Describing conditions faced by low-income tenants in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-1970s
Fillette describes the deplorable conditions low-income tenants faced in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1974, his first full year of employment with the Legal Aid Society of Mecklenburg County. According to Fillette, low-income tenants were subject to laws dating back to the seventeenth century, which decreed that landlords did not have the responsibility to repair property. Fillette outlines in detail the various ramifications this entailed for low-income tenants, emphasizing the substandard conditions they lived in and their susceptibility to eviction.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ted Fillette, April 11, 2006. Interview U-0186. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
In a moment, I want to return to the issues of public housing as well as
recent gentrification in several areas of Charlotte, but I thought we
might step back a little bit right now and talk about some of your more
general work in the area of tenants' rights and welfare
rights. It might be helpful if you could sketch for me sort of the
general landscape in the mid-70s that you encountered that led to your
work in those areas.
- TED FILLETTE:
-
Alright, I'll try to sort of describe the landscape in 1974,
which was the first full calendar year after I came to Charlotte. The
low-income housing in Charlotte was in generally extremely bad shape in
the private market. Most of the low-income tenants had week-to-week
leases and many of those were oral and not written. A typical lease
would be for the tenant to pay fifty dollars a week or seventy-five
dollars per week and there would be no provision for any kind of repairs
to be done in the lease. If there were written leases at all, they would
usually be one page and it would be very perfunctor. It would say what
the address was, the amount of the rent, and what time the rent was due,
and that's all it said.
The law in North Carolina at that point was based upon the common law of
England in the seventeenth century, which has been described in legal
jurisprudence as under the doctrine of caveat emptor,
or "the buyer beware," which means that the tenant was
not entitled in common law to have the landlord make any repairs at all.
What that meant was that low-income tenants could not force their
landlords to do any repairs at all, no matter how serious. The only
potential relief that tenants had at that time was to ask for an
inspection from a housing inspection department of the city of Charlotte
that enforced the housing code. But what that meant in practical terms
was that if a tenant requested a housing inspection from the city, the
inspector would come out and might find twenty or twenty-five violations
of the housing code that would include things such
as leaking plumbing, holes in the roof, unsafe wiring, inoperable
furnace or dangerous flues. There was actually no requirement that the
landlord provide any heating equipment at that time even in the housing
code. What that would do is cause the city inspector to send the owner
of the property a written complaint and offering the owner the
opportunity for a hearing to dispute whether or not those conditions
existed. What would happen in about ninety-eight percent of those
circumstances is the owner would get in touch with his property manager
and the property manager would then send a notice for terminating the
lease to the tenant.
Under North Carolina law at that time, the week-to-week tenancy could be
terminated on two days' notice. So if the lease began on a
Monday, the landlord could give the notice on Friday to be effective
Sunday night, and then on Monday, they would be considered a holdover
tenant. It was very common at that time for landlords to retaliate by
evicting tenants that called for housing inspections. So in the same
scenario I've described, if the notice was sent out on
Friday, the landlord would file an action for summary ejectment in the
small claims court on Monday and that might be scheduled for a trial on
Friday of that same week. Then when the tenant would go to that trial
and I went to many of these in small claims court, the tenant was not
entitled to raise as a defense to the summary ejectment that it was in
retaliation for having called for the housing inspection. That was not a
defense in common law and there was no statutory right to be protected
from retaliatory evictions. So it was very well-known in the community
that if a housing inspector came into your home and reported the defects
to the owner, that inside of a week, you were likely to be faced with an
eviction trial.
So let me tell you what happened when people had eviction trials. When
there was no right to get repairs done, there was no claim for the
tenant to make about having paid rent for
dangerous and unhealthy houses and there was no defense for retaliatory
eviction. So when we had these trials, the tenant would always lose.
When the tenants lost, they had a theoretical right to appeal for a new
trial in the district court, but there was a procedural requirement in
the North Carolina statutes that said if a tenant wanted to appeal a
judgment of a magistrate to district court to have a trial in front of a
jury or a real judge, that the tenant would have to pay three
months' rent in advance to stop the judgment of the
magistrate from being carried out or executed by the sheriff. Well, in
my entire career of working for Legal Aid, we had never had any client
who had enough money to pay three months' rent in advance. We
had plenty of clients who were able to pay their next week's
rent in advance, or perhaps one month in advance, but none of them had
enough money saved. They were living pretty much from check to check, so
they could not afford to pay the rent appeal bond to stop the landlord
from putting them out while they sought an appeal. Of course, since they
didn't have many substantive rights, there was very little
reason to need an appeal, but if they had any sort of good claim, they
would surely be displaced before any new trial occurred.
What happened then is, and this is going back to the original scenario,
if the trial was scheduled on Friday and they lost and they could not
pay three months' rent in advance, the following Monday, the
sheriff and the landlord would be at the house and they would physically
remove all of the belongings of the tenant and they would put them out
on the street. Usually every Monday and sometimes every day of the week,
you would drive through the low-income neighborhoods of the city and you
would see all the furniture, the clothes, the food, the appliances, the
televisions, everything that belonged to these families, was put out on
the street. You had people with pickup trucks who were scavengers that
would go through the neighborhoods and pick through the items of the
tenants that were put out on the street and take
the things that they wanted and just carry them off with impunity, while
the tenants usually weren't home to protect them; they were
at work and they weren't there to protect them. And they
didn't necessarily know when these evictions were going to
occur, but usually they would occur within one or two days after they
lost in court.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
In talking with other folks in Legal Aid work across the region, did you
find this to be a similar pattern? North Carolina, how would
it rank or compare to other southern states or
nationally?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
Well, there weren't very many Legal Aid people in the South at
that time. There were only three counties in North Carolina that had
Legal Aid offices and all of us could talk, we could all meet in this
same room. When we would talk, we would realize we all had the same
problem with the landlord-tenant law or the complete lack of it. So that
was very well-known among our three offices. South Carolina, I knew, had
similar laws that were mostly just common law from England. Alabama and
Mississippi, I think, were similar. I didn't know much about
Georgia and Tennessee. But that was pretty typical in the South.