Pictures, Tears, Race, & Class

By: Anonymous Watcher

My impression being in rent court for the first time was that the decision-making apparatus felt impenetrable to an outsider. The cases went by at a frightening speed, with decisions being made in the blink of an eye. It was unclear what evidence, if any, the judge was using to come to her decisions. The judge took landlords’ statements as fact with no supporting evidence being offered—in one case, the judge remarked that she didn’t understand how the landlord had calculated the rent he was demanding from a tenant (the math didn’t make sense to me either), but she gave the landlord the benefit of the doubt and ruled in his favor.

“After a while it seemed that the decisions that the judge made did not consider what the defendants said.”

The few tenants who showed up were not given this benefit. The judge spoke over the defendants, refusing to hear out their explanations. I felt that maybe if people were given the opportunity to speak, the outcomes of the cases might be different, but the judge wouldn’t let the tenants defend themselves. One woman carried pictures of the poor condition of her home, but wasn’t allowed to show them. I found her crying in the hallway afterwards, talking about how she’s scared for her baby. She said that she got confused about how the rent escrow system works, and now must pay the landlord despite the clear threats to health and safety in the home.

Many of the tenants seemed as confused as I was about how the system was supposed to work. A tenant asked a clarifying question at one point, and the judge told her that she couldn’t answer that question, the tenant should seek her own counsel. The defendants were invisible to the judge either way.

The only times cases were settled in favor of tenants were when tenants had lawyers standing next to them. The effect of class and race was felt strongly. The same explanation, ignored and batted away when it was offered by a middle aged African American mother, was suddenly relevant when a white man in a suit put it into more formal language. A set of landlords had several cases being tried, one right after another. I kept wondering what the condition of their properties must be like. The judge ruled in their favor for all but the last case, when the tenant had a lawyer. What a surprise, when during this last case the landlord turned out to be operating illegally! Of course, no help to the previous tenants, who had their explanations cut off.