, and with the city Building Department.

On the latter point, however, Carlson said a system established a few years ago for referring cases where substandard housing was alleged directly to a building inspector broke down because judges were so often forced to order the buildings vacated as unsafe--which played into the hands of landlords seeking to get rid of tenants.

Eventually tenants stopped raising the issue of building violations or hazards because they preferred to have a chance of remaining in a building, however dilapidated, Carlson said. The referral system was dropped, he added.

The follow-up study also says that Eviction Court "should no longer be the dumping ground for unqualified judges" and that landlords' attorneys should be restrained from coercing tenants into damaging pre-trial settlements in order to prevent them from presenting their cases.

One prominent landlord attorney, however, doesn't think change is needed. "In better than 90 percent of the cases, the tenants owe rent," said Sanford Kahn, a 31-year Eviction Court practitioner whose four-lawyer firm does about 8,000 eviction cases a year. "I'm a small landlord, too, and it's just so common that tenants don't pay rent.

"After seeing all of it, I don't have too many suggestions for improvement. Not in a way that would stop people from not paying rent."

CAPTION: GRAPHIC (color): Daley Center, 1997: Waiting in reception area for court appearance. GRAPHIC (color): In Eviction Court, Judge Ronald Bartkowicz presiding. GRAPHIC: In Chicago's Eviction Court, where there were 42,000 eviction actions in 1996. Illustrations by Carol Renaud.

Copyright 1997/The Chicago Tribune. Reproduced with permission. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the Permissions Desk, The Chicago Tribune, 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611.
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