Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

STEPHEN SMITH: Just open the newspaper and look at all the pages of rental ads. It's hard to believe that a decent apartment might be difficult to find. What's not obvious in these ads is that you're looking at essentially two local housing markets-- one for the stable middle class renter, one for the working poor and families on welfare. You simply can't tell one market from the other by the prices. The differences are in how the rental systems operate and in the quality of apartments offered.

AUDREY EVANS: Kyle, quiet down.

STEPHEN SMITH: Audrey Evans, a single mother living on federal aid to families with dependent children has a lot of experience perusing rental ads. Each of the past seven years, she's had to move. The first apartment she found was too small for her three kids.

AUDREY EVANS: The second one was a very nice place, but the landlord sold the building. And then after that, the next one, me and the landlord had a problem about things getting fixed and I had to move.

STEPHEN SMITH: It happened like that year after year. The rental market in the Twin Cities is unusually tight. Low income housing gets scarcer all the time. Sometimes Audrey was so desperate for a place, she'd take whatever she could find regardless of condition.

AUDREY EVANS: I was living in an apartment in Maplewood, and they were paying for the heating. And it wasn't enough in the house and my daughter at the time. She was about six or seven, and she had got real sick from the house being so cold. And she went into a seizure and stuff because of her fever, and I stopped paying the rent because they hadn't come in to get the things fixed for me. Before I decided that I was going to move, they had already filed a UD on me.

STEPHEN SMITH: A UD, or Unlawful Detainer, is the Scarlet letter marking a bad tenant. The UD is a court-ordered eviction usually for failure to pay rent. Most landlords in the low-income market check a prospective tenant's criminal credit and rental histories. The UD on Audrey's record made it harder to get accepted by new landlords, even though she might argue that the eviction was unfair.

At a shelter for homeless people in Minneapolis, Deion, her husband, and their five children are living in two rooms while they search for a permanent place to live. They don't have a car, so Deion takes the bus to look at vacant apartments, often with the kids in tow. She's looked at more than 30 places so far, and Deion's discovered it's tough to find an affordable apartment or house for two adults and 5 kids, except perhaps in some of the suburbs.

SPEAKER: I guess if you're willing to move out there with no transportation, that's fine. But I've got small children. They get sick. I don't have anyone to call that I can get to come get us take us back into the city. So I've been looking mainly in the city. I've looked in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and I can't find nothing.

STEPHEN SMITH: Finding a big enough place isn't the only problem. Like Audrey, Dion has a UD eviction on her record. Every time she signs up for an apartment, Dion has to pay a non-refundable application fee, usually from $15 to $35. That's how much the landlord pays a screening company for the background check. Because of the UD, Deion's been turned down every time.

SPEAKER: I mean, money I've shelled out I can't really afford to shell out paying these application fees just to tell me, no, you can't have the place. It's like I just walked up to you on the streets and just gave you some money just to be giving it to you. I don't have money like that.

STEPHEN SMITH: Deion says she spent so much money looking for an apartment that if she does get accepted at one, she's not sure she'll have enough left for the security deposit. Across the river in Saint Paul, homeless moms load their kids onto a school bus at their temporary lodgings in a homeless shelter. Yvette supports her three kids on AFDC, and one of her chief complaints about low income housing is what she actually gets for her money. Her last place was a two bedroom apartment that cost $700 a month, and it was a dump.

YVETTE: Rats and mice, and sometimes no lights, and sometimes no water, and sometimes I'd have to sit up at night because it wasn't an adequate lock on my back door. We had to get a slab of wood, a piece of lumber, to prop up against the door just so nobody would be able to open it. That wasn't worth it.

STEPHEN SMITH: How can landlords get away with charging so much for so little? John Powell, director of the Institute on race and poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School, says low income tenants are in a captive market.

JOHN POWELL: Many of the people who are homeless or in shelters will not have the credit history. And when you don't have the credit history, the landlord or prospective owner jacks up the price. And any time you have a difficulty in finding housing, it means the housing that you find, you're likely to pay more for because you're in a much tighter market.

STEPHEN SMITH: Housing advocates say that some landlords intentionally take advantage of poor people-- charging too much in rent, demanding excessive application fees, pocketing damage deposits without justification. But Bryan Miller says these genuine slumlords are actually a minority.

BRYAN MILLER: Renting property to low income people, particularly smaller rental properties, is not something you're going to make money at.

STEPHEN SMITH: Bryan Miller heads the Neighborhood Development Alliance, a non-profit organization that builds and refurbishes low income housing on St Paul's West Side. He also privately owns a few small rental properties. Miller contends that many landlords in low income neighborhoods get into the business expecting to make a modest amount of money. He says they wrongly assume that a small landlord's most valuable skills are handiness with a paintbrush and a plumber's wrench.

BRYAN MILLER: They're not prepared to deal with the tenant problems. They feel ripped off and cheated when they get a tenant that trashes their apartment or has parties or walks out and doesn't pay the rent. To me what I see is well-intentioned people who expected to make not big money but some money getting disinherited and not maintaining their properties over time and they get rundown.

STEPHEN SMITH: It's an unending cycle, Miller says, with properties changing hands time and again. On St Paul's East side, landlord Ward Schlaeppi recalls the damage left behind by an angry tenant in a low income apartment building he recently bought.

WARD SCHLAEPPI Well, there's a shotgun blast down through the floor here. So we had to patch the subfloor and then go underneath and patch the ceiling. The guy below decided to move. [LAUGHS] Well, because he got woke up. The thing missed his head about this much.

STEPHEN SMITH: Ward Schlaeppi owns three buildings on the East side. When he bought this place, he started evicting the most troublesome tenants, the kind that don't pay their rent or prompt frequent police visits. All new tenants must pass a background screening and a minimum income requirement.

WARD SCHLAEPPI I like to see that they're working. I mean, I don't say they have to be working, but we do have income requirements that would make it so it's pretty hard for just someone that doesn't work at all to qualify.

STEPHEN SMITH: So for this apartment, for example, what would be the income requirement?

WARD SCHLAEPPI Double the rent at least. And usually, I like to go three times what the rent is as a gross wage.

STEPHEN SMITH: And the rent here is?

WARD SCHLAEPPI This is a one bedroom, so it rents for about $400. And the twos go all the way up to $495.

STEPHEN SMITH: That means a family must get at least $800 a month in wages or welfare to pass Schlaeppi's threshold. None of the women we met earlier in this story would qualify. Schlaeppi has essentially bought 18 low income apartments, fixed them up, priced them for the working poor, but put them out of the range of many of the most disadvantaged renters.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Audrey Evans is lucky. She found refuge from the low income rental market. New Foundations, a nonprofit service that helps house poor women, gave Audrey furniture and found her a pleasant three bedroom apartment in the suburbs.

AUDREY EVANS: I like being away from the hustle and bustle of the city and the things that are going on. I feel more comfortable out here.

STEPHEN SMITH: Meanwhile, Deion and Yvette are still looking, still paying the application fees, still hoping to find a place they can both afford and feel safe in. Housing advocates say one small way to make life easier for low income renters is to create notarized credit reports they could give to prospective landlords instead of paying for a new background check at each apartment. But housing experts say what's really needed is a substantial number of new affordable three and four bedroom places for families in the Twin Cities. No one expects that to occur anytime soon. For Minnesota Public Radio, this is Stephen Smith.