Inequality under the law

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” – Anatole France (1844-1924).  

An article that that appeared in last Sunday’s Miami Herald brought home once again the force with which those words still apply – today, in the twenty-first century United States.

A lot has changed for the good in this country in the 100 or so years since France wrote those words about his country (France) – the political process has opened to women and minorities, Social Security and Medicare have made the life of seniors considerably easier, and post-World War II economic prosperity created the biggest middle class in world history.

For a while there it even seemed as if class power and privilege was waning. But, as the article in the Herald last weekend (along with too much other evidence to present here) reminded me, it never disappeared. Indeed, how could it when it was inscribed in the nation’s foundational texts by the privileged patriots who created the United States and reinforced by the actions of the many subsequent generations of lawmakers, judges and politicians – overwhelmingly drawn from the social and economic elite – who followed them.

The situation narrated in Sunday’s paper hit close to home in more than geographical terms. The piece is titled “Little Havana renters learn the hard way that owner has upper hand.”

After my family came to Miami from Cuba in the early 1960s we – my mother, father, two older single aunts and me – lived in a series of more or less rundown Little Havana apartments. I learned early on, first-hand, and in the same tough way today’s Little Havana renters are learning it, that “the owner has the upper hand”.

In our case, that fact was usually communicated in the form of an impersonal letter from a lawyer telling us of a rent hike or some other diktat from our landlord. There often was a threatening undertone to those letters. It was years before I understood the reason for this. The landlords and their lawyers had us where it hurts, and they knew it.

But by the time I finished college at the University of Florida a decade later, the trauma those letters had produced had been erased from my mind. Or so I thought. After all, hadn’t I made it, modesty aside, by graduating with high honors, a Phi Beta Kappa key added to my meager belongings, from the school in the state, UF, alma mater of most of the state’s leaders?

Then it came time to decide on the next step, and I wavered between law school and graduate studies in sociology. I decided to let the numbers make the choice for me. I took the key tests, the LSAT, the open sesame for law school, and the GRE, the closely guarded gateway to graduate school.

I did superbly well on both the LSAT and the GRE.

Then I thought about what most lawyers actually do, and I learned that the emotional mark those letters addressed to our home on SW 13th Street had left was still powerfully in my subconscious. I realized that the attraction of law school for me was the money that would come after the diploma. I was also aware that to make good money you have to work for those who have plenty of it, like huge corporations, very rich folks in trouble with the law, high-level crooks, and…slumlords.

Did I want to become one of the people who wrote those kinds of letters on behalf of the haves? Like the decision not to take the LSAT for someone else, I knew in my bones the money that hung in the balance – a much bigger payoff this time – wasn’t worth the moral cost. If I went to law school I knew I would end up representing the poor and bedraggled, no money there, and since I wasn’t nearly as intellectually interested in the law as in social dynamics, I went for sociology. If I wasn’t going to make a ton of money either way, I would rather study something I really loved.

That’s way more than enough about me. The point is how little the basic relations of power have changed decades after my days at SW 13 Street, and the scars that the exercise of power can leave on the powerless, what social critic Richard Sennett calls “the hidden injuries of class.”

What is happening today to the unfortunate Little Havana tenants is a classic example of how things really work. The Herald’s snapshot of the situation: “Fed up with the decrepit state of their apartment building, tenants began withholding their rent. It was a bad move, they found out in court.”

The details reporter Melissa Sanchez provides in an excellent article wouldn’t have surprised Anatole France, and they make my point so crystal-clear they are worth quoting at length:

“One by one, the tenants who stopped paying rent at a crumbling Little Havana apartment building are being evicted and moving out.

“The residents made a miscalculation that is common among renters dissatisfied with their living conditions. As a last resort, they quit paying their rent in the hope of forcing the landlord to fix myriad maintenance problems, including holes in the walls and ceilings, lack of hot water and faulty plumbing that sometimes flooded the premises with raw sewage.

“That’s not how it works, they were told by Miami-Dade judges.

“No matter how disgusting conditions might be, residents must continue paying rent, if not to the landlord then into a court-maintained escrow fund.

“If they don’t, the court will find in favor of the landlord, and they will be out.”

The longsuffering Little Havana tenants made the “miscalculation” of thinking they could exercise the puny slice of power they thought they had – their rent money – against a landlord who evidently cares nothing about his tenants’ health, safety, or welfare and who has done nothing about the horrible conditions despite being fined multiple times by the building department for countless violations. We are talking here about an absentee landlord who lives in New York, more than a thousand miles from the scene of the crime, and who evidently lacks basic human empathy and decency. To top it off, he is a scofflaw.

Yet, what was the unanimous message sent to the desperate rent-strikers by the judges, those august interpreters of the “majestic equality of the law”: “That’s not how it works.”

How it works is this. Mariano V. Fernandez, the city’s building director, has the power –and plenty of reason – to condemn the building in question. But he is reluctant to do so, not out of any apparent sympathy for the owner but because he realizes that, for the renters, it’s heads you lose, tails you lose too. From the Herald article:

“Fernandez has the authority to condemn the building but he doesn’t want to do this, since 18 families would suddenly be homeless.

‘“The ones who always suffer the most are the renters,’” he lamented.”