A landlord, a drug sniffing dog and a chief of police walk into a press conference . . . I wish it were the beginning to a joke. Yesterday, as a group of homeless people and their advocates were setting up for a press conference (bringing in chairs and a table and some snacks) about how difficult it is to find housing, they were confronted by the menagerie listed above. It was about an hour before the press conference. The police say a neighbor called and said people were moving in. So the landlord and the chief of police were having coffee together and rushed right over. Sounds too absurd to be true.
They get there and the person who has the lease explained that the rent was paid and she had the right to have guests over. The landlord says he expects to be called when she has guests. (It doesn’t say that in the lease.) I don’t know why, since this landlord has a penchant for spying on his tenants, by sitting in his car outside the apartment or with video cameras and the neighbors seem to be watching the house anyways.
When the tenant presses further about why they are there, the police say that they assume that this house is a drug house. They say they are going to stop anyone who is coming to visit this property. And they do. And they subsequently leave empty handed before the press conference starts.
What kind of a bizarre freak show was that? It happened in the Town of Madison, so many of the tenant protections in the City of Madison don’t apply and I don’t think our police would have acted that way. To me, it looks like intimidation or retaliation for enforcing their rights. The rest of the story is here.
This incident just underscores how difficult it is for homeless people working together to find housing with co-signors to find housing and the harassment they have to endure because of . . . well, the color of their skin? our biases about the homeless?
