A Year of Avoiding Eviction in Tennessee

Cara Grimes and her fiancé, Justin Pitts, moved with their eight-year-old daughter from Delaware, Ohio, to Bedford County, Tennessee, in the spring of 2019. Grimes was pregnant, and the family took up residence in a camper in Pitts’s brother’s yard. “We were desperate to get in anywhere before we had the baby,” Grimes told me. They looked for apartments, but they had low credit scores and no rental history, and landlords refused their applications. They applied for public housing, but their calls were never returned, and their applications remained, to their knowledge, unprocessed. Grimes, who is twenty-eight, had a felony conviction, for robbery. She’d had a tough childhood, becoming addicted to prescription pain pills as a teen-ager, before being coerced into prostitution by someone she knew, who pushed her to harder drugs. She’d gone along with a plan to rob a client, and got caught. She eventually took a plea deal, serving a year and a half of a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Pitts had also struggled with addiction and had a conviction for breaking and entering and another for drug possession. They wanted to start their lives over somewhere new. They found work in Bedford County through a temp agency, sweeping factory floors and doing maintenance work.

One day, as they were looking for a place to rent, they ran into a man named James Farrar in a trailer park. Farrar, who goes by Blue, is the manager of Farrar Rental Properties, based in Shelbyville, Bedford’s county seat. The company, which was founded by Farrar’s father, owns and manages more than four hundred rentals in Bedford. They seemed to own “half the county,” Grimes told me. She asked Farrar what kind of requirements he had for tenants. “He said, as long as you pay, I don’t care,” Grimes told me. “I was, like, ‘We can pay, we can pay!’ ” They gave him a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deposit, and the next morning they had a trailer to move into. Grimes had a C-section two days later.

The lease for the trailer was a page long. It stipulated seven rules about noise, cleanliness, and other issues before listing details about deposits and rent-collection requirements. The rules forbade washers and dryers, pets, parking outside of driveway areas, and keeping inoperative vehicles on the premises. Further down the lease was a clause declaring that the landlord could evict the tenant in three days if any of the seven rules was broken. Tennessee law requires, in most cases, that landlords provide thirty days’ notice before evicting anyone, but right below that clause on the lease was another proviso: “All tenants’ rights and privileges under law are hereby waived by tenant(s).”

The trailer had bugs. Also, Grimes and Pitts heard rumors that they had neighbors who were on the sex-offender registry. Farrar’s policy to rent to anyone who could pay benefitted them when they were desperate, but they realized they might not like all of the policy’s results. They began looking for a new place, and, after six months in the trailer, moved into an apartment on the second floor of a neat brick building in the middle of Shelbyville. It was also owned by Farrar. Rent was about seven hundred dollars a month; utility and Internet bills were another five hundred or so. Grimes noticed a leak coming from a hole in the bathroom ceiling. The apartment had bugs, too. The floor appeared to be rotten in spots, which Grimes covered with a toy box and a laundry basket.

Around this time, Grimes saw a post on Facebook about the Bedford County Listening Project, a group founded three years before by low-income renters with help from a regional organization called Southern Crossroads. On behalf of the Listening Project, a community organizer named Kelly Sue Waller, along with a handful of other local residents, went door to door in Bedford County, listening to renters’ concerns and telling them about resources that they might use to address them. Early in 2019, the group began a ten-month survey of two hundred and thirty renters; by the time that Grimes found the group, the results had recently been released. Ninety-four per cent of those interviewed said that they “had trouble finding safe, affordable housing.” Seventy-seven per cent dealt with pests, sixty-seven per cent dealt with mold, and fifty-one per cent had heating or cooling issues. Seventy-three per cent said they sometimes had to forgo groceries in order to pay rent, and forty per cent said they had to forgo health care. Grimes began attending the Listening Project’s biweekly meetings.

A month later, COVID-19 hit middle Tennessee. The largest employers in the county—the Tyson Foods processing plant, the auto-parts factory, the pen-manufacturing plant, the Wal-Mart distribution center—were either completely or partially shut down, and the temps were the first workers to be let go. Grimes and Pitts started falling behind on rent. They caught up a bit in the summer, when factories reopened, but by then they owed more than a thousand dollars. The hole in their ceiling was covered by a weakening film of plaster. “When it rains, it rains in our bathroom,” Grimes told me. She swept factory floors into the fall. When school started up again, new expenses came with it. The bucket beneath the hole started catching colder water as the weather turned brisk. In October, 2020, Grimes got back from work and found an eviction notice on her door.

At the time, there was a federal moratorium on evictions, put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It applied to any tenant who made less than ninety-nine thousand dollars a year and faced eviction for nonpayment of rent. It was bolstered in some states by additional protections, but not in Tennessee, where some landlords continued to serve eviction notices. When an eviction case is decided in a landlord’s favor, that eviction remains on the renter’s record for at least seven years, and the resulting civil judgment can show up on the renter’s credit report, too. With the help of the Listening Project, Grimes called the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, a nonprofit law firm, and was connected with Linda Blackwelder, an attorney who takes on housing cases in seven Tennessee counties.

Blackwelder lives on a farm with a menagerie of farm animals and pets. She got a master’s degree in geology and worked for an environmental consulting firm specializing in hazardous-waste remediation before studying law, in Nashville. From a distance, she might look like an idealist, but she has a pragmatism that comes from steady work with people who are poor. She can help only a tiny fraction of the people who seek her out, and she is often their last hope.

When it comes to housing law, the problems that Blackwelder confronts begin with an asymmetry of information. Some landlords have done business with hundreds or even thousands of tenants, and they can generally afford legal advice. Many tenants do not know their rights, and lower-income tenants are typically unable to hire an attorney to inform them of what they are. It is often more rational simply to do whatever the landlord asks—to be an “easy” tenant—than it is to push for fair treatment, particularly given the risk of retaliation, especially in a small town like Shelbyville, where the same few people own the majority of affordable properties. What if no one is willing to rent to you again? What if they refuse to renew your lease?

More than thirty states have adopted all or part of the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act (URLTA), or similar legislation, which establishes the landlord-tenant relationship as one based on contract law instead of property law, making the obligations of each party to the other explicit. URLTA, which was drafted in 1972, requires that landlords “do whatever is necessary to put and keep the premises in a fit and habitable condition” and that tenants keep the premises “as clean and safe as the condition of the premises permit.” Tennessee has adopted the law nearly in full, but with a provision that makes it applicable only in counties with more than seventy-five thousand residents. Bedford, with around fifty thousand residents, misses that mark. Blackwelder said that she sometimes gets calls from confused clients who looked up their rights online and found hope in an URLTA law that applies in Rutherford County, twenty miles away, but not in theirs.

In Bedford, and places like it, renters rely on a hodgepodge of common and statutory law to moderate their relationships with landlords. They can also contact the Better Business Bureau if the landlord is engaging in unethical business practices, or the local health department or codes department if there are safety or health hazards. But, if living conditions are particularly bad, there is a chance that the county will condemn the property, leaving the renter with nowhere to go.

The pandemic made an already complicated rental landscape more complicated, Blackwelder said. The CARES Act placed a moratorium on evictions based on nonpayment of rent in March, 2020, pausing some court proceedings. (The moratorium only applied to properties “participating in federal assistance programs or with federally backed financing,” which account for somewhere between a quarter and a half of occupied rental units nationally, according to one study.) That expired in the summer. Blackwelder was in court, in August, when those proceedings resumed. “First day back in court, I think I saw fifty people get evicted that day, one after the other after the other,” she told me. “I was representing two people that day. Most of them don’t have attorneys—they don’t have to be assigned an attorney in a civil case. And then, on top of that, a lot of people don’t even show up, and they end up getting evicted by default. I saw a woman, they wheeled her in—she was in hospice—and she got evicted.”

A lack of legal representation is the norm when it comes to eviction proceedings in Bedford County. “I’m the only Legal Aid attorney for eviction cases for seven counties, and it’s only fifty per cent of my practice,” Blackwelder said. “I do domestic-violence family law and I do housing law, so we can’t help everyone who applies. Those cases, we have to triage them and evaluate them.” On any given day in court, Blackwelder might represent two people dealing with housing issues while five to ten others face the judge and their landlords alone. There are private attorneys who do pro-bono work, but most people in the region have no one.

Blackwelder picked up Grimes’s case and went to court with her in October. She noted that the one-page lease had a number of unenforceable clauses in it, including the one which waived all of the tenant’s legal rights if a tenant broke a rule. Grimes had filled out a form confirming her eligibility for the moratorium. She presented it to the judge, and the eviction was dismissed.

The Listening Project had set ambitious goals for 2020: first, help to pass legislation making URLTA apply to Bedford County; second, create a commission, made up largely of low-income renters, to study and recommend solutions to the county’s affordable-housing crisis; third, partner with the local government to secure grants to pay for legal representation for low-income renters. But the pandemic scrambled everything. By the fall of 2020, there were hundreds of tenants in the county who, like Grimes, had been served with eviction notices and didn’t know whether they could stay in their homes or not. The members of the Listening Project focussed on helping as many of those people as they could.

When the C.D.C. moratorium took effect, in September, its expiration date was set for the end of the year. Then, as cases of COVID kept rising, it was extended into January, and then to the end of March. These extensions were the only things keeping Grimes and her family in their apartment. In the winter, she stopped getting work from the temp agency and began drawing unemployment. In March, Pitts lost his job, and the family fell even further behind on rent. They were barely keeping their utilities turned on. Their car broke down, and they used stimulus money to buy another one, but it was not in good shape—Grimes couldn’t trust it to get her to Nashville or La Vergne, both an hour’s drive away and the only places where she could find work. “I feel like, honestly, it’s all just going downhill,” she told me at the time. “My daughter needs clothes, because she’s growing so fast. . . . I mean, I have hope. I’m trying. I don’t know. It’s really hard to stay positive when everything just kind of shits on you.”

Shortly after Pitts lost his job, he and Grimes got another eviction notice for nonpayment from Farrar. She filled out the paperwork again, and went back to court. This time, instead of being thrown out, it was simply postponed to April, one week after the C.D.C. moratorium was set to expire. Grimes had gone to court without Blackwelder. “The judge dismisses cases where you have a lawyer, but if you don’t then he just extends it and extends it and extends it—like us, this time,” she said. Blackwelder told me that Grimes’s first case was dismissed because her landlord had violated the notification requirement; otherwise, the standard protocol in Bedford County, in her experience, was simply to delay the hearing. In the meantime, around the country, landlords began winning their cases challenging the moratorium. In West Tennessee, in March, a federal district judge, Mark Norris, struck it down, ruling that the C.D.C. had overstepped its authority. A hundred miles east, Grimes’s eviction case was kept open, and she knew she couldn’t rely on the moratorium to protect her much longer.

At the end of 2020, Congress allocated twenty-five billion dollars for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. In March, with surveys showing one in seven tenant households still behind on their rent, Congress allocated another twenty-one billion. The program requires that state and local governments devise their own plans for distributing these funds, and many states were slow to start. Grimes applied for aid from the Tennessee Housing Development Agency (T.H.D.A.) two days before her second eviction notice, in March. “I had to turn in everything I had, which—I had verification, but, some people around here, they don’t have leases or anything,” she told me. “They make you jump through hoops for the help they’re supposed to give you.” Grimes had to work with Farrar’s office to complete the application. The same people trying to evict her were supposed to work with her to get the money she owed them, she pointed out. But Farrar did what was needed, and they got it done.

If Grimes and her family qualified for aid, the government would pay for up to twelve months of back rent, plus another three months. Things moved slowly, though, and she and Pitts started packing boxes, sure they were going to be kicked out of their home. The T.H.D.A. agent was incredulous that their lease was only a page long; Grimes and Pitts confirmed that it was legitimate, and then they were asked to get it renewed. “I mean, this money was made for people who need rental assistance, and it’s like they don’t want to give it out,” Grimes told me. In the meantime, the couple put in several rental applications elsewhere, but they kept getting rejected. Landlords were mostly polite, Grimes said, but no one would take them. “I get it,” she said, noting her criminal record and her credit score, plus the open eviction case. “But I’m just more terrified that I won’t be able to provide for my kids and put a roof over their heads. And that’s why I’m still fighting and am not, like, ‘Screw it.’ ” She added, “Any time I think about it, I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

Blackwelder told me that the T.H.D.A. money came slowly for all her clients. One woman who applied on the first possible day waited six weeks before she was approved. In other states, it was worse. Florida and South Carolina didn’t begin reviewing applications until May; New York didn’t start until June. Tenants around the country continued to accumulate debt. The more money they owe, the more dangerous the whiplash of an eviction becomes: after a tenant is evicted and deemed to owe a certain amount of money, that figure will follow them around until it’s been repaid. Tenants’ wages can be garnished for years after their evictions if they are employed. This is one of the unintended consequences of the moratorium extensions—the longer people can stay in their homes without paying rent, the more they end up owing, and the greater the potential repercussions of an eviction after hearings resume.

Blackwelder said that she knows of landlords who are refusing to work with the T.H.D.A. Their tenants are just accruing debt, waiting for their days in court. “Some of these landlords are just like, ‘Nope, don’t want the money. No, not taking it. I just want ’em out. Just want ’em out,’ ” she said. She added, “As advocates, we’re glad that it got extended, obviously, because you want to meet your clients’ immediate needs, which is to not become homeless. But, on the other hand, it is just kicking it down the road, creating a backlog for the courts—and many landlords are struggling, too. Resentment has seemed to increase.”

Recently, I spoke to Blue Farrar. “They got their money but we ain’t got ours,” he said, referring to tenants who had received stimulus checks and to the landlords they owe. Farrar was not oblivious to the plight of his low-income tenants, but he believes that the moratoriums have removed any incentive to pay rent, and given him little recourse to recover lost income. He has issued eviction notices over the past year to try to pressure people into paying up or moving out, he said, but word got around, thanks in part to the Listening Project, that the moratorium could be used to postpone eviction hearings. If a renter called “the Society people,” he said, referring to Blackwelder and others at the Legal Aid Society, he would have no chance in court, given the moratorium. “If they pull that card on you, you’re dead in the water,” he told me. One or two people never brought up the moratorium, and he was able to evict them, he said. “But the other twenty-something have been on my back, riding our coattails.”

At the time we first spoke, around thirty of his units were empty. He was turning away people who needed apartments, he said, worried that they would stop paying him rent after they moved in. His past openness had been replaced by a hard and fast rule: if you don’t have a full-time job, you don’t qualify. He was fed up with the T.H.D.A.’s rental assistance, which was taking a long time to come through. He said that his office was doing everything required of it to help his tenants qualify for aid, but they still hadn’t got anything. “We call them and call them, and they just tell us to call back,” he said. “If they pay their rent up and everybody got back in motion, we would just go along with it. We don’t have a vendetta against nobody. But this T.H.-whatever-that-is is supposed to help us. I mean, where they at?”

Nine days before Grimes’s court date, the moratorium was extended to the end of June. Two weeks later, she was finally approved for rent assistance by the T.H.D.A. We talked the next day. She sounded relieved, but also frustrated and tired. “This process is so ridiculous that they called me once this month, once last month, to get me to change the months on it,” she said, referring to the three additional months that the assistance would cover. “We went from March, April, May, to April, May, June, and now it’s May, June, July.” Each time, she had to recalculate the total that she owed her landlord. It’s now more than five thousand dollars.

A federal district judge had voided the C.D.C. moratorium in May, ruling that the organization had overstepped its bounds, but that judgment was on hold pending appeal. Blackwelder told me that lawyers and advocates are prepping for further shifts in the legal landscape. By the time the federal case works its way through appeals, she noted, the moratorium will likely have expired anyway. She paused, then laughed. “Unless . . . it could always get extended again,” she said. “I don’t know.” After we spoke, the moratorium was extended through July.

The T.H.D.A. sent Farrar eight thousand dollars to cover what Grimes owed him, plus rent through the end of June, but her eviction hearing stayed on the docket for July 14th. Blackwelder didn’t understand why Farrar was going through with it. Maybe it was just to harass her, she guessed—or so that, if Grimes fell behind on rent again, he could quickly get her out. Farrar told me that the eviction was the only way to get Grimes to pay him. He believes that she has been using the pandemic as an excuse not to, relying on the moratorium and government aid to bail her out rather than working and saving up. Every time he calls her, he said, he gets sent to voice mail. Workers at his office said that they have had similar luck trying to reach her. Farrar said that he wasn’t even aware of the hole in Grimes’s bathroom ceiling, and had no documentation showing that she had tried to get it fixed. “Some people try to ride the system,” he said. “People don’t see the other side of that.”

Grimes took out a title loan to make a down payment on a functioning car and started delivering pizzas for Papa John’s, but gas was expensive and she was only making minimum wage. We spoke the day before her hearing; she told me she had brought in eleven dollars that day. Blackwelder had promised to go to court with her, and said there was no way that the judge would rule against her, but Grimes was nervous anyway. “If they, for any reason, find in Farrar’s favor, we’ll be homeless,” she told me.

In court the next day, the judge, citing the moratorium, postponed the hearing again, to August 11th. Farrar wasn’t present, but Blackwelder and Grimes ran into him afterward, in the parking lot. They told him the new date, and he told them that Grimes’s T.H.D.A. money had run out on July 3rd, so she was behind on rent again. He promised to send the accounting that would prove this. When he did, Blackwelder saw that he had billed Grimes for thousands of dollars in late fees. By accepting T.H.D.A. money, Farrar had agreed to waive late fees and to withdraw any pending evictions. He had also agreed, per T.H.D.A. rules, not to evict Grimes within sixty days of the final month of government payment.

Blackwelder told me that, even after the moratorium ends, at the end of July, she could make the case to a judge that Grimes’s eviction should be dismissed. She had difficulty understanding Farrar’s accounting, but it was evident to her that he had breached T.H.D.A. rules in multiple ways—and there would be other arguments to make, too, she said, once all the details were laid out in court. She described them to me, but asked that I not disclose what they were before the hearing. These were just the ones she could think of off the top of her head.