Member-only story
Walk Away, a memoir
Winning & Losing
In my second year of law school, after a brief stay in a rental house in another town, Mink and I moved back to our urban slum neighborhood in Lynn, renting a two-room apartment on the third floor of a tenement complex called Kingsley Terrace.
The building was below code in many ways; there was no security system, the windows rattled in their frames and leaked rain and snow and cold air, the plumbing was unpredictable, the electricity shorted out. Cockroaches, of course, infested the cracks between the walls, floors, and ceilings. People complained to the landlord, Mr. Backman, but he ignored us. A small group of tenants persuaded most of the other tenants to be part of a complex-wide inspection by the health department. The health department issued a detailed citation calling for a daily fine for noncompliance, but Mr. Backman was a longtime well-known landowner in the city, and when he did nothing to address the defects, we all assumed the city wasn’t actually fining him and that he would continue to do as he pleased. Some of us started withholding rent.
Eviction notices arrived. A few of the older tenants, fearful of losing their longtime, two-room homes, paid up. By the time our court date rolled around, most of the other tenants had already moved out due to the deteriorating conditions, and I was the only one who showed up…
