When the neighbors drive you out
Local code enforcement is harsh and arbitrary, said Radley Balko in the Nashville Scene— and in Nashville gentrifiers routinely harness it to harass homeowners they don’t like.
FREDDIE BENFORD AND his wife, Clarice Ramey, bought their home, a modest white brick ranch home in East Nashville’s Rosebank neighborhood, in 1997.
It’s a pretty plot of land, with a sundrenched, gently sloped front yard and a backyard lined with trees. The house itself looks well lived-in. There’s some peeling paint and a rusty, photogenic pair of old lawn chairs out front. It’s certainly not an eyesore. The grass is well-trimmed. There’s no visible trash. No furniture on the lawn. No debris.
From the street, or even the front yard, you’d be hard-pressed to understand why, according to Benford, inspectors from the Metro Codes Department have visited the couple more than 50 times. Or why, he says, they’ve racked up $3,500 in fines. Or why in 2016, just a few years after the couple finally paid off their mortgage, the city put a lien on their home—one that remains in place today.
According to the city, the first problem is the small fishing boat the couple has parked on a trailer in their front yard. That apparently isn’t allowed. Neither are the cars sometimes parked off the driveway, slightly on the lawn.
But to get to the main problem, I have to take the couple’s long driveway up to the house and enter the backyard to find the carport that extends out from the home. Benford spends a lot of time under the carport. He works on his own faded blue 1967 Dodge Coronet here, and fixes up other cars. “I’ve been a mechanic for 40 years,” he says.
Benford tinkers at his workbench and listens to the radio. On the blistering June day I visit, it isn’t hard to see why he likes it. The trees provide shade, rustle up a nice breeze, and bathe the area in dappled light. As we talk, the couple’s lab mix, Bella, patrols a T-shaped patch of grass.
“See that mini fridge over there? He wrote me up for that,” Benford says, referring to the Codes inspector. “I never heard of something so dumb. A man can’t have a mini fridge in his own garage?”
Benford sighs, rolls his eyes, and continues. “He wrote me up for having tools out here. Said you can’t have tools that aren’t put away. He said I can’t have the workbench.
Once I was drinking a can of soda when he came over. He told me to put it away. You believe that? I’m a grown man, and you’re telling me to put away my soda. Everything you see out here, they told me I can’t have.”
Benford’s Coronet itself is also an issue. Nashville prohibits residents from keeping inoperable or unregistered vehicles on residential properties unless they’re stored in an enclosed garage. Paradoxically, the city also forbids residents from making major repairs on their own vehicles—again, unless it’s done in an enclosed garage. For Benford, that means when the Coronet has broken down over the years, his only legal option is to have it towed to a garage and pay someone else to fix it, even though he has the skills to fix it himself. According to Benford, the same Codes inspector has repeatedly shown up at his home over the years solely to demand that Benford prove that the car is operable. “I lost count of how many times he made me do that,” Benford says. “More than 20.”
“It’s just outrageous and demeaning,” says Jamie Hollin, the couple’s attorney. “You’re going to come out and make this man start his car for you on command? You’re going to put a lien on this couple’s home over an old car? Some chairs in a carport? A goddamn refrigerator?”
OVER THE PAST three years, Nashville’s Metro Codes Department has fielded more than 95,000 complaints. Some complaints concern unkempt vacant lots, abandoned buildings that pose a fire hazard, dumped garbage or cars abandoned in alleyways. Others are requests for the city to remove old signs or debris.
But browse the content of the complaints themselves—they’re all conveniently posted and plotted on the city’s “Nashview” site—and you’ll see a lot of complaints from residents about “eyesores,” tall grass, unregistered vehicles, cars parked on grass or houses in need of new paint or siding. You’ll see a lot of neighbors reporting neighbors.
“Think about who a system like this targets, and who it benefits,” says Joanna Weiss, co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center in New York. “Poor people don’t typically call Codes on their neighbors, because poor people don’t trust the legal system. The people who benefit from complaint-driven systems are people for whom the legal system already works perfectly. Wealthy people. White people. Developers. And they usually use it as a weapon against people who don’t have the means to fight back.”
Codes inspectors often tell the people they cite that they’re only enforcing the law— that they aren’t given the discretion to overlook even petty violations. That isn’t quite true. There’s no provision that prohibits Freddie Benford’s mini fridge, for example, or his soda can, or the tools he keeps under his carport. But there is a prohibition on “open storage,” and that gives inspectors wide discretion to cite anything in a yard they or a neighbor might find unsightly.
“They told me I was in violation of open storage because I had more cushions on my porch than I had chairs,” says Claire, an East Nashville resident who asked to not be identified by her real name. (Several sources for this article said they feared retaliation from the city or Codes, and requested anonymity.) “I had a shovel leaning against the house. He ordered me to put that away. My husband had cut some 2-by-4s into blocks for my kids to play with. The inspector called it ‘construction debris.’ Because one neighbor complained about our yard, it was like he was looking for as many violations as he could.”
“I had a tenant, a couple, who loved garden gnomes,” says Burt, a builder and
landlord whose properties include affordable housing. “They had dozens of them. The neighbors hated the gnomes and called Codes. But I told the city that this is art. You may hate it, you may think it’s ugly, but it’s art, and there’s no code prohibiting it. They backed off the gnomes, but then started citing them for all sorts of ticky-tack violations until they had to move.”
The vagueness of the rules is one of two fundamental problems with Nashville’s Codes enforcement. The other is that it is primarily driven by anonymous complaints. Anyone can call in a complaint to the 311 hotline or send one through the city’s website.
“I’d compare it to anti-loitering laws,” says Weiss. “You have these vague laws that are wildly open to interpretation, that essentially make everyone a potential criminal. But then you have this added component where everyday people become the enforcers, with no accountability for false reporting.”
THE TENNESSEE LEGISLATURE established countywide environmental courts in 1991. The initial legislation authorized counties of more than 600,000 people—essentially, Davidson County, which includes Nashville, and Shelby, which includes Memphis—to set up a special docket under general sessions courts solely to hear codes complaints. By 2001, the number of Nashville Codes cases had grown to the point that the General Sessions judge who oversaw them couldn’t keep up. She created a new position, a “referee,” to take over the docket.
The referee is not a judge, and the Environmental Court itself is more administrative than legal. The ambiguousness of it all gave city officials what they wanted—the ability to plow through stacks of cases relatively quickly.
“The priority in the Environmental Court is efficiency, not due process,” says Bill Maurer, a litigator with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm. “They don’t adhere to the rules of evidence. They don’t pay much attention to rights. The goal is to resolve as many cases as possible, as quickly as possible. That’s a big problem, because you’re dealing with people’s most important and cherished possession: their home.”
Maurer and the Institute for Justice currently represent two Memphis residents who lost their homes because of Environmental
Court decisions. In both cases, the residents couldn’t afford to make repairs after a storm damaged their homes. The city bulldozed one house. It evicted the other client, an elderly woman, and put her possessions on the street. It then auctioned off her home. Both people are now homeless.
“The environmental courts don’t record their hearings,” Maurer says. “They don’t preserve evidence. So sure, you can appeal a decision. But you can only appeal based on what’s in the record. And for most of these cases, there is no record. It’s just a series of orders.”
The current Davidson County referee, Renard Hirsch, is a commercial and bankruptcy lawyer who was appointed in 2017 and hears cases one or two days per week. Hirsch’s approach to the position has been especially irksome to Hollin.
“The previous referees at least understood that these are administrative hearings,” he says. “They wore business attire. Hirsch came in on the first day wearing a robe and hoisting a gavel.” Hollin adopts a scolding tone. “You are not a judge. You do not preside over a real court. You are a part-time administrator who helps the city harass poor people for parking on their own grass.”
BROWSE FACEBOOK GROUPS for Nashville’s neighborhoods, and you’ll also see speculation that builders and developers have weaponized codes departments to target low-income holdouts in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. They call in a series of complaints, the theory goes, then swoop in with a lowball offer.
Because complaints are anonymous, it’s almost impossible to prove who filed them. But in 2019, Nashville’s Fox affiliate WZTV ran a series of reports alleging that developers were weaponizing codes to target properties they wanted to acquire. Two reports focused on Evelyn Suggs, a beloved, then–94-year-old Black landlord in North Nashville. Suggs told the station several of her properties had recently been hit with a rash of Codes complaints. Shortly after, developers began contacting her with offers to buy those properties. Some made reference to her battles with Codes. Other local residents, including Freddie Benford, have similar stories.
It’s possible that these developers simply scoured the complaints and court records available online to find property owners with fines, then made offers to those owners. But Burt, the local builder, says he’s witnessed it firsthand. “It absolutely happens,” he says. “I’d go so far as to say it’s common. I’ve personally heard developers boast about ‘lighting up Codes’ on a property they want to buy.”
Advocates like Weiss and Maurer say abuses such as this are frequent in other places. “It’s just eminent domain by another name,” Maurer says. “Instead of officially declaring a property blighted and handing it over to a developer, you just hit it with codes complaints until the owner is overwhelmed.”
Feeling outcast is a common sentiment among Codes targets. That includes my wife and me, after a neighbor called
Codes on us, complaining about weeds in our sloped back yard (fixing this cost us $4,000, and has caused new problems with soil erosion). You feel a bit like a pariah, like you’re a scourge on the neighborhood. It changes how you feel about your neighbors, your place in the community, your relationship with the city. On some level, the Codes issue is just another debate about who Nashville is for, about who gets to have a stake in how the city grows and evolves.
I moved to Nashville in 2010, fell in love with the city, and persuaded my now-wife to move from New York in 2015. We’ve wrestled with our own contribution to the neighborhood’s gentrification. But while we’ve had problems with neighbors over the years, we’ve never considered reporting someone to the city. The problem with anonymous complaint–driven Codes enforcement is that it puts the shape and direction of the city in the hands of people who do.
“It’s a sham. A joke,” Hollin says of the Davidson County Environmental Court. “A predatory body.” Recalling his first visit there, Hollin summarizes the reality of how Codes enforcement operates: “Here’s the common denominator among the people I saw in that room: poor, Black, and elderly. Ninety-five percent of them didn’t have a lawyer. And their rights were being trampled.”