ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
If you rent an apartment and your faucet springs a leak, what do you do? Well, you call your landlord to get it fixed. That's the deal, right? You pay rent, and the landlord maintains the place. Well, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hundreds of renters say their landlord hasn't been holding up his end of the bargain, and the issues are much bigger than leaky faucets. In the series How To Evict Your Landlord, from WUWM Milwaukee's NPR member station, reporters Sam Woods and Jimmy Gutierrez tell the story of how a group of tenants are working to push out one of the city's largest corporate landlords. Welcome to both of you.
JIMMY GUTIERREZ, BYLINE: Thank you for having us.
SAM WOODS, BYLINE: Good to be here.
FLORIDO: Your podcast is about one landlord in particular in Milwaukee, David Tomblin. Who is David Tomblin?
GUTIERREZ: Yeah, Tomblin is an out-of-state corporate landlord. He owns about a dozen LLCs across the city and about 250 properties. They're primarily placed in low-income Black neighborhood. And kind of what he does is he buys these incredibly cheap properties. And according to tenants and city officials, he does the bare minimum to rehab them and then charges as much as possible to renters. And in the majority of those properties, he has been accused of neglect, pages of code violations and, from when we were reporting, around, like, 300 to half a million dollars in unpaid taxes with the city.
And if you ask tenants, they've experienced two different Tomblins. One of the tenants that we really highlight in this series is Deshawn Harris, and she's described him as kind of a Jekyll and Hyde. So this is someone who was once president of Los Angeles' Rotary Club, so who can come off very charming and smart and connected. But her experiences with him is that he's been someone who's refused to make repairs to her apartment while increasing the rent almost double since she's been there, forcing her to live in some pretty rough situations.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
DESHAWN HARRIS: You know, not only the hole up under the porch, the backyard - I can't take a bath or a shower. What got me is when a bullet came through my living room window and how long he took to repair it.
FLORIDO: Your series is about the incredible way that Deshawn and many other of Tomblin's tenants organized to try to hold him accountable. And they identify this pretty powerful legal tool available in Milwaukee called receivership. How does this work?
WOODS: So the basic idea that the city is asking the court for in its lawsuit is to declare as many of Tomblin's properties a public nuisance as possible. And then if those properties are declared a public nuisance, it triggers a state law that allows a third party to take over management of the properties. So if this happens, Tomblin would still legally own the properties, but this third party would take over management of the properties, and collect rent money to fix up the properties and pay back Tomblin's back taxes. So he'd still own them but could lose control for a long time and would stop making money off of them.
Now, I want to note also that we still have months if not years of court proceedings before we know if any of Tomblin's properties will be declared a nuisance and put into receivership, but this could be a pretty big deal if it comes together in the way the city is asking the court for.
FLORIDO: Well, in this current case, which is ongoing against Tomblin in Milwaukee, you know, a big part of your story is about the alliance between a nonprofit group that organizes tenants and officials at City Hall, the way they work together to basically build this case against this landlord. How important is this alliance proving to be as tenants continue their fight, as we speak, to win their case against this landlord?
WOODS: Yeah, this alliance was one of the most interesting parts of the reporting for me because under state law, the city of Milwaukee can't carry out random inspections. It can only document code violations that are either visible from the street or if a tenant reports them. And you can understand why maybe a tenant wouldn't want to get on their landlord's bad side for fear of retaliation and then, you know, doesn't report a violation. So that's where this nonprofit called Common Ground came in. It started to get to know Tomblin's tenants, and it documented a lot of the problems in their home. And the city was then able to use that information to build its legal case that this landlord is a public nuisance. And for the tenants we talked to, Common Ground was a breath of fresh air, as they got to meet other people going through similar situations and realize they weren't alone.
FLORIDO: It took you a lot of work to get to speak with this landlord, but you did eventually track him down. What did he have to say?
GUTIERREZ: Yeah, it was definitely a journey. When we finally did get in touch with his PR team, they gave us about 15 minutes to have a one on one with him, which Sam and I were really excited about. The first thing that we wanted to get into was some of Deshawn Harris' claims about the condition of her property.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
DAVID TOMBLIN: Things about the bathtub and everything like that, we have nothing on record about that. That's No. 1. The bullet holes in the window were taken care of. And I understand the bullet hole in the wall - I double-checked that - were all taken care of in December, and the situation of the hole underneath, that should have been taken care of.
GUTIERREZ: He emphasized, within the conversation, a couple things that we found interesting. One was how much he was in lockstep with the city, which really struck us because, as kind of this whole podcast is looking at and we've been talking about, is that he's being sued by the city currently, but he also talked about his commitment to staying in Milwaukee.
FLORIDO: You know, your story is about one community of people organizing in one city, Milwaukee. But is there something that communities in other places can learn or are trying to learn from what's happening in Milwaukee right now?
WOODS: This story really is about power. Tomblin has monetary power. City - the city of Milwaukee has legal power. And tenants and Common Ground have people power. And so as we see how this plays out over the next, you know, months or years, it may reveal how power works in Milwaukee and maybe in the country.
FLORIDO: I've been speaking with reporters Sam Woods and Jimmy Gutierrez from WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR member station, about their new podcast, How To Evict Your Landlord. Thanks to both of you.
GUTIERREZ: Yeah, thanks so much.
WOODS: Yeah, thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
