Hous­ing activists in Chica­go are sound­ing the alarm over a pro­posed state law that they say would effec­tive­ly pri­va­tize the evic­tion process and erase decades of gains sur­round­ing ten­ants’ rights. Intro­duced by Rep. Monique D. Davis (D), who is both a leg­is­la­tor and small-time Chica­go land­lord, the bill could also prove to be a boon for the Wall Street investors cur­rent­ly mak­ing a for­ay into the rental market.

Tenants’ rights groups have warned that the measures outlined in HB 5395 could take the city back to a time when landlords could remove their renters simply by strewing their belongings across the sidewalk or retaining someone to order them out at gunpoint.

Though the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion is before the Illi­nois Gen­er­al Assem­bly, it is writ­ten only to apply to coun­ties with pop­u­la­tions of 3 mil­lion or more peo­ple; in oth­er words, it would only impact Cook Coun­ty, Illi­nois, which encom­pass­es the greater Chica­go area.

At present, evic­tions in Cook Coun­ty are a civ­il mat­ter car­ried out by a spe­cial­ly trained unit with­in the Sheriff’s office. Dur­ing the past three decades, large­ly at the urg­ing of advo­cates, this unit has begun train­ing deputies in the nuances of ten­ant law and employ­ing a social work­er to con­sult with elder­ly or dis­abled ten­ants and those with young chil­dren. Police typ­i­cal­ly do not become involved in the process.

By con­trast, HB 5395, which passed out of com­mit­tee this month and is now before the Illi­nois House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, would change evic­tion laws to allow any ​“peace offi­cer,” includ­ing off-duty police in the employ of pri­vate secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies or land­lords, to remove ten­ants from their homes. Crit­ics have denounced the idea of ​“rent-a-cops” unfa­mil­iar with the nuances of ten­ant law car­ry­ing out this procedure.

Under cur­rent law, ten­ants may also file motions to attempt to stay their evic­tion if, for exam­ple, their new apart­ment is not ready yet, or they have a dis­abil­i­ty that pre­vents them from mov­ing in the allot­ted time. Such motions do not pre­vent the enforce­ment of evic­tions unless they are grant­ed by a judge, but legal advo­cates say that they can still pro­vide a safe­guard against ten­ants who are being evict­ed wrong­ful­ly. HB 5395 would restrict the num­ber of motions a ten­ant can file to two, plac­ing what advo­cates say is an arbi­trary lim­it on a process that self-rep­re­sent­ed ten­ants, in par­tic­u­lar, often strug­gle to com­plete cor­rect­ly on their first try.

Over­all, ten­ants’ rights groups have warned that the mea­sures out­lined in HB 5395 could take the city back to a time when land­lords could remove their renters sim­ply by strew­ing their belong­ings across the side­walk or retain­ing some­one to order them out at gunpoint.

Jere­my Bergstrom, senior attor­ney for the Sar­gent Shriv­er Nation­al Cen­ter on Pover­ty Law, says the new law would throw the cur­rent evic­tion sys­tem into ​“chaos.” ​“The one thing we always stress to all ten­ants is, ​‘Your land­lord can­not just hire some­one to come and evict you,’” he says. ​“This would change that.”

Among those vehe­ment­ly oppos­ing the bill is Cook Coun­ty Sher­iff Tom Dart, who has said that hav­ing such pri­vate par­ties with­out spe­cial train­ing car­ry out evic­tions would be a ​“night­mare.”

​“Evic­tions are inher­ent­ly dif­fi­cult and often trag­ic — par­tic­u­lar­ly when chil­dren and oth­er at-risk pop­u­la­tions are involved,” says Cook Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office Direc­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Ben­jamin Bre­it. ​“The Cook Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office is able to pro­vide social ser­vices to fam­i­lies that we are ordered to evict because we care about them. … Plac­ing this author­i­ty with those that have a finan­cial stake in the process would incur unthink­able consequences.”

Sym­pa­thy for the landlord

As first intro­duced in Feb­ru­ary, the orig­i­nal ver­sion of HB 5395 would have elim­i­nat­ed a stand­ing mora­to­ri­um on evic­tions when the weath­er dips below 15 degrees, earn­ing it the nick­name ​“the Polar Vor­tex Evic­tions bill” from crit­ics. Davis, the chief spon­sor of the bill, is her­self a land­lord who grew frus­trat­ed dur­ing the bit­ter­ly cold Chica­go win­ter that the sheriff’s office had not yet evict­ed one of her ten­ants. The lat­est ver­sion of the bill has removed the weath­er pro­vi­sion, as well as a sub­se­quent one that would have required the sheriff’s office to enforce an evic­tion order with­in 45 days of its entry. Still, many hous­ing advo­cates are nev­er­the­less decry­ing what they see as a moral and polit­i­cal con­flict of inter­est in Davis’ dogged advo­ca­cy for the bill. (Illi­nois law stip­u­lates that leg­is­la­tors asked to take offi­cial action on an issue in which they have a per­son­al, fam­i­ly or busi­ness inter­est should ​“con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty of elim­i­nat­ing the inter­est cre­at­ing the con­flict sit­u­a­tion” or ​“con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty of abstain­ing from such offi­cial action.” But Illi­nois is not among the 30 states that pro­hib­it so-called ​“con­flict of inter­est vot­ing” by state legislators.)

Reached by In These Times, Davis says that HB 5395 is not about enforc­ing evic­tions against peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties or par­ents of small chil­dren, who crit­ics fear would suf­fer most under the new pro­vi­sions lim­it­ing the num­ber of motions that can be filed. Instead, she says, ​“This bill is for those groups of peo­ple who have the belief that they don’t have to pay rent when they’ve rent­ed an apart­ment. This is to give some relief to land­lords who are hav­ing sit­u­a­tions in which a ten­ant files motion after motion to delay the inevitable.”

Bergstrom, mean­while, believes such con­cern is exag­ger­at­ed. ​“There’s a per­cep­tion that it takes a long time to evict peo­ple in Chica­go. The lawyers who I talk to … believe it’s more a per­cep­tion than a real­i­ty,” he says. ​“The sher­iff got behind this win­ter, but I think that’s evi­dence of why the sher­iff needs to have some dis­cre­tion. It was a record cold winter.”

Asked whether the bill con­sti­tut­ed a con­flict of inter­est, Davis says, ​“I also pay a light bill. Should I not vote on [leg­isla­tive] util­i­ty bills?”

Davis declined to state how many build­ings she rents out in Chica­go, but an In These Times search of pub­lic records found that she owns at least five. In a review of evic­tion pro­ceed­ings ini­ti­at­ed by Davis last year, In These Times dis­cov­ered one case in which a ten­ant on the city’s South Side alleged before a judge that Davis had changed the locks and had her car towed off of the prop­er­ty in Novem­ber 2013 before her evic­tion had been car­ried out. If true, this action would con­sti­tute an ille­gal lock-out under Chicago’s Res­i­den­tial Land­lord Ten­ant Ordi­nance, accord­ing to attor­ney Kel­li Dud­ley, direc­tor of the Resis­tance Legal Clin­ic. The ten­ant had filed a motion the pre­vi­ous month to stay her evic­tion in order to give her and her 8‑year-old daugh­ter more time to move; accord­ing to a lat­er motion by the ten­ant, the judge ordered Davis in mid-Novem­ber to give the ten­ant a new key.

Asked to com­ment on that case, Davis says that the ten­ant, who had first giv­en her a bad rent check in June 2013, had only just been evict­ed when she spoke to In These Times on May 23 — a sign, the leg­is­la­tor argues, that the sys­tem is unfair to landlords.

As Chica­go Sun-Times writer Mark Brown has not­ed, irony abounds in the fact that Davis is her­self a delin­quent ten­ant: Her dis­trict office is in a build­ing owned by Chica­go Pub­lic Schools, but Davus has paid no rent for 11 years and is fight­ing evic­tion. In 2009, the Chica­go Board of Edu­ca­tion and Cook Coun­ty filed suit to recov­er more than $100,000 in back rent and $456,000 in tax, fees and fines for use of the office, but Davis and the State of Illi­nois have con­tin­ued to fight the litigation.

Wall Street ​‘Repo Men’?

Davis tells In These Times that she decid­ed to intro­duce the bill after con­sult­ing with oth­er local land­lords. But as the hous­ing mar­ket picks up again and the pace of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion in the city quick­ens, hous­ing activists wor­ry that the bill could have impli­ca­tions beyond the finan­cial inter­ests of leg­is­la­tors and small-time landlords.

Crit­ics of the bill say that it could exac­er­bate the impact of the fore­clo­sure cri­sis in an already hard-hit city. Davis, for her part, is quick to empha­size that HB 5395 ​“has noth­ing to do with mort­gage fore­clo­sures.” But the bill as writ­ten would apply to ​“ten­ants of sin­gle-fam­i­ly or mul­ti-fam­i­ly res­i­den­tial dwellings,” and grow­ing num­bers of ten­ants are liv­ing in fore­closed build­ings reposessed by banks or acquired by third-par­ty investors, notes the Shriv­er Center.

In the wake of the fore­clo­sure cri­sis, as In These Times has report­ed pre­vi­ous­ly, Wall Street investors have launched a new sin­gle-fam­i­ly-home rental empire by gob­bling up more than 200,000 homes nation­wide. Ten­ants have report­ed numer­ous abus­es, includ­ing high evic­tion rates, at the hands of firms seek­ing to secure returns on their invest­ments. Now, the same investors and hedge funds are set­ting their sights on mul­ti-fam­i­ly apart­ment build­ings; among them, the pri­vate equi­ty giant Black­stone Group, which recent­ly became the largest own­er of sin­gle-fam­i­ly homes in the U.S., is cur­rent­ly ratch­et­ing up its efforts to acquire dis­tressed mul­ti-fam­i­ly apart­ment build­ings. Accord­ing to a report in Al Jazeera, renters in such apart­ment build­ings are already report­ing abus­es at the hands of investors-turned-land­lords, who advo­cates fear are seek­ing to force out long-time ten­ants in order to hike rents.

Shriv­er Cen­ter Direc­tor of Hous­ing Kate Walz notes that pri­vate evic­tion enforcers are less like­ly to be versed in the array of local, state and fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions that extend pro­tec­tions to ten­ants in such fore­closed build­ings, poten­tial­ly cre­at­ing an atmos­phere of con­fu­sion that could fur­ther abet these abus­es. ​“I can’t imag­ine what will hap­pen when an off-duty cop han­dles this dicey sit­u­a­tion [of deter­min­ing the rights of ten­ants in fore­closed build­ings], par­tic­u­lar­ly when there may be a [high] vol­ume of evic­tions,” she says. ​“This is a dan­ger­ous ​‘repo man’ pol­i­cy being set in motion for res­i­den­tial tenants.”