Two Tales of One City
This is a story about two people in conflict. As the landlord saw it she was doing a public service to the community by renovating a filthy, crime-ridden, run-down tenement slum. To her tenants, on the other hand, she was an arrogant white girl who had pushed her way into a black area, looking down her nose at people even as she threw them out in the street. In any situation where tensions are high and emotions intense, objective truth is impossible to discover--there are too many biases and omissions. Here then is the landlord's story, told entirely from her point of view, followed by a tenant's story, told entirely from his.
The Landlord's Tale
It was the worst building Kristin had ever seen. "Filthy," she called
it. "Indescribably disgusting." There were dirty diapers in the hallways
and roaches on the walls, the stench of urine everywhere. On the front
steps black men drank wine and shouted insults at passing patrol cars.
Illegal aliens slept on gray, shredded mattresses, five or six to a room.
Inside a second-floor doorway, dried blood covered the floorboards in a
stain two feet wide.
The building was located near the USC campus, between two parking lots.
It was over 60 years old, of stucco construction, three stories high, with
no heat, an incontinent roof and 47 units, each consisting of a single
fourteen-by-sixteen foot room, a small kitchen, a tiny bath. Some of the
toilets didn't flush. The sinks were full of dirty dishes and moldy food.
Garbage filled the air shafts to a depth of eight feet.
Kristin took title to the building in August of 1979. The tenants made
her nervous and the squalor made her retch (after every visit she used to
take a shower and change her clothes), but the location had potential and at
$425,000 (with $71,000 down) the price was irresistibly cheap. Her plan was
to evict all the tenants, completely redo the building inside and out, and
once everything was up to code, rent the apartment to students from USC.
The start was not an auspicious one. The firm of process servers she
normally employed in her regular downtown law practice refused to work in
the neighborhood. The man she did hire would only work with a bodyguard.
At first the tenants didn't take Kristin seriously--she was too young;
she wore jeans; there was a hesitant quality to her speech. The tenants
thought she was a health inspector or social worker. Later, when they
learned she owned the building, they made fun of her with a kind of
obsequious politeness, flattening themselves against the corridor walls,
shuffling their feet and saying, "Yes ma'am." But they whispered as she
passed and behind her back they called her bitch.
Kristin was frightened. Her tenants were so different from anyone
she'd ever known. She'd had a black roommate at Swarthmore, but that was
another world. Once, while she stood in the parking lot, someone threw a
wine bottle from the roof and it shattered at her feet ("Naturally," says
Kristin, "it was empty.")
It surprised and annoyed Kristin that all her tenants ignored their 30-
day notices to vacate. She gave them a few more weeks and then started
filing lawsuits. The Mexicans left first. They were meeker than the blacks
and afraid of immigration raids. The lawsuits, in the meantime, all fell
through, the judge ruling that although Kristin had given her tenants the
required 30-day written notice of intention to evict, she hadn't met the
court's personal requirement to spell out the reason on the documents as
well. Kristin was professionally offended and financially distraught. Her
mortgage and utility bills were running $10,000 a month without a penny
coming in.
She quickly filed a second round of lawsuits, but these too were
dismissed because none of the apartments had ever been registered under the
Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Kristin paid $423 in fines and registration
fees and filed the suits for yet another time.
By December, half the tenants had voluntarily moved out. Relations
with the rest were so poor that Kristin's contractor took to carrying a pipe
wrench when walking through the halls. Thieves broke into his tool room and
stole a power saw and an electric drill. They pried lids off paint cans and
poured the contents on the rugs. Once, while he was working behind the
building, someone threw a twenty-pound slab of concrete at him from the
third floor fire escape. On another occasion, someone threw a switchblade
at his back as he walked down the stairs. It missed and stuck in a
banister. He pulled it out, snapped the blade under his heel and threw the
pieces on the floor. ("Actually," he says, "they were sort of impressed by
that.")
Over the Christmas holidays, thieves kicked in the doors to 25 nearly
renovated apartments. They tore up the rugs, spray painted the walls,
pulled down the drapes and bent the curtain rods. They removed the new
toilet seats and shower heads. They smashed the lavatories and pounded the
spigots off the tubs. They hauled away ten stoves and refrigerators, all
the new fire extinguishers, and spray painted MERRY CHRISTMAS on the
entrance foyer's marble walls. Afterward Kristin's contractor came to her
to say his entire crew had quit and he was quitting too--she couldn't pay
him enough to work under conditions like that.
When Kristin presented a $25,000 damage claim to her insurance company,
they offered to settle for $10,000 and then canceled the policy. Kristin
obtained another policy with a different company at double the premium,
prepaid a year in advance. Suddenly without explanation, this policy was
canceled too. Her bank threatened to call in the loan for failure to keep
the building insured.
In late January, a marshal walked into Kristin's law office high up in
the Number One Wilshire building and handed her a temporary restraining
order enjoining her from "annoying, molesting or harassing" a tenant named
Beverly "in any manner whatsoever."
Kristin was astonished and frustrated. From her point of view, it was
Beverly who had been harassing her ever since she bought the building.
Beverly lived in a third-floor apartment with three children and a man named
Fred. Surprisingly for the kind of building they lived in, the kids were
polite and respectful, calling her ma'am and all the workmen sir. But her
husband Fred was another matter.
Fred was an actor, or at least he claimed to be. He went jogging every
morning, had rippling biceps, a flat stomach and processed hair, which he
combed straight back, down over the sides and flared out in back like Darth
Vader's helmet. He sent out his acting resumes in hand-colored envelopes,
calling himself "Fast Stepping Freddie--an old woman's dream and a young
girl's thrill."
Beverly was better spoken and better educated than Fred. She had been
the only tenant to fight the eviction in court and she had done quite well,
succeeding in delaying the eviction for six months, not once paying a single
penny's rent.
Kristin tried everything to get them out, offering them $500, even
$3500. But their demands kept escalating. They wanted a two-bedroom
apartment. And couldn't Kristin find them a house? Kristin wasted 45 hours
trying to find them a place to live, but they turned down every apartment
she came up with, including one with a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, brand-new
carpeting, new drapes and three times their current floor space.
As Kristin's relations with them deteriorated, Beverly and Fred used
increasingly profane language--every other word was "mutherfucking." Not
that they considered that a profanity. They used it like an adjective.
Kristin couldn't understand why they were so incensed. They seemed to be
responding to threats that had never been made. They said things like, if
anything happened to their kids, Kristin would get the same and worse. One
of these days someone was going to come at her out of a dark door. Some
morning she was going to wake up and find she couldn't walk.
They used to laugh about the vandalism, offering Kristin spurious
sympathy, telling her that her contractor was robbing her and all her
workers were thugs. Far from being helpless tenants, they played the system
like a grand piano, forever calling the fire marshal, the health department,
building and safety inspectors and, most of all, the police. Then if they
couldn't think of anything else, they threatened to trash the building.
The threats left Kristin a nervous wreck. If the building went, it
would wipe her out completely. She asked the police for extra patrols, but
they turned her down flat--their relationship with the residents was badly
strained already and they didn't want to make matters worse by helping a
white landlord in a black neighborhood. In fact, in their opinion, Kristin
was stupid to have bought the building in the first place. And everyone
would be better off if it burned to the ground--Kristin would get her
insurance and the cops would have one less headache on their beat.
Due to the frequent threats against the building, Kristin moved into
one apartment herself. A week later she was awakened in her sleep by
strange noises outside. She pulled on her robe, ran down the stairs to the
parking lot out back and found her six-year-old Fiat engulfed in flames.
She called the Fire Department but the car was a total loss. Later that
evening a policeman told Kristin she was stupid to live in the building
without a gun. "Or," he added helpfully, "for $150, you can have somebody
rubbed out in this neighborhood."
The incident frightened Kristin badly enough that she called an LAPD
officer who ran a private security service. He took her up on the roof and
spelled out his terms: she would have to hire two off-duty cops at $20 an
hour apiece, 24 hours a day, for a minimum of two months, all payments in
cash. He in turn would guarantee that her remaining tenants would leave in
three weeks if he had to drag Fred up to the roof and dangle him over the
side.
In the meantime, he urged Kristin to buy a gun. He had one in his
briefcase. It was a folding shotgun, small enough to fit in a handbag. It
came in a plastic carrying case with plush molded lining and was available
now, loaded for under $200.
Kristin declined the offer. If she had wanted muscle, she could have
hired the Mafia. In fact she had already been given the name of an alleged
underworld connection, helpfully supplied by a visitor to the site.
By late March, all the tenants had left except Beverly and Fred.
Confrontations with them were growing in both frequency and intensity.
Matters came to a head when Kristin hired an exterminator to wrap and tape
the building and flood it with poison gas. No one could return for at least
three days. For the duration Kristin had arranged for Beverly, Fred and the
kids to stay at the Vagabond Motel on Figueroa. It was a nice place, a
clean motel, used all the time by visitors to USC.
Beverly refused to go unless Kristin agreed to pay for meals. That was
no problem, said Kristin. She'd pay $10 per person per day.
Well yes, said Beverly, but what about all the food in the house she'd
have to throw away?
Kristin offered to buy it from Beverly. They would inventory it
together and set a fair price.
No, said Beverly. She wasn't letting Kristin into the apartment.
The food was worth $500. In addition, they would be needing three units at
the motel--their daughter was 12 and couldn't be sharing a unit with their
sons.
Wrong, said Kristin. Forget this. Forget the whole thing. She was
willing to pay reasonable expenses but this was ludicrous.
Kristin's workmen now joined in the argument. Kristin had given them a
long weekend and they thought that unless the extermination went forward
they would lose their jobs. To Kristin it was an extraordinarily ugly
scene, her fired-up workmen standing toe-to-toe with Fred. In fact, she had
to admire Fred's courage in a way. These were not restrained unemotional
guys. After her original contractor quit, she had hired a pickup crew, all
young guys, friends of other workers, people from the Union Rescue Mission--
anyone she could get.
The workers took Fred aside and told him to get out. He was screwing
up their job and he wasn't going to get away with it. Why didn't he just
move out, anyway? Let Kristin pay for his food, live in a decent building
for three days?
Who were they threatening, demanded Fred. They had no right to
dictate to him.
Kristin was appalled. She'd seen from her tenants how much blacks
hated whites. Now she saw from her own workmen how much whites hated
blacks. Any one of them could have taken a hammer to the back of Fred's
head and not cared at all. "Nigger" was the nicest word she heard.
Everyone was steaming, including the exterminators. They were a black-owned
company. To them, this contract for $6000 or $7000 was no small matter.
They tried to act as intermediaries, using a lot of "hey bro," but Fred
refused to leave. In the end, Kristin's own workmen fumigated the building
as best they could, using hand-scattered powders and nontoxic sprays.
At the end of April, nine months after Kristin first started the
proceedings, a judge finally evicted Beverly and Fred. To prevent their
appealing the decision, Kristin wrote them a check for $1000. As they were
moving out she warned them that she had documented everything that had
happened in the building. Fred and Beverly were the only tenants who had
ever given her any trouble. If anything happened to the building, if
anything happened to her--even if she tripped on the sidewalk and twisted
her ankle--the initial suspicion would fall on Beverly and Fred.
They said that that was unfair. And Kristin agreed that it was.
The Tenant's Tale
Fred never liked Kristin from the first day he saw her. It had to do
with the way she carried herself--aloof, arrogant, like that lady in the
James Bond movie, From Russia With Love , stiff upper lip, looking down on
him, looking down on everybody as if they were filth, vermin. Fred was an
actor. He knew body language. He could psyche people out. Kristin, he
thought, had no compassion. She was a rich spoiled brat. When she couldn't
have her way, it was nothing for her to jump up and down, throw a temper
tantrum, stamp her foot and toss her hair. She couldn't wait a second.
Everything was always rush, rush, rush.
Fred didn't even know who she was the first couple of months. She
wouldn't speak to anyone. What does it cost to say good afternoon? Or just
a simple how you doing? And the way she evicted everyone--just a notice
under the door. "Damn," Fred had said. "How can I be evicted? I just
paid the rent."
The man she hired to get people to move came around offering $25 and
$50. Fred called it chump money. Fred would be sitting in his room watching
the ball game and suddenly--boom, boom, boom! This guy wasn't subtle. "Get
your jive ass out here now!" And Fred would run to the door. "You got to
get out of here," the man would tell him. "You found a place yet? Well,
you've got to get out. If you're not out of here by so and so, you're going
to find your stuff in the street."
It wasn't as if Fred wanted to say in the place. You didn't have to
be a genius to realize that the people who lived there were not exactly the
cream of the crop. People shot craps in the hallways, kicked in the doors,
sprayed stuff on the walls. There wasn't any security--anyone could walk
through. Even the police drew their guns when they came inside.
Fred and Beverly tried to find a place. They put ads in the L.A.
Sentinel :
Will some "LANDLORD" rent "ME" a 1,
2, or 3 bedroom house for $85 to $200
mo. I don't have much money, "BUT" I
swear on my "MOTHER'S" grave that I
will take "IMMACULATE" shape of your
house! "GUARANTEED."
Nothing every came of it. Kristin could have helped, but frankly she
didn't give a damn. That was what bothered Fred most. She made no effort
to use her influence to find something he could afford. Instead, she was
always whining at him and Beverly: "Guys, what do you want? Give me a
break."
"All I want," Fred would say, "is for you to find me something
affordable. I can't afford no $250 or $350 a month."
And Kristin would say, "I can't find you anything like that. There's
nothing like that."
The first time Beverly and Fred met Kristin in court, the judge drew up
a stipulated agreement. If Kristin could find a place for under $220, then
Beverly and Fred would move out in three days. Kristin was very confident.
She said she'd find a place within the week.
Was that enough time? asked the judge.
Oh, yes, your honor. She was sure, your honor.
Fred was disgusted. That was the way she talked--fast and flippant.
No patience with anything. Just got to have her way.
The next thing Fred knew Kristin was calling him on the phone to say
she'd found a place in Baldwin Hills, what the blacks call "the jungle."
Fred was pissed when he saw it had only one bedroom. He told her before
that he needed a separate room for his daughter. She was twelve, beginning
to menstruate. She couldn't be sleeping with the boys anymore.
The next time out, Kristin went through a rental agency. It was
wintertime, raining hard. The first place she took Beverly and Fred to was
already fully occupied, would be occupied and didn't have any intention of
not being occupied. Fred couldn't believe his eyes--Kristin threw a
tantrum--the agency was incompetent--how could anyone deal with people like
that?
Fred enjoyed himself. Now she was seeing what he'd gone through. Not
that it did any good. She was still finding apartments for $250 and $350,
even though with his present income, $125 a month was all he could afford.
"You're crazy," Kristin would tell him. "I can't find anything for
$125."
In fact, thought Fred, Kristin simply didn't care. One day she'd be
acting so polite to him, so friendly, saying what nice kids he had, as if
she gave a damn at all, saying how upstanding he was, when Fred knew all
along she secretly hated his guts, and the next time he'd see her she'd fly
around, huffy and irrational, accusing Fred of not keeping his word.
She was tricky too. She tried to get Fred and Beverly to move into a
motel one weekend, saying she was going to fumigate the building. Fred
thought it was a trick. She probably had a man ready to change the locks
the instant they left--they'd never get back inside. Or another time, when
Beverly put the harassment suit on her, she had to put fire extinguishers in
the building, but no sooner had the fire marshal inspected the place--the
pavement wasn't even cool from the tires of the truck leaving--she put them
back in a little red truck and took them all away again.
What really burned Fred was that whenever he called the health
department or the fire department or the police department to report the
latest atrocity that one of her goons had pulled, she'd stand out front
telling lies on him--he was just a squatter who had been evicted. He was
living here free and he wouldn't pay his rent. She had stood up in court
and told the judge that she didn't want any rent. How could he pay rent if
she wouldn't take it?
And then, after the harassment suit, she put all these big old lies in
the court record, charging him with all the vandalism and the burning of her
car. Of course, she never mentioned the guys she had working for her--they
treated minorities like dirt, like dogs that didn't deserve to live. Fred
had a court order saying that Kristin had to leave him alone, but it didn't
do any good because the police wouldn't enforce it. The police had never
liked the building anyhow, because the tenants used to yell out the windows
at them. They told Fred that the judges downtown didn't know what they were
signing. It didn't mean anything. It was just a piece of paper--that was
their attitude.
Fred was forever running down to the basement to replace fuses her
workmen had taken out or phone wires they had cut. Every chance they got,
they turned off the water, the gas. They broke their own hot water heater,
tore the mail in half. He used to have to go across the street and bring
back jars of water to flush his commode. One workman's dog grabbed his
daughter by the pants leg and pulled her down the stairs. She wasn't hurt
but the thing that really infuriated Fred was the way the dog owner just
laughed at him and asked why didn't he get his black ass out?
Fred never knew the real names of most of the workmen, he made up names
on his own--Waterboy, Lockman and Weirdhead. Weirdhead stopped Fred in the
hallway after Kristin's car was burned and gave him a warning. He was sick
and tired of trouble from Fred. If Kristin so much as hurt her fingernail,
Fred was going to suffer. If she was in an airplane and it blew up, he was
going to take care of Fred. His family too.
Fred answered that that kind of talk didn't make any sense. It made
him so angry he just wanted to dive on the guy and choke him. Either that
or get a gun. For $200 you could get a dope fiend to do anything in this
neighborhood. They didn't care. They'd kill anyone.
It didn't do any good to call the police. They didn't want to hear it.
They said it was a landlord-tenant dispute. Fred couldn't get a lawyer--
they only worked on contingency fees. You had to get hit by a meteor or an
airplane before they'd take your case. The courts were no help either. The
judges had no patience. You'd just stand there mumbling, mispronouncing the
terms, trying to talk about some law you looked up. And then, in the end,
they'd still throw you out in the street.
In mid-April somebody painted a message on Fred's door: "NIGGERS LEARN
TO DIE. GET YOUR BLACK ASS OUT!" Fred took a photograph to use in his
eviction hearing but the judge wouldn't look at it. She said Kristin
couldn't renovate the building with them living there. They'd had enough
time. Now they had to go.
Four days later, one workman had a fight with Beverly. Thirty or forty
men from the neighborhood gathered in the street. Some were high, some just
wanted to fight--they didn't have anything else to do.
Fred thought Kristin was crazy. She opened the security door, stamped
her feet, looked at them hard, dared them to try anything. At least her
workmen had sense--they stayed inside.
Kristin didn't know how close she had come. All Fred would have had to
say was, "The hell with it. Let's burn it up now." Instead, Fred broke it
up by refusing to go along. He called Channel 7 but they wouldn't send a
camera crew.
Epilogue
The instant Kristin's apartment house is fully rented to USC students,
she plans to put it up for sale. She estimates that it will bring about
$800,000, which, after deductions for mortgage interest, insurance losses
and operation and renovation costs, will leave her with a net profit of
$150,000.
Kristin says she's learned two important lessons from the building.
The first is, if she ever has any more money to invest in housing, she'll
put it in Tulsa, Kansas City or Houston--any place but LA.
The other lesson is a personal one. Having seen close up how welfare
turns poor people into con artists, she's become politically conservative.
She's also come to understand something about herself that she might not
have otherwise suspected--that night when the policeman offered to
intimidate Fred by hanging him over the roof, it wasn't any concern for
Beverly or Fred that made her turn him down. The fact was she didn't trust
the police any more than the Mafia. And once the payments to them started,
she didn't know where it would end. But it was a business decision, not a
humanitarian one. Whether Beverly or Fred were hurt didn't matter to her at
all.
Shortly after Fred moved out, he received a letter from his welfare
worker saying that someone had made 40 complaints against him on the welfare
hotline, including pimping, narcotics distribution and turning his daughter
out. The caller also recommended that his kids be taken away.
Fred and Beverly are now living across the street half a block down.
Two months ago their new landlord told Fred to hold the rent, he was selling
the building. Fred stopped payment and was promptly hit with a three-day
notice to pay or quit. "I'll probably be kicked out again," he says.
Whenever Fred can get his lawyer off top dead center, he's going to try
to get a tax lien against the building so Kristin can't make any money. "I
want to hurt her financially," he says, "like she hurt me."
#
Postscript: In September, 1985, following a long court fight with his new
Hispanic landlord over alleged anti-black discrimination, Fred was evicted
again. On October 29, at 3 am, returning to pick up some clothes, he got
into a fight with a neighbor. A gun was drawn. And Fred was shot in the
chest and killed.
Archives
The Landlord's Tale
It was the worst building Kristin had ever seen. "Filthy," she called
it. "Indescribably disgusting." There were dirty diapers in the hallways
and roaches on the walls, the stench of urine everywhere. On the front
steps black men drank wine and shouted insults at passing patrol cars.
Illegal aliens slept on gray, shredded mattresses, five or six to a room.
Inside a second-floor doorway, dried blood covered the floorboards in a
stain two feet wide.
The building was located near the USC campus, between two parking lots.
It was over 60 years old, of stucco construction, three stories high, with
no heat, an incontinent roof and 47 units, each consisting of a single
fourteen-by-sixteen foot room, a small kitchen, a tiny bath. Some of the
toilets didn't flush. The sinks were full of dirty dishes and moldy food.
Garbage filled the air shafts to a depth of eight feet.
Kristin took title to the building in August of 1979. The tenants made
her nervous and the squalor made her retch (after every visit she used to
take a shower and change her clothes), but the location had potential and at
$425,000 (with $71,000 down) the price was irresistibly cheap. Her plan was
to evict all the tenants, completely redo the building inside and out, and
once everything was up to code, rent the apartment to students from USC.
The start was not an auspicious one. The firm of process servers she
normally employed in her regular downtown law practice refused to work in
the neighborhood. The man she did hire would only work with a bodyguard.
At first the tenants didn't take Kristin seriously--she was too young;
she wore jeans; there was a hesitant quality to her speech. The tenants
thought she was a health inspector or social worker. Later, when they
learned she owned the building, they made fun of her with a kind of
obsequious politeness, flattening themselves against the corridor walls,
shuffling their feet and saying, "Yes ma'am." But they whispered as she
passed and behind her back they called her bitch.
Kristin was frightened. Her tenants were so different from anyone
she'd ever known. She'd had a black roommate at Swarthmore, but that was
another world. Once, while she stood in the parking lot, someone threw a
wine bottle from the roof and it shattered at her feet ("Naturally," says
Kristin, "it was empty.")
It surprised and annoyed Kristin that all her tenants ignored their 30-
day notices to vacate. She gave them a few more weeks and then started
filing lawsuits. The Mexicans left first. They were meeker than the blacks
and afraid of immigration raids. The lawsuits, in the meantime, all fell
through, the judge ruling that although Kristin had given her tenants the
required 30-day written notice of intention to evict, she hadn't met the
court's personal requirement to spell out the reason on the documents as
well. Kristin was professionally offended and financially distraught. Her
mortgage and utility bills were running $10,000 a month without a penny
coming in.
She quickly filed a second round of lawsuits, but these too were
dismissed because none of the apartments had ever been registered under the
Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Kristin paid $423 in fines and registration
fees and filed the suits for yet another time.
By December, half the tenants had voluntarily moved out. Relations
with the rest were so poor that Kristin's contractor took to carrying a pipe
wrench when walking through the halls. Thieves broke into his tool room and
stole a power saw and an electric drill. They pried lids off paint cans and
poured the contents on the rugs. Once, while he was working behind the
building, someone threw a twenty-pound slab of concrete at him from the
third floor fire escape. On another occasion, someone threw a switchblade
at his back as he walked down the stairs. It missed and stuck in a
banister. He pulled it out, snapped the blade under his heel and threw the
pieces on the floor. ("Actually," he says, "they were sort of impressed by
that.")
Over the Christmas holidays, thieves kicked in the doors to 25 nearly
renovated apartments. They tore up the rugs, spray painted the walls,
pulled down the drapes and bent the curtain rods. They removed the new
toilet seats and shower heads. They smashed the lavatories and pounded the
spigots off the tubs. They hauled away ten stoves and refrigerators, all
the new fire extinguishers, and spray painted MERRY CHRISTMAS on the
entrance foyer's marble walls. Afterward Kristin's contractor came to her
to say his entire crew had quit and he was quitting too--she couldn't pay
him enough to work under conditions like that.
When Kristin presented a $25,000 damage claim to her insurance company,
they offered to settle for $10,000 and then canceled the policy. Kristin
obtained another policy with a different company at double the premium,
prepaid a year in advance. Suddenly without explanation, this policy was
canceled too. Her bank threatened to call in the loan for failure to keep
the building insured.
In late January, a marshal walked into Kristin's law office high up in
the Number One Wilshire building and handed her a temporary restraining
order enjoining her from "annoying, molesting or harassing" a tenant named
Beverly "in any manner whatsoever."
Kristin was astonished and frustrated. From her point of view, it was
Beverly who had been harassing her ever since she bought the building.
Beverly lived in a third-floor apartment with three children and a man named
Fred. Surprisingly for the kind of building they lived in, the kids were
polite and respectful, calling her ma'am and all the workmen sir. But her
husband Fred was another matter.
Fred was an actor, or at least he claimed to be. He went jogging every
morning, had rippling biceps, a flat stomach and processed hair, which he
combed straight back, down over the sides and flared out in back like Darth
Vader's helmet. He sent out his acting resumes in hand-colored envelopes,
calling himself "Fast Stepping Freddie--an old woman's dream and a young
girl's thrill."
Beverly was better spoken and better educated than Fred. She had been
the only tenant to fight the eviction in court and she had done quite well,
succeeding in delaying the eviction for six months, not once paying a single
penny's rent.
Kristin tried everything to get them out, offering them $500, even
$3500. But their demands kept escalating. They wanted a two-bedroom
apartment. And couldn't Kristin find them a house? Kristin wasted 45 hours
trying to find them a place to live, but they turned down every apartment
she came up with, including one with a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, brand-new
carpeting, new drapes and three times their current floor space.
As Kristin's relations with them deteriorated, Beverly and Fred used
increasingly profane language--every other word was "mutherfucking." Not
that they considered that a profanity. They used it like an adjective.
Kristin couldn't understand why they were so incensed. They seemed to be
responding to threats that had never been made. They said things like, if
anything happened to their kids, Kristin would get the same and worse. One
of these days someone was going to come at her out of a dark door. Some
morning she was going to wake up and find she couldn't walk.
They used to laugh about the vandalism, offering Kristin spurious
sympathy, telling her that her contractor was robbing her and all her
workers were thugs. Far from being helpless tenants, they played the system
like a grand piano, forever calling the fire marshal, the health department,
building and safety inspectors and, most of all, the police. Then if they
couldn't think of anything else, they threatened to trash the building.
The threats left Kristin a nervous wreck. If the building went, it
would wipe her out completely. She asked the police for extra patrols, but
they turned her down flat--their relationship with the residents was badly
strained already and they didn't want to make matters worse by helping a
white landlord in a black neighborhood. In fact, in their opinion, Kristin
was stupid to have bought the building in the first place. And everyone
would be better off if it burned to the ground--Kristin would get her
insurance and the cops would have one less headache on their beat.
Due to the frequent threats against the building, Kristin moved into
one apartment herself. A week later she was awakened in her sleep by
strange noises outside. She pulled on her robe, ran down the stairs to the
parking lot out back and found her six-year-old Fiat engulfed in flames.
She called the Fire Department but the car was a total loss. Later that
evening a policeman told Kristin she was stupid to live in the building
without a gun. "Or," he added helpfully, "for $150, you can have somebody
rubbed out in this neighborhood."
The incident frightened Kristin badly enough that she called an LAPD
officer who ran a private security service. He took her up on the roof and
spelled out his terms: she would have to hire two off-duty cops at $20 an
hour apiece, 24 hours a day, for a minimum of two months, all payments in
cash. He in turn would guarantee that her remaining tenants would leave in
three weeks if he had to drag Fred up to the roof and dangle him over the
side.
In the meantime, he urged Kristin to buy a gun. He had one in his
briefcase. It was a folding shotgun, small enough to fit in a handbag. It
came in a plastic carrying case with plush molded lining and was available
now, loaded for under $200.
Kristin declined the offer. If she had wanted muscle, she could have
hired the Mafia. In fact she had already been given the name of an alleged
underworld connection, helpfully supplied by a visitor to the site.
By late March, all the tenants had left except Beverly and Fred.
Confrontations with them were growing in both frequency and intensity.
Matters came to a head when Kristin hired an exterminator to wrap and tape
the building and flood it with poison gas. No one could return for at least
three days. For the duration Kristin had arranged for Beverly, Fred and the
kids to stay at the Vagabond Motel on Figueroa. It was a nice place, a
clean motel, used all the time by visitors to USC.
Beverly refused to go unless Kristin agreed to pay for meals. That was
no problem, said Kristin. She'd pay $10 per person per day.
Well yes, said Beverly, but what about all the food in the house she'd
have to throw away?
Kristin offered to buy it from Beverly. They would inventory it
together and set a fair price.
No, said Beverly. She wasn't letting Kristin into the apartment.
The food was worth $500. In addition, they would be needing three units at
the motel--their daughter was 12 and couldn't be sharing a unit with their
sons.
Wrong, said Kristin. Forget this. Forget the whole thing. She was
willing to pay reasonable expenses but this was ludicrous.
Kristin's workmen now joined in the argument. Kristin had given them a
long weekend and they thought that unless the extermination went forward
they would lose their jobs. To Kristin it was an extraordinarily ugly
scene, her fired-up workmen standing toe-to-toe with Fred. In fact, she had
to admire Fred's courage in a way. These were not restrained unemotional
guys. After her original contractor quit, she had hired a pickup crew, all
young guys, friends of other workers, people from the Union Rescue Mission--
anyone she could get.
The workers took Fred aside and told him to get out. He was screwing
up their job and he wasn't going to get away with it. Why didn't he just
move out, anyway? Let Kristin pay for his food, live in a decent building
for three days?
Who were they threatening, demanded Fred. They had no right to
dictate to him.
Kristin was appalled. She'd seen from her tenants how much blacks
hated whites. Now she saw from her own workmen how much whites hated
blacks. Any one of them could have taken a hammer to the back of Fred's
head and not cared at all. "Nigger" was the nicest word she heard.
Everyone was steaming, including the exterminators. They were a black-owned
company. To them, this contract for $6000 or $7000 was no small matter.
They tried to act as intermediaries, using a lot of "hey bro," but Fred
refused to leave. In the end, Kristin's own workmen fumigated the building
as best they could, using hand-scattered powders and nontoxic sprays.
At the end of April, nine months after Kristin first started the
proceedings, a judge finally evicted Beverly and Fred. To prevent their
appealing the decision, Kristin wrote them a check for $1000. As they were
moving out she warned them that she had documented everything that had
happened in the building. Fred and Beverly were the only tenants who had
ever given her any trouble. If anything happened to the building, if
anything happened to her--even if she tripped on the sidewalk and twisted
her ankle--the initial suspicion would fall on Beverly and Fred.
They said that that was unfair. And Kristin agreed that it was.
The Tenant's Tale
Fred never liked Kristin from the first day he saw her. It had to do
with the way she carried herself--aloof, arrogant, like that lady in the
James Bond movie, From Russia With Love , stiff upper lip, looking down on
him, looking down on everybody as if they were filth, vermin. Fred was an
actor. He knew body language. He could psyche people out. Kristin, he
thought, had no compassion. She was a rich spoiled brat. When she couldn't
have her way, it was nothing for her to jump up and down, throw a temper
tantrum, stamp her foot and toss her hair. She couldn't wait a second.
Everything was always rush, rush, rush.
Fred didn't even know who she was the first couple of months. She
wouldn't speak to anyone. What does it cost to say good afternoon? Or just
a simple how you doing? And the way she evicted everyone--just a notice
under the door. "Damn," Fred had said. "How can I be evicted? I just
paid the rent."
The man she hired to get people to move came around offering $25 and
$50. Fred called it chump money. Fred would be sitting in his room watching
the ball game and suddenly--boom, boom, boom! This guy wasn't subtle. "Get
your jive ass out here now!" And Fred would run to the door. "You got to
get out of here," the man would tell him. "You found a place yet? Well,
you've got to get out. If you're not out of here by so and so, you're going
to find your stuff in the street."
It wasn't as if Fred wanted to say in the place. You didn't have to
be a genius to realize that the people who lived there were not exactly the
cream of the crop. People shot craps in the hallways, kicked in the doors,
sprayed stuff on the walls. There wasn't any security--anyone could walk
through. Even the police drew their guns when they came inside.
Fred and Beverly tried to find a place. They put ads in the L.A.
Sentinel :
Will some "LANDLORD" rent "ME" a 1,
2, or 3 bedroom house for $85 to $200
mo. I don't have much money, "BUT" I
swear on my "MOTHER'S" grave that I
will take "IMMACULATE" shape of your
house! "GUARANTEED."
2, or 3 bedroom house for $85 to $200
mo. I don't have much money, "BUT" I
swear on my "MOTHER'S" grave that I
will take "IMMACULATE" shape of your
house! "GUARANTEED."
Nothing every came of it. Kristin could have helped, but frankly she
didn't give a damn. That was what bothered Fred most. She made no effort
to use her influence to find something he could afford. Instead, she was
always whining at him and Beverly: "Guys, what do you want? Give me a
break."
"All I want," Fred would say, "is for you to find me something
affordable. I can't afford no $250 or $350 a month."
And Kristin would say, "I can't find you anything like that. There's
nothing like that."
The first time Beverly and Fred met Kristin in court, the judge drew up
a stipulated agreement. If Kristin could find a place for under $220, then
Beverly and Fred would move out in three days. Kristin was very confident.
She said she'd find a place within the week.
Was that enough time? asked the judge.
Oh, yes, your honor. She was sure, your honor.
Fred was disgusted. That was the way she talked--fast and flippant.
No patience with anything. Just got to have her way.
The next thing Fred knew Kristin was calling him on the phone to say
she'd found a place in Baldwin Hills, what the blacks call "the jungle."
Fred was pissed when he saw it had only one bedroom. He told her before
that he needed a separate room for his daughter. She was twelve, beginning
to menstruate. She couldn't be sleeping with the boys anymore.
The next time out, Kristin went through a rental agency. It was
wintertime, raining hard. The first place she took Beverly and Fred to was
already fully occupied, would be occupied and didn't have any intention of
not being occupied. Fred couldn't believe his eyes--Kristin threw a
tantrum--the agency was incompetent--how could anyone deal with people like
that?
Fred enjoyed himself. Now she was seeing what he'd gone through. Not
that it did any good. She was still finding apartments for $250 and $350,
even though with his present income, $125 a month was all he could afford.
"You're crazy," Kristin would tell him. "I can't find anything for
$125."
In fact, thought Fred, Kristin simply didn't care. One day she'd be
acting so polite to him, so friendly, saying what nice kids he had, as if
she gave a damn at all, saying how upstanding he was, when Fred knew all
along she secretly hated his guts, and the next time he'd see her she'd fly
around, huffy and irrational, accusing Fred of not keeping his word.
She was tricky too. She tried to get Fred and Beverly to move into a
motel one weekend, saying she was going to fumigate the building. Fred
thought it was a trick. She probably had a man ready to change the locks
the instant they left--they'd never get back inside. Or another time, when
Beverly put the harassment suit on her, she had to put fire extinguishers in
the building, but no sooner had the fire marshal inspected the place--the
pavement wasn't even cool from the tires of the truck leaving--she put them
back in a little red truck and took them all away again.
What really burned Fred was that whenever he called the health
department or the fire department or the police department to report the
latest atrocity that one of her goons had pulled, she'd stand out front
telling lies on him--he was just a squatter who had been evicted. He was
living here free and he wouldn't pay his rent. She had stood up in court
and told the judge that she didn't want any rent. How could he pay rent if
she wouldn't take it?
And then, after the harassment suit, she put all these big old lies in
the court record, charging him with all the vandalism and the burning of her
car. Of course, she never mentioned the guys she had working for her--they
treated minorities like dirt, like dogs that didn't deserve to live. Fred
had a court order saying that Kristin had to leave him alone, but it didn't
do any good because the police wouldn't enforce it. The police had never
liked the building anyhow, because the tenants used to yell out the windows
at them. They told Fred that the judges downtown didn't know what they were
signing. It didn't mean anything. It was just a piece of paper--that was
their attitude.
Fred was forever running down to the basement to replace fuses her
workmen had taken out or phone wires they had cut. Every chance they got,
they turned off the water, the gas. They broke their own hot water heater,
tore the mail in half. He used to have to go across the street and bring
back jars of water to flush his commode. One workman's dog grabbed his
daughter by the pants leg and pulled her down the stairs. She wasn't hurt
but the thing that really infuriated Fred was the way the dog owner just
laughed at him and asked why didn't he get his black ass out?
Fred never knew the real names of most of the workmen, he made up names
on his own--Waterboy, Lockman and Weirdhead. Weirdhead stopped Fred in the
hallway after Kristin's car was burned and gave him a warning. He was sick
and tired of trouble from Fred. If Kristin so much as hurt her fingernail,
Fred was going to suffer. If she was in an airplane and it blew up, he was
going to take care of Fred. His family too.
Fred answered that that kind of talk didn't make any sense. It made
him so angry he just wanted to dive on the guy and choke him. Either that
or get a gun. For $200 you could get a dope fiend to do anything in this
neighborhood. They didn't care. They'd kill anyone.
It didn't do any good to call the police. They didn't want to hear it.
They said it was a landlord-tenant dispute. Fred couldn't get a lawyer--
they only worked on contingency fees. You had to get hit by a meteor or an
airplane before they'd take your case. The courts were no help either. The
judges had no patience. You'd just stand there mumbling, mispronouncing the
terms, trying to talk about some law you looked up. And then, in the end,
they'd still throw you out in the street.
In mid-April somebody painted a message on Fred's door: "NIGGERS LEARN
TO DIE. GET YOUR BLACK ASS OUT!" Fred took a photograph to use in his
eviction hearing but the judge wouldn't look at it. She said Kristin
couldn't renovate the building with them living there. They'd had enough
time. Now they had to go.
Four days later, one workman had a fight with Beverly. Thirty or forty
men from the neighborhood gathered in the street. Some were high, some just
wanted to fight--they didn't have anything else to do.
Fred thought Kristin was crazy. She opened the security door, stamped
her feet, looked at them hard, dared them to try anything. At least her
workmen had sense--they stayed inside.
Kristin didn't know how close she had come. All Fred would have had to
say was, "The hell with it. Let's burn it up now." Instead, Fred broke it
up by refusing to go along. He called Channel 7 but they wouldn't send a
camera crew.
Epilogue
The instant Kristin's apartment house is fully rented to USC students,
she plans to put it up for sale. She estimates that it will bring about
$800,000, which, after deductions for mortgage interest, insurance losses
and operation and renovation costs, will leave her with a net profit of
$150,000.
Kristin says she's learned two important lessons from the building.
The first is, if she ever has any more money to invest in housing, she'll
put it in Tulsa, Kansas City or Houston--any place but LA.
The other lesson is a personal one. Having seen close up how welfare
turns poor people into con artists, she's become politically conservative.
She's also come to understand something about herself that she might not
have otherwise suspected--that night when the policeman offered to
intimidate Fred by hanging him over the roof, it wasn't any concern for
Beverly or Fred that made her turn him down. The fact was she didn't trust
the police any more than the Mafia. And once the payments to them started,
she didn't know where it would end. But it was a business decision, not a
humanitarian one. Whether Beverly or Fred were hurt didn't matter to her at
all.
Shortly after Fred moved out, he received a letter from his welfare
worker saying that someone had made 40 complaints against him on the welfare
hotline, including pimping, narcotics distribution and turning his daughter
out. The caller also recommended that his kids be taken away.
Fred and Beverly are now living across the street half a block down.
Two months ago their new landlord told Fred to hold the rent, he was selling
the building. Fred stopped payment and was promptly hit with a three-day
notice to pay or quit. "I'll probably be kicked out again," he says.
Whenever Fred can get his lawyer off top dead center, he's going to try
to get a tax lien against the building so Kristin can't make any money. "I
want to hurt her financially," he says, "like she hurt me."
#
Postscript: In September, 1985, following a long court fight with his new
Hispanic landlord over alleged anti-black discrimination, Fred was evicted
again. On October 29, at 3 am, returning to pick up some clothes, he got
into a fight with a neighbor. A gun was drawn. And Fred was shot in the
chest and killed.
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