Eviction watch

The case of Cabrini-Green resident Lenise Forest

11/18/2009 10:00 PM

By IAN FULLERTON
Contributing Reporter

No Comments - Add Your Comment


Lenise Forrest is fighting to stay in her home of 19 years after losing her job.
Photo courtesy Megan Cottrell

‘There’s a lot of news people coming,” Lenise Forrest said. “That makes me nervous, and kind of frustrated.”

It was around 9:30 in the morning Tuesday, and a crowd of about 40 people — activists, media, people from the neighborhood — were gathered outside Forrest’s home in the Cabrini-Green Rowhouses.

Family members and strangers passed by Forrest on their way in and out of her front door, with signs reading “We Are All Lenise Forrest” and “Where’s Our Bail Out?” taped on both sides.

Forrest, 32, was told Cook County sheriff officers would be back that day to evict her and her family — two sons, a brother, a granddaughter and her granddaughter’s mother — from their two-story apartment at 933 N. Cambridge, where she has lived for the last 19 years.

She was not eager to repeat the ordeal from a week earlier.

“This part was hanging off right here,” said Forrest, pointing to where the lock had been broken off her door when officials kicked it in after knocking. Management has since repaired it.

The officers were acting on a judge’s eviction order over the $7,893 that Forrest owed in back rent to H. J. Russell & Co., the company hired by the Chicago Housing Authority to manage Cabrini-Green.

Forrest has been unemployed since May, and she said it wasn’t her fault that it had stacked up.

Back in 2007, Forrest was falling behind in her rent, making $9 dollars an hour at a nursing home. A year later, she got a new job with Holsten Realty as an outreach worker for the CHA. The pay was better, and Forrest applied for an Earned Income Disallowance, a program that freezes rent fees for housing tenants while they adjust to their new income levels and pay back rent. Forrest was now paying $355 a month.

In July of 2008, a month later, Cabrini’s then-property managers Urban Property Advisors were fired after a boy was killed by a falling gate in the 900 block of North Cambridge. When the CHA appointed H. J. Russell as interim and then permanent management, Forrest thought she was still enrolled in the EID plan.

“I was thinking I was fine,” she said. “I didn’t get any 14-day notices, a demand for rent, none of that.”

H.J. Russell did not return calls for this story by press time on Wednesday. CHA spokesperson Matt Aguilar said the agency does not discuss the situations of specific tenants.

Forrest continued spending what she thought she could, and it wasn’t until February 2009 that she started getting statements asking for more than $5,000 in unpaid rent. The new managers hadn’t enrolled her in the EID program, and her rent was now $595 a month.

Forrest filed a grievance with the CHA over the back rent statements and hired her own counsel. She was let go from her job in May when the outreach contract expired, and her lawyer walked away when she was unable to pay him.

At her court date, Forrest signed an order that gave her 30 days to pay $4,000 of the back rent, or she would have to go. She scrounged up the $4,000 and paid — but she was 12 days late. Forrest said that H.J. Russell refused to take the money.

Instead, the eviction order went into effect, and on November 10, officials from the Sherriff’s office came to Forrest’s house — with guns drawn, she said — and told her she had to get out. The only reason they let her stay, according to Forrest, was because her brother, who lived at the house and had the address on his license, was not on the eviction list.

Forrest called the public housing journalist Megan Cottrell, who blogged about the story, and soon the case got the attention of a group called the Anti-Eviction Campaign.

“We as citizens of Chicago refuse to let another one of our people be evicted,” said Willie J.R. Fleming, an organizer with the AEC.

Fleming said that, given the condition of the economy and the country’s unemployment levels, the state should put a moratorium on evictions for people struggling to find work and pay their living expenses.

“Lenise Forrest represents a lot of people across the city and the country right now,” he said.

Another group, Northside Action For Justice, caught wind of Forrest’s story and got on board. The group had a victory earlier this summer with the overturned eviction attempt of the Bledsoe family in Rogers Park, a case in which two orphaned children were set to be evicted because their aunt, who became their legal guardian, was not on the lease.

The groups came out on Tuesday morning to protest the order and form an “eviction barricade” around the entrance to Forrest’s house, should the department make another appearance.

“The sheriffs will kick a door off the hinges,” said resident Raymond McDonald. “They set all your furniture out on the street in fifteen minutes — your house will be empty when they get through.”

While news cameramen and activists mingled outside — some waiting for the eviction and some hoping it wouldn’t happen — Forrest was inside, trying to parley a deal with management and the CHA over the phone.

“All I need is some understanding,” Forrest said. “If they put me on a payment arrangement and I’m able to pay something, I shouldn’t be put out.”

Outside, rumors began to spread. Fleming surmised that the sheriffs wouldn’t show because the media was there. One resident said they always come at noon.

As the morning turned into early afternoon, the crowd began to dissipate, with only Fleming and a few neighbors left outside while the rest enjoyed the comforts of a warm home. A few news vans were still parked around the corner.

At around 11:15 a.m., Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Steve Patterson sent out an e-mail to some news media that the department was not scheduled to evict anyone from 933 N. Cambridge on that day.

In the e-mail, he said the episode at Forrest’s house the previous week was “the first notice of eviction at that residence.”

“This is the first of many steps instituted as part of the new procedures put in place a year ago, ensuring proper notice before an eviction actually takes place,” he wrote, adding that the real eviction date would not be publicized by the department.

Patterson also noted that there is a judicially-ordered moratorium of any evictions taking place around Christmas, which “could also impact an actual eviction day for this tenant.”

By noon there was almost no one left outside save for Fleming and a few friends. No one there had seen Patterson’s e-mail yet.

“You bailed out the banks, you bailed out General Motors, now bail out the bottom!” Fleming yelled to a police officer who had pulled up in front of the house, before going over to talk with him in a friendlier tone.

Inside, Forrest was making headway. By that point it was fairly certain that the eviction wouldn’t happen that day, and in the meantime she had talked the people at H.J. Russell into meeting with her at the offices of the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council down the street.

An initial commitment from the Heartland Alliance, a poverty support organization, to help her pay her back rent was also hinted at, in the event that managers agreed to strike a new arrangement.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.


No Comments - Add Your Comment