This story talks about how blacks are being evicted more often than whites. The story is written to make you believe that discrimination is at play. They detail the eviction of Deltonya Thomas, her boyfriend, and their five kids.
A look at the facts of the case tell a different story. Deltonya is a 34 year old woman with 5 kids, aged 16 to 5. She and her boyfriend signed a 12 month lease in November of 2019, with the move out date being October 31, 2020. A year later, November 2020, they didn’t pay rent. Even though the lease had expired, they didn’t pay rent, nor did they vacate the property.
On November 19, the landlord filed for the eviction. The only response from Deltonya was to write a letter to the judge on December 2, asking for 30 days to find another apartment. The case dragged on for two more months, until the family was finally evicted on February 2, three months after the expiration of the lease.
This family got to live in a $1400 a month apartment for three months without paying a dime. The real victim here is the landlord, who lost $4200 in unpaid rent, $400 in court and service fees, plus whatever their lawyer cost them. Sure, they got to keep the security deposit, but that likely got eaten up in repairing the damage done to the property. It isn’t like tenants being evicted are known for taking care of the rental property they are being removed from.
3 Comments
Techiedude · February 20, 2021 at 8:54 am
None of these studies, from this to redlining to incarceration rates, do they use Occam’s razor and come up with the blindingly obvious reasons for racial disparities.
More galling is the shear number of programs and amount of our tax dollars that go to help people like these mitigate problems like these.
Karl Ushanka · February 20, 2021 at 1:02 pm
That landlord got lucky. Other tenants are milking the pandemic for many months of free living. Such a fast eviction in modern times – shows the landlord played by the rules by using the lawyers.
I’m not a landlord because I suspect that I wouldn’t play by the rules.
It was a great business once.
Brian_E · February 20, 2021 at 7:46 pm
It’s pretty clear that the tenant knew how to ‘game the system’ in order to get a few months of ‘free’ rent. Free to them, not the landlord. This is nothing less than theft.
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