One Strike Discussion on WBEZ

“The first One-Strike case I encountered at Stateway was a woman whose 16 year old son [Pat Evans and her son Arthur, pictured above] was getting caught up at the margins of the drug trade. She was heroic in addressing this. She was staying up all night to keep him from going out. She went head to head with gang leaders to say, “This is not your boy, this is my boy.” She was on top of that kid; she was monitoring him; she was in his face. She participated in a demonstration of mothers marching between two warring buildings at Stateway during a gang war. The “innocent tenant” or the “lack of knowledge” defense wasn’t available to her, because she had knowledge. She was a conscientious, concerned parent trying to do right by her child and her community. She was one of the first people evicted at Stateway under One-Strike. The conditions in her building—the drug dealing in the lobby—she wasn’t responsible for that. The lack of effective law enforcement—she wasn’t responsible for that. But the failures of these public institutions and the costs incurred by those failures got passed on to her.”

—Jamie Kalven on WBEZ, June 21, 2001

On June 21, “Eight Forty-Eight” [WBEZ, 91.5 FM] broadcast a discussion of the One-Strike eviction policy. Host Steve Edwards was joined by Stephanie Horton of the Chicago Housing Authority, Katherine Walz of the National Center on Poverty Law, and Jamie Kalven of The View From The Ground.