IN EVICTION COURT
48 PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2021
boys are in town than from three middle-aged women who’d known each other for years. Because Philadelphia Municipal Court’s sixth floor is built more like a Department of Motor Vehicles office than a vaunted temple of American justice, the sound of the fight bled through the wall and into Judge David H. Conroy’s Courtroom 3. You couldn’t tell exactly what Jefferson, Cottman, and Grant were saying, but you didn’t have to. By the time the deputy arrived to restore order, attorneys Jermaine D. Harris, for the landlord, and Vikram A. Patel, for the tenants, had separated their clients and were beginning the cooling-off process. An hour later, they had an agreement. The tenants would move out in three months and the landlord would forgive unpaid back rent. EXPECT MORE SHOUTING IN the coming months. The coun-
try’s eviction courts were a flaming mess before the pandemic, so imagine the chaos when tenant protections are lifted and an estimated ten million Americans face getting booted from their homes. The virus revealed the nation’s landlord-tenant
BOB IVRY
PHILADELPHIA – Eviction court during COVID-19 is boring, boring, boring, and then all of a sudden, BOOM! A door gets slammed, voices rise, and someone has to call the sheriff. That kind of case doesn’t happen often, but on a raw January morning in Philadelphia, it did. The court encourages adversaries to resolve disputes before they reach a judge, so a landlord named Francine Jefferson and two women who’d been her tenants for eight years, Benita Cottman and Carol Grant, ducked out of the courtroom with their lawyers, into an area reserved for mediation. Their quarrel centered on issues that, even with dockets shortened due to the pandemic, the court hears every day. The landlord said the tenants hadn’t paid rent since August. Also they’d promised to move out but didn’t. The tenants said the landlord had allowed a small water leak to grow into a big problem. Also part of the stairs was broken. Also the landlord was a liar. The landlord said no, actually the tenants were liars. It escalated from there. Their language was laced with the kind of viciousness more likely to come from the cheap seats when the Dallas Cow-
