‘Moving, moving, moving’

homes.

Brown and Frederick both say landlords would rather avoid evictions if possible.

“It’s cheaper to keep her,” Brown said — a rule he shares with other landlords. In impoverished neighborhoods, he says, a tenant who is late with the rent but eventually pays is often the best landlords can hope for.

“If they had high credit scores and money in the bank, they wouldn’t be renting in these neighborhoods,” Brown said. “This market is tough.” He speaks from experience. The 36-year-old property manager grew up in Baltimore. He says he doesn’t remember his father being around. His mother always held a job of some sort to pay the rent. The utilities might be cut off, he said. Food might be short. But the rent was always paid. They did, however, move a lot. “We lived all over the city,” he said. His “cheaper to keep her” advice deliberately characterizes tenants as women.

The tenants who file in and out of Baltimore’s rent court on Fayette Street are mostly black women, some with toddlers and infants in tow, others waiting anxiously for their cases to be called before they lose more unpaid hours from work.

Desmond has observed a similar dynamic elsewhere: “Poor black men are locked up while poor black women are locked out.” Brown says he deals mostly with women. “It sucks, but it’s so true,” he said. “Most of the heads of households are women because there’s not enough men.”

Like his mother, many of the women and their families are constantly on the move.

“It’s a revolving door,” he said. “They go from one place to the next to the next.”

Six-year-old Mesiyah Rucker offered to help his mother raise the money to pay the rent. Zina Rucker says she almost cried. “He said, ‘I can get a job selling cookies or lemonade to get some money for you,’ ” Rucker said. “I told him he’s only 6 years old, your mind should be on school, not on helping mommy pay the rent.”

After three years of moving from one rented room to another, Rucker and her son had finally settled into a real house last April. She said she agreed to pay her landlord Eric Duvall, $850 per month to live in the rowhouse in the 2600 block of Madison Ave. in East Baltimore.

Rucker earns minimum wage helping nurses in an assisted-living facility in Northwest Baltimore. She receives $344 a month in food stamps.

She says Duvall, who she says is her uncle, promised flexibility if she ever needed extra time to pay the rent.

But by September, she says, she fell a month behind, and he threatened to evict her.

Rucker has been on the waiting list for public housing for six years. As Desmond has pointed out, only one in four families who qualify for housing assistance actually receives it.

“I don’t want to stay in no shelter,” she said. “That’s a whole different lifestyle. I don’t want him to be introduced to all that. How do I explain that to a 6-year-old?

“We just been moving, moving, moving,” she said. “I just want to have something for my son. I need a stable home for my son. I am working. I just need a little bit of help.”

Rucker turned to Bon Secours Community Works, one of several programs in town that offers eviction prevention assistance. But she did not qualify for the $700 grant aimed at forestalling an eviction. The program requires that recipients be able to pay the rent going forward.

She eventually found two roommates to move in with her and split the $850 rent three ways.

Their days started early. Rucker says she woke Mesiyah up at 5 a.m. to get him to the bus stop by 6:45 for the ride to Furley Elementary School.

On a typical morning last fall, she combed his hair and checked to see if he had brushed his teeth. Finally, she looked into his eyes and pleaded: “Please don’t get in any fights today. If someone hits you, just tell your teacher.”

Then she walked to the subway stop at Johns Hopkins Hospital to get to her job at Dee’s Assisted Living by 9. A roommate would watch Mesiyah until Rucker returned home near 5 p.m.

Rucker and her son shared a single bed in a small front room of the rowhouse. A hanging sheet separated the room from the rest of the first floor. They ate at a child-sized plastic table.

Two mice crawled across the kitchen counter and slipped through the burners of the oven. Despite the smell and appearance of a well-cleaned house, roaches dashed across the wall and floor, chased by Rucker’s small dog, Honey.

After Duvall threatened to throw her out, Rucker says, she called housing inspectors to complain about conditions in the home.

A city housing inspector found seven violations, including a defective floor, three defective electric outlets, a broken bedroom window, a cracked ceiling and flaking paint. The inspector did not note mice or roaches. Duvall declined to comment. “The case is over,” he told The Baltimore Sun. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

At a court hearing over her missed rent payment, Rucker told the judge about the inspector’s report. The judge told her to file a tenant complaint down the hall and return to his courtroom, where he would set a date for a new hearing.

He warned her to make sure she arrived at that next hearing with all of the rent she owed or she would risk having the case dismissed.

She missed the hearing — her ride bailed, she said, and the bus would have taken too long — and the case was dismissed. She moved out in December. Now, she says, she pays $200 for her and her son to sleep on a blow-up mattress on the floor of her grandmother’s dining room in South Baltimore.

She did qualify and receive a federally funded Rental Assistance Program voucher that pays half of the rent for low-income families who “either are homeless or have an emergency housing need.”

Rucker said she has not been able to sign a new lease with the voucher because she still owes $500 to Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. from Duvall’s house. The voucher would pay $340 of her $845 rent. But she is still struggling to save money as she pays $275 for classes to obtain a medical technician’s license.

She says the moving has been hardest on her son. She says he has been acting out, with bursts of anger and fights at school. She has kept him enrolled at Furley even though it requires a long school bus ride to East Baltimore.