* “Betty Jennings” is a pseudonym applied by Renters Welcome.
The first page of the lease looked fairly common and standard to Betty Jennings* and she had barely read the second page before she made the choice to sign a lease agreement. It was for a 1 bedroom apartment in a suburb of Chicago with a twice former local government official as her landlord. While there were a few clauses that made her eyebrows rise at first, along with the landlord originally stating it was a 2 bedroom apartment, she wasn’t too concerned, especially considering the friend that originally referred her to the landlord, that he lived across the street and the maintenance man lived next door to the landlord.
“Due to a variety of reasons, including the property owner selling the property I was living in, I found myself needing to enter the rental market after being inactive for years,” says Jennings. “It was quite intimidating, especially since I had just started a new job working 3rd shift as a data entry clerk.”
“I had treated the task as if it was a job, setting aside hours at a time to comb through the various websites offering promises of having just the type of listing I was looking for, including a decent landlord that wouldn’t hold out on fixing a toilet or leaking roof. I had no reason to doubt the referral I was given because of course, I transferred some level of ‘credit’ to him because of the person that referred him to me.”
And yet, it was a leaking roof that led Jennings to begin severely questioning her relationship with her landlord. “I had to leave the data entry job for health reasons at the beginning of the pandemic and it really broke my heart. I loved my co-workers and my supervisors and there was room for growth. While I managed to freelance enough to keep the lights on, I also was the recipient of the food boxes being distributed on a fairly regular basis and couldn’t pay the landlord.”
While renters continue to fall into debt on every front, Jennings worked hard to remain an advocate for the landlord while waiting for financial assistance since the beginning of the pandemic. “When I was younger, I was somewhat involved with local politics because I wanted to be a part of creating solutions for problems that my backyard was facing. Just as I was worried for myself and my future, I was struggling to understand why it was okay for landlords to suffer right along side of us. My landlord was busy paying the water bill the whole time I was spending my money on dollar bags of french fries, just to make sure I could settle my stomach if I needed to.
But most of Jennings time was spent trying to find enough freelance work to stop the financial bleeding and she under-estimated the challenges the pandemic would put on good old-fashioned networking. “As an freelance artist, I am well aware of the value and importance of networking, especially in person. I totally miscalculated on the ease in which I would be able to find work locally. So, despite super-creative efforts on my part and A LOT of hard work and restless nights, I still fell severely short and remained appreciative my landlord seemed willing to leave room for me to pay off my debt sooner rather than later, especially as government began releasing aid.”
Jennings even applied for rental assistance twice but to no avail. “The first time I applied for assistance, it was June 2020 when the county I live in began inviting renters in arrears to apply for aid. I quickly completed all of the paperwork, got my receipt via email and then waited. And waited. And waited. When I finally tried to track down the reason for the delay on my application, I eventually discovered that I was denied simply because my landlord refused to fill out the County’s paperwork.”
Disappointed and now more wary of her landlord and his management of a property being held in a land trust, Jennings understood the eviction moratorium would provide only the shortest of windows to climb through to cure her contractual deficiencies once it was lifted, which didn’t happen until early October 2021. “Of course a landlord is not mandated to apply for assistance of any kind for their tenants, so to push his failure to apply seemed counter-productive. Instead, I decided to keep seeking out assistance, and employment, fully ready to sell my landlord on the idea it was worth his effort to join me in applying for aid as he could clearly see I was a decent tenant in every other category rather than waiting for me to hit on that ‘next big thing’ that could dig me out of my mess. It was all about ensuring an illegal eviction did not grow from the circumstances.”
Illegal evictions are not uncommon under certain circumstances that lead a renter believes they have no recourse for the break-in and theft of property. “The last thing I was in the mood for was to find myself needing to call the police on my landlord for illegally entering my apartment, especially after he ‘lectured’ me about not calling the police after I found rare need to contact them and request there help, like an accident that happened right outside my window. My property may not be valuable in the regular marketplace, but as an artist of the unique, it’s priceless. And my artwork isn’t the only angle to my losing my property, so I knew I would not hesitate to call if necessary, but in the meantime there was no reason for me not to honor the spirit of the written lease that eventually transferred to a month to month verbal lease.”
The second time Jennings applied for assistance, it was through the State and she was far more hopeful she’d be eligible for the aid. “By the time the State launched it’s own renters relief program, I was months behind in rent and working mostly part-time. Bills were being settled sometimes hours before their cut-off time and at one point after I finally was able to get vaccinated, I even lost my phone service. Luckily I had used an alternate number on my job applications and within a matter of days after submitting my resume with a local small business, I had a job that I could perform well and that could turn my life upright again in a matter of months, rather than years. The trick here was that after the landlord actually joined me in applying for State aid, I was declined with some generic phrase clearly saying I wasn’t eligible, but that was about it. The moment I got that email, I switched gears and buckled down on finding another part-time job to help dig myself out of debit.”
While Jennings admits she was curious why she was declined, she also declined to battle the decision and instead focused on whether or not she should continue trying to live where she was at, or if it would be better for both parties if she found a new home and worked off the debt from there. So, at the end of August, she composed a letter with $400.00 cash inside to start properly paying rent and the two choices she felt he had; did he want to keep her as a tenant or did he want her to move?
“If he had said at any time he wanted me to move, I would have initiated the process sooner and I even missed out on an apartment a few blocks away at the time I was giving him the letter and the choice. I put it to him that I could no longer afford to pay outrageous gas bills to heat a home that leaked so much, I had to pay almost $300.00 a month just to keep most rooms in the apartment a balmy 68 while the thermostat read 77 or 78. I told him that he needed to insulate the attic space and other activities to reduce this bleed on my finances, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to pay rent, among other issues.”
“After I gave him the letter and the money, I thought he would be prompt with the receipt as he had been pre-pandemic. Within a day, I would have a rental receipt in my hand, and a few times I only had to wait a few minutes for him to run inside and come out with one. Not this time. This time, he hid from me, literally. He would scurry away to one of his other properties with a wave, except for one time in the middle of the month when we chatted for a moment. He hedged on committing to wanting me as a tenant and I once again asked him for a receipt for the $400.00 I paid him. He reassured me he would get it to me and I didn’t see him again until October 5, 2 days after the moratorium lifted. No calls, no emails, no notes on the door. Nothing.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, the landlord had already issued Jennings a 5 day notice to cure the contract violation in June 2020, which she had used as supporting paperwork for her county filing. She had already started taking her landlord’s behaviors to signal he didn’t truly want her as a tenant and instead something else was bubbling underneath everything.
On October 5th, the landlord had been waiting outside of her home with two sheets of paper in his hand. One was a notice that the County was once again issuing relief payments and the other was a new 5 day notice, with one piece of data being the last red flag she needed to know things had somehow things had gone severely wrong, but little did she know just how long ago the “wrong” had started and just how complicated and convoluted the whole curve became as it related to her reputation, let alone any number of other openings the circumstance created.
And if everything she had discovered was true, then her landlord would never enter a courtroom to regain control of the rental unit simply because his fraud would be revealed. In other words, he would have to take other paths to remove her, and that’s what bothered her the most after her encounter with him on the 5th.
Part Two of The Betty Jennings Story coming January 2022!
Do you have a situation that is similar to Betty Jennings? Do not hesitate to reach out to an attorney regarding your rights and responsibilities with your circumstance.