Commentary : ‘Habitability’: The First and Last Word in How Housing Shapes Up
The toilet seat struck the judge, which was good, because it won us our case. The sight of that rim, worn down to the black, convinced His Honor that our client’s apartment was uninhabitable. He ruled that the landlord had violated his statutory duty to maintain the property, couldn’t evict our family and had to lower the rent.
“After all,” stated the court, “he couldn’t even spend $2 to replace a damn toilet seat.”
About a hundred evictions a week are filed in Orange County Municipal Court in Santa Ana. These don’t count the times when tenants are told to get out and do so voluntarily, or move because they are threatened or their water is turned off. That kind of forced eviction is not only informal but illegal. An eviction has to be a court process. It can be resisted several ways, and inability to pay the rent isn’t one of them.
The handiest defense is “habitability,” proof that the landlord has ignored his part of the bargain and let the place run down. At the Legal Aid Society office in Santa Ana, nearly a quarter of our cases are eviction defenses, and habitability is the first thing our lawyers wonder about.
On errands for Legal Aid, I’ve had the interesting duty to inspect hundreds of apartments and homes, met some of the most pleasant people in memory, mainly Latino, living under conditions that would be funny if they weren’t tragic.
One family on Washington Street in Santa Ana lived with a gas leak so volatile it could have blown the house to splinters. I could hardly go inside, but the family had gotten used to it.
On Logan Street, in a row of falling-down sheds since fallen down, seven large families shared two small bathrooms.
On East Camile Street, the children don’t need toy trains because they have real ones flashing by 30 feet from where they play. Their apartment is shaken and battered. Their fathers pay almost as much for it as I do for mine, and mine is a mile from the beach and has two swimming pools.
On South Center Street, the tenant’s garbage disposal drains directly through the floor, inconveniencing the families that live in the three garages below.
The truth is, Latinos suffer through conditions that the more comfortably housed tenants would raise instant hell about. The eroded toilet seat that so alarmed the judge is a normal fixture in thriftier households. So are mildew, peeling paint, damp carpets, broken windows, torn screens, broken door-frames, naked wiring and taped-up crevices everywhere. Look behind a devotional wall-hanging and it quite often covers a hole. A rod or stick at the corner of a sliding window means the latch doesn’t work and this crosswise shim is called a “Mexican lock.”
Landlords have ready rationale: The dwelling, as bad as it is, is better than the occupants are used to; (It is in California, but not Chihuahua, and it’s subject to different laws.)
The dwelling has I-don’t-know-how-many people living in it; (The dwelling has you-know-exactly-how-many people living in it. You charge extra rent per extra person and $200 apiece for those hombres in the garage.)
I’m tired of tenants complaining; I’d as soon tear the building down ; (You’re dying to tear it down anyway. You’ve been offered top price for the land and that’s why you’re evicting the tenants.)
The minute you rent to Latinos the place goes to pieces : (The minute you rent to Latinos the maintenance usually stops.)
Landlord arguments, summarily dealt with here, do have merit in some cases. Some buildings richly deserve to be emptied, just as tenants deserve time to move and money to move with, and not to pay luxury rent on a crumbling establishment. Latinos would rather crowd their relatives under cover than send them to sleep in the street. They pay well to keep them inside, so the overcrowding is rarely a surprise to the landlord. Latinos have large families, and children cause traffic and wear. Children, however, do not kick holes in the ceiling, make roofs leak or paint peel, disjoint plumbing, shatter driveways, create termite damage and dry rot or keep mice and cockroaches as pets.
Latinos are apt to tolerate wreckage because it is not easy for them to move. New surroundings mean a change in schools, markets, bus stops and neighbors. The family’s young men find themselves on unfamiliar and often perilous turf. So the family will make heroic efforts to stay where it is, and I have seen poignant attempts to make the best of really awful places.
On South Standard Street, one family had piled its belongings on the dining room table because leakage and mildew had destroyed the other three rooms. On West Brook Street the senora gave me supper and I watched her sponge off an untiled work surface in a heartbreaking effort to cleanse the dry rot.
The place on East Warner Avenue is the one that has us baffled. It is one of the oldest structures in Santa Ana and the family inside faces eviction after 18 years’ residence. From the outside, the place is a wood frame shambles; generations of termites have aerated the timbers and eaten away the lower foot of siding. The plumbing is prehistoric, and a careening car has demolished a corner and taken out a front window, giving the house a one-eyed look.
The startling thing is that the occupants aren’t suffering. Inside there are no effusions of damp and dry rot or vistas of daylight through holes in the wall. For 18 years, the father has bandaged pipes the moment they spout, covered wilting wallpaper with layers of new wallpaper, and sealed up holes, broken windows and roof leaks with plywood scrap. He has relined the house so often the interior has shrunk as the family has grown. The 16-year-old son, who was born there, has to stoop to get in the kitchen.
If Senor pulled out his interior fixings the house would fall down before the bulldozer could get to it. The landlord might never get to see it, and that would be too bad. Senora’s roses are in bloom.
