Nancy Mintie

She may be the most successful lawyer in Los Angeles. In the past two decades, Nancy J. Mintie and the Inner City Law Center have never lost a case. But her clients are not corporate giants or superstar athletes. They are those with whom society has grown impatient: the poor and the homeless. At a time when the majority of voters would rather not pay to educate undocumented workers and the talk-radio solution to the homeless is “just get a job,” Mintie and her minions fight for the rights of those most in need of legal services: the immigrant poor who live in slums, the mentally ill and other disenfranchised living on the streets.

The number of poor people is growing. According to a 1995 U.S. Census bureau study, the number of tenants living below the poverty level has nearly doubled since 1989. In L.A. County, more than 150,000 rental apartments are substandard, infested with rats or without working toilets.

Mintie and the law center’s staff of 15 serve between 350 and 500 clients each month, often partnering with private law firms on particular cases. They get court orders for the repair of broken plumbing and leaky ceilings or to mandate the extermination of vermin and roaches. They sue for injuries to children who have fallen from faulty fire escapes or have cockroaches embedded in their ears.

Mintie, 45, started her practice in a garage behind the Catholic Worker soup kitchen. She likes to say she met her husband, Ardon Alger, in the gutter on Skid Row, an area in downtown L.A. Actually, he was also volunteering for the Catholic Worker, standing in the street to keep the soup line in order.

Their first date was a field trip to take photographs of rat droppings in a slum-apartment basement. “When he did that,” Mintie says, “I realized this was the man for me.” Today, Alger teaches photography at a local college.

In Mintie’s office, in addition to the pictures of her 9-year-old daughter, Michelle Alger-Mintie, and the heart-wrenching photographs Alger has taken of some of Mintie’s youngest clients, there’s a piano, an inheritance from her late “Gramma.” Mintie says she only dares play it when nobody is around. She started brushing up when she volunteered to play at Sunday mass at her local Catholic church. Mintie’s commitment to serving the poor is strongly based in her lifelong Catholic faith. But it was a career choice that surprised her family.

Question: Did your parents object to your setting up shop on Skid Row?

Answer: They were very worried about me, of course, for my safety. They were conservative, Orange County Republicans, and they didn’t understand. Lawyers for the poor were a concept very strange to them and very new to them. But because they were Catholic, and there is a strong social-justice tradition within Catholicism, they understood the work from that point.

I think to be a person of faith means to be a person of radical hope. . . . At the heart of every religious faith there are the values of charity and justice. So, as lawyers for the poor, we are the embodiment of zedaka, you know, the beautiful word from the Jewish tradition that means the unity of charity and justice, where charity and justice kiss. From what I understand, the litmus test of every major faith is, “If you believe these things, what are you doing for the poor?”

The great power in the work is this combination of values. Because justice alone can be cold and forgiving and impersonal. But justice powered by love is Gandhi, is Martin Luther King--it’s a force that’s so powerful it can change the world. Charity alone can be weak or ineffective. Charity might be giving a food basket to a family in a slum.

But, to take an example from our work, charity armed with justice can go into that slum, get a court order to clean it up, move the family out, get enough money to put the kids through college and break the cycle of poverty for that family.

*

Q: What was your first case?

A: A woman walked in with a rat as big as a small cat that she’d had to bash over the head with a board to kill. But she wasn’t able to kill it until after it had already attacked her five daughters, her five little girls. She was finally able to kill the thing, and she brought me the pillowcase with the bloody rat tracks across it that she had found in her children’s beds. And I thought, “Good heavens, this is terrible! This is the worst case I’ll ever see in my life. This is a nightmare!”

But the real nightmare is that after I won that case, and we got some publicity, identical cases started pouring in from all over the city. And the nightmare continues, because those cases have continued to come in for the past 20 years. People think housing conditions like this went out with Dickens, the Industrial Revolution of England, or 100 years ago in the tenements of New York. But we have them right here.

*

Q: Why are housing standards allowed to slip so much?

A: The inspection system of the city and the county has been dysfunctional for many years. . . . In the past, buildings were only inspected if there was a complaint from the tenant. But many tenants didn’t speak English, and getting through the bureaucracy to make a complaint baffled even the lawyers and law students who began to investigate the problem. Many of them couldn’t figure out how to make a complaint.

The new system is designed to be more streamlined and designed to inspect, regularly, every single rental apartment in the city, so that you’re not dependent on the tenants sticking their necks out by making the complaint--because often the victim is evicted. And there aren’t enough lawyers in the city to defend tenants who are evicted by vengeful landlords.

*

Q: How many inspectors will it take to inspect every apartment in the city?

A: They’re supposed to be inspecting them on a three-year cycle, once every three years. Hopefully, that will be enough to catch a building before it slides into a complete slum. If you get it at the beginning stages of deterioration, you have a better chance of getting the repairs done and preserving the neighborhood.

It’s like the homeless problem. If we do homeless-prevention work, with children and with families in distress, or with men who have lost their jobs, we have a much better chance of stabilizing that person and returning them to a normal place in society than if you wait until the person has hit the sidewalk. Because once they have fallen that far, you’re dealing with mental illness; you’re dealing with substance abuse they’ve turned to in despair; you’re dealing with a long history of joblessness; you’re dealing with a jail record because they’ve been picked up a number of times while they’ve been on the street. It’s an almost insurmountable task at that point to solve the problem.

*

Q: What do you do to serve your homeless clients?

A: What we do is try to get them what few government benefits are available for homeless people, which are pitifully few, patch them together with what is available in the private community and try and get them housed. Or, if they’re able to work, get them into a job program. If they’re mentally ill, get them some mental-health care. . . .

The conditions that create homelessness have not been effectively addressed. So the problem continues to grow each year. And the aid that’s available to help homeless people is less than it’s ever been in the time that I’ve been here. Right now, the only government program that’s available for homeless adults is the general relief program, which they can only participate in nine months out of the year and it pays them $221 a month. Well, try living on $221 a month. And there are between 58,000 and 80,000 people at any given time on that program. Many live on the street because you cannot find housing and feed yourself on $221 a month.

We’re in a dispute now in the Skid Row area over something as basic as toilet facilities. Twenty-six portable toilets were brought into the community after half a dozen years of organizing by advocates for the homeless. The saddest thing in the world to see is a man or woman squatting down before God and everybody, having to use the restroom in public. The City Council and Los Angeles Board of [Public] Works is now considering a proposal to remove all of those. They’re under a lot of pressure from the business community that doesn’t want to have toilet facilities--though we have an enormous homeless population. We’ve only got about 10,000 shelter beds in the whole county for a homeless population that’s estimated at about 80,000. And I’m sorry, but people have to use the restroom. A minimum of once a day. In fact, the toilets are used so heavily, every day, the city says they really need to be emptied twice a day. It would be embarrassing if it weren’t so tragic that we’re debating over such a basic human need.

*

Q: After 20 years, how do you avoid burnout?

A: I continue to do this work because slum housing kills children. And that’s enough of a motivation for me. And because there are people who are homeless and dying in the street. . . .

I’m working on a case right now where a baby died in her slum building because of the slum conditions there. And I’m representing 55 other tenants in that building, most of them children who were injured or became ill. . . .

The problem is beyond even what some middle-class people can imagine. We had a case one time that we tried before a jury and we brought in tray after tray of sticky cockroach traps--the photographs of them. Every night, the family would put out traps and they would completely fill up with big thumb-sized cockroaches that fly. We were talking to the jury afterward--we won the case--but one of the jurors was quite skeptical. She was a young woman from Colorado and she said, “I didn’t believe the tenants could have cockroaches like that. That’s not possible. They must have gone out and collected them and pasted them to those boards just to make an impression.” So even in the face of evidence, she couldn’t believe people were living like this. . . .

We represented a family who lived in a slum building where they had a terrible rat infestation, a terrible cockroach infestation, and fleas come in on the backs of the rats and so you’ve got clouds of fleas. One day, the mother took her little 3-year-old son out to McDonald’s, which for some of these poor families is the equivalent of going to Disneyland. It is a big, big treat. It is the splurge of the year. And the security guard came up and told them that they would have to leave because he was so covered with bites and rashes from the vermin that the other patrons thought he had a contagious disease.

*

Q: Is the next generation as passionate about these issues? Why aren’t they flocking to work at public-interest agencies?

A: You should meet them! They’re every bit as passionate as I was. I recognize that fire burning in them and I want to put them to work. . . . The problem now is that young people coming out of law schools can’t afford to take low-paying jobs working for the poor because the cost of a legal education or a graduate-school education has gotten so high that they’re carrying a mountain of debt. For example, one of the lawyers who works here now had to turn off the gas in his apartment, his car has 268,000 miles on it, he’s behind in his rent and the tax man is after him because he is drowning in debt.

We have these wonderful law students who come through the center and volunteer for us. And I ask them, “What’re you going to do after you graduate?” And they say, sadly, “I guess I’m going to have to go work for a law firm.” Which is kind of funny because a lot of people would give their right arm for a high-paying job at a prestigious law firm. But these kids are sad because their hearts are with the poor. Their hearts are burning for justice. I can’t bear it that they won’t have the opportunity to lay their talents at the feet of the poor. I’m greedy for the poor. I want that talent and that wonderful dedication and youthful energy for the poor.

And so my latest project has been to start a new organization called Uncommon Good. It is setting up a scholarship fund to pay the monthly debt service for any law-school graduate who wants to serve the poor. One exciting thing that has happened is the Methodist Church has stepped forward and funded two lawyers to come and work in Los Angeles for two years--one with our organization and one with a sister organization, Public Counsel--as an expression of their social-justice commitment.

And if the Methodists can do it, the Catholics could do it, the Jews could do it, the Baptists could do it, the Bahais could do it. . . . I want to partner with law schools to jointly fund-raise for this, because they have an interest in seeing that their graduates who want to go into public service can do so.

If this model is successful, we hope that it can be duplicated nationally and that it can be duplicated by other professions. Because the poor need doctors and they need dentists and they need social workers, they need mental-health workers. . . . Ultimately, I think the very future of public service in America is going to depend on its success.