• Copenhagen will launch the CopenPay initiative to reward climate-conscious tourists.
• The monthlong trial offers incentives such as free museum entry for green deeds like cycling.
• The aim is to reduce the environmental burden of tourism on Denmark's capital.

Copenhagen may have figured out how to get tourists to behave.

The Danish capital is launching an initiative this month to reward climate-conscious visitors with incentives such as free meals, wine, kayaking tours, and complimentary entry to museums.

Tourists and locals will be rewarded for their green deeds, such as arriving at a tourist attraction on a bike or picking up litter.

For instance, those who take a train or ride a bike to Copenhagen's heating plant can then ski down its sloped roof.

Meanwhile, visitors who show up with a piece of plastic waste at the National Gallery of Denmark can get involved in workshops that turn that waste into art.

The city tourism board said that while proof of these green deeds is desirable, the CopenPay scheme will operate mainly on trust. A report from the Pew Research Center has shown that Denmark has the highest levels of personal trust in the world.

Tourism generates a huge amount of money for Denmark. Official statistics from the Danish government show that the country welcomed an estimated 15 million tourists in 2023. According to Statista, revenue from tourism in 2021 was around 118.2 billion Danish kroner or about $17.5 billion.

"With CopenPay, we're empowering people to experience more of what Copenhagen offers while placing less burden on our planet. It's about creating meaningful and memorable experiences that are enjoyable and environmentally responsible," said Mikkel Aarø Hansen, CEO of Wonderful Copenhagen.

According to Copenhagen's tourism board, the initiative aims to reduce tourism's environmental burden rather than attract more tourists to the region.

The disclaimer comes in the wake of anti-tourist protests in Barcelona, where visitors were sprayed by locals with water guns in a bid to deter overtourism in the country.

Other cities, such as Venice, have implemented a daily tourist fee to deter visitors from arriving on certain days.

The CopenPay scheme will begin on a trial basis on July 15 and run for one month.

• Microsoft has given up its observer role on OpenAI's board, per a letter reported by outlets including Axios.
• Apple is not expected to take up a similar observer role, The Financial Times reported.
• The moves may be an attempt to ease regulatory concerns over their influence in the AI sector.

Microsoft and Apple might have made a play to assuage antitrust regulators over their involvement with OpenAI.

Microsoft has now relinquished its role as an observer on OpenAI's board, while Apple will not take up a similar spot, according to reports by outlets including The Financial Times.

Although Microsoft had no voting rights, its decision may be a bid to ease the concerns of regulators, who have been trying to assess its influence over OpenAI.

Microsoft won an observer role following the brief ousting of Sam Altman as OpenAI's CEO last November.

But late Tuesday the company said it was not "necessary" to keep its seat after witnessing "significant progress" in the past eight months, according to a letter Microsoft sent to OpenAI seen by outlets including Axios and the Financial Times.

Microsoft also said in the letter that it's "confident" about OpenAI's "direction."

Alex Haffner, a competition partner at law firm Fladgate, told BI: "It is hard not to conclude that Microsoft's decision has been heavily influenced by the ongoing competition/antitrust scrutiny of its (and other major tech players) influence over emerging AI players such as OpenAI."

He added: "It is clear that regulators are very much focused on the complex web of interrelationships that Big Tech has created with AI providers, hence the need for Microsoft and others to carefully consider how they structure these arrangements going forward."

Microsoft has invested billions in the ChatGPT maker and gets nearly half of OpenAI's profits as part of the partnership deal. OpenAI still relies on Microsoft's cloud services for the computing power needed to train and run its large language models (LLMs).

New approach

The partnership has been considered to have given Microsoft a leg up in the AI race, as OpenAI's models power its AI features such as Copilot.

An OpenAI representative told BI that its new CFO, Sarah Friar, was taking a new approach to engaging with partners such as Microsoft and Apple, and investors including Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures.

"Moving forward, we will host regular stakeholder meetings to share progress on our mission and ensure stronger collaboration across safety and security," they said.

Apple is set to follow Microsoft's lead, retreating from its plan to take on a similar board observer role, the FT reported. Bloomberg previously reported that Apple had secured an observer seat.

Antitrust scrutiny

This came after Apple announced it struck a partnership with OpenAI at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, integrating ChatGPT into its devices including the iPhone as part of a broader AI push.

The pullback underscores the mounting antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech's grip on AI. Regulators in both the US and UK have raised concerns about potential market control through strategic partnerships.

Microsoft and OpenAI are both facing regulatory scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. European regulators have also been assessing the partnership.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft and Apple's moves will placate those concerns about their involvement with OpenAI.

• The first "Gladiator 2" trailer showed Paul Mescal as Lucius fighting Pedro Pascal's Marcus Acacius.
• The younger version of Lucius was played by Spencer Treat Clark in the original "Gladiator" movie.
• Here's why Clark doesn't reprise the role in "Gladiator 2."

The trailer for the "Gladiator" sequel dropped on Tuesday, leaving fans wondering why Paul Mescal plays slave fighter Lucius instead of Spencer Treat Clark, who played him in the original.

Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" starred Russell Crowe as Maximus Decimus Meridius, a former Roman general who is betrayed and sold into slavery. The film sees Lucius, the heir to the Roman Empire, watch Maximus fight in the Colosseum.

The 2000 movie is one of the most beloved historical epics of all time and won five Oscars, including best film, best actor, and best director. Because of this, there's plenty of pressure on "Gladiator 2" to live up to the high expectations set by the original.

The first trailer for "Gladiator 2," which is out on November 15, suggests that Lucius disappeared after the events of the original movie and forged a life for himself. But like Maximus, he's forced into becoming a fighter when he's captured by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and his soldiers.

It's not surprising that Scott cast Mescal as Lucius for the sequel considering the Irish actor has become a rising star after his critically acclaimed performances in"Normal People," "Aftersun," and "All of Us Strangers."

But "Gladiator" fans on social media have said it's odd that Scott didn't ask Clark to reprise the role since he's still working as an actor.

Scott said he needed someone younger to play Lucius in "Gladiator 2"

Clark, who is now 36 years old, also played Joseph Dunn in "Unbreakable" opposite Bruce Willis — a role he later reprised in 2019's "Glass." And he's appeared in several TV shows, including "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D," "Animal Kingdom," and "Manhunt.

In November 2023, Scott told Deadline that he wanted to cast a younger actor to play Lucius in "Gladiator 2," and said he was impressed by Mescal, who is 28, in "Normal People."

Scott said: "I'm always looking for someone, something new and fresh. I mean, fresh is terribly important. So they're not carrying … baggage is a terrible word for what they've done before, because it's great stuff, but you will remember he just did this character already.

"I watched this show called 'Normal People.' It's unusual for me, but I saw one and thought, that's interesting. These actors are really good I watched the whole goddamn show and thought, damn."

He added: "So this came up at a time when I need a 23 year old, 24 year old to take up the mantle of Lucius. And I just said, 'You want to do it?' He said, 'Yeah.'"

Representatives for Spencer Treat Clark did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

• Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker and his wife have cut their company salaries to $1.
• Fisker was once valued at $8 billion and planned to challenge Tesla.
• The EV startup filed for bankruptcy in June.

The founder of embattled EV startup Fisker has cut his salary to $1 to help cover the company's bankruptcy costs.

In a filing submitted to bankruptcy court on Tuesday, Fisker's chief restructuring officer, John DiDonato, said Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker and his wife Dr. Geeta Gupta-Fisker — CFO and COO of the company — had "voluntarily" reduced their annual salary to $1 to continue covering "vital business expenses" as Fisker scrambles to sell off its remaining inventory.

DiDonato also said that Fisker had decided to defer certain severance payments and employee healthcare benefits.

A 2022 SEC filing stated that Fisker and Gupta-Fisker were each paid $62,400 a year, the minimum base salary under applicable law at that time — although both also received cash bonuses of $710,000.

Fisker, once valued as much as $8 billion, filed for bankruptcy last month after efforts to find a buyer for the company failed.

Founded by automotive legend Henrik Fisker, who helped design the Tesla Model S, the EV startup had ambitious plans to take on Tesla with its flagship electric SUV, the Ocean.

However, its plan to build an affordable EV by outsourcing production quickly ran into choppy waters.

Current and former workers told Business Insider that Fisker struggled with parts shortages and even had to strip parts from the CEO and CFO's cars to repair the first batch of Oceans delivered to customers.

Fisker is now attempting to sell its 3,300 unsold Oceans to Uber and Lyft vehicle provider American Leasing at an 80% discount.

Fisker did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

Do you work at Fisker or own an Ocean? Get in touch with this reporter via email at tcarter@businessinsider.com.

• Riho Maruyama is a 25-year-old college student in Utah.
• She got married in her freshman year and found out she was pregnant in her senior year.
• A village of college friends who helped raise her daughter has allowed Riho to finish college.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Riho Maruyama. It has been edited for length and clarity.

During my senior year of college, my husband, who I married in my freshman year, and I found out we were expecting a baby. The news surprised us. It was a total shock.

I felt like there was this stigma that once you have a baby, your life would be over. That you can't do all that you love anymore.

At the time, I was in the thick of classes, work, and playing rugby.

My team had won a national title the previous year, and we were training for another one. It was terrifying to tell my coach I was pregnant and couldn't play anymore.

I also really wanted to graduate from college. With only a year left, I was so close to finishing. Work was a necessity. We needed the money, so quitting wasn't an option.

I was determined to have my baby but not to give up on the things that I loved most.

Our friends became our support system

Already living in a two-bedroom house, we spent my pregnancy preparing for a new baby. Our house is in a college town with many students living around us. My brother only lives two doors down from us.

They started to become a support system even during the pregnancy, but once our daughter Hinami was born, their help was amplified.

Since my husband and I were both getting degrees, playing rugby, and working part-time, we were going to need all the help we could get with Hinami.

Soon after her birth, our group chat became a day care forum to talk about who could take care of Hinami, with different people volunteering to have her when my husband and I weren't around.

A typical day for me started at 4 a.m. when I would wake up to pump breastmilk that my husband could give her when she woke up in the morning. I'd leave the house at 5 a.m. for rugby practice and get back at 7 a.m. When I got home, I'd start working from home while my husband went to classes. Hinami often slept, only waking for feeds, until 11 a.m. so I could get on with work pretty easily, even with her there. By the time Hinami was born, I was getting my master's degree, which didn't require me to go in for classes as much. My husband would come back from school, and I would work all afternoon while he had the baby.

We've only paid for childcare 3 times since she was born

There have been plenty of times when work, rugby, or school kept both of us from being able to watch Hinami. Friends have stepped up to the plate to help when we've needed childcare. At times, it is a bit like a baton toss, with her staying with one friend for an hour and then another friend having her the next.

Since we've had her, we've only had to pay for daycare at most three times. Having a village of friends around has saved us so much money.

This group of friends hasn't only been childcare help — they've continued to be our social circle, which we see most evenings. Everyone will come to our house and Hinami will stay up with us, often until 12 a.m. She'll be awake and around when everyone watches sports in the evening or while we study. They'll volunteer to do her nighttime feedings and make her laugh by throwing her up in the air. All of them are incredibly protective of her.

Luckily, our group of friends aren't drinkers or smokers, so we've been able to trust them to be around Hinami in the evenings.

One of my favorite things to watch is how the guys have been with her. I expected my girlfriends to have a motherly instinct with Hinami, but to see college boys playing with and nurturing a baby who isn't even their own has been shocking and incredibly sweet.

Maybe it is Hinami's personality, or perhaps the impact of being raised by college students, but she is very adaptable to both change and people. Since birth, she's learned to be around many different people in different environments and routines.

Raising her around people who don't have children has allowed me to become a first-time mom without fear of judgment. We are all learning what it means to take care of a baby together.

I wouldn't have been able to raise Hinami without this village of friends around us. It's been a game changer. Because of them, life didn't have to stop. I could be a mom, an athlete, a student, and an employee, even with a newborn.

• Indian Prime Minister Modi gave Russian President Putin a bear hug during an official visit to Moscow.
• Modi's visit coincided with a Russian missile strike that hit a Ukrainian children's hospital and ahead of a NATO summit.
• India is seeking to balance China-Russia ties, leveraging Moscow for trade and geopolitical stability.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made Russia the destination of his first bilateral visit after securing a historic third term in office. On top of that, he gave Russian President Vladimir Putin a bear hug while he was there.

The spectacle involving the two leaders came on the same day Russia hit a Ukrainian children's hospital with a missile strike and ahead of a three-day NATO leaders' summit in Washington DC that started on Tuesday.

"It is a huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world's largest democracy hug the world's most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Monday.

On Monday, the US State Department said it has raised concerns with New Delhi about India's relationship with Russia.

Modi's advances toward Putin come less than two months after the usually reserved Chinese leader Xi Jinping hugged Putin not once, but twice — dealing another blow to the West's isolation of Russia.

What India wants from Russia

Like Xi, Modi has his own agenda for cozying up to Putin during the two-day visit.

India is an important strategic partner for the US and the rest of the world, which is aiming to diversify supply chains away from China.

Over the last two years, India-Russia trade has grown. The relationship is underscored by energy, as India has become a major buyer of Russian oil.

But there's a huge trade imbalance that Modi is seeking to narrow. India imported about $60 billion of goods a year from Russia in the last fiscal year. In comparison, Russia bought less than $5 billion of goods from India.

"The structure of trade is highly asymmetric, with India running a chronic large trade deficit with Russia," Rajiv Biswas, an international economist who's also the author of "Asian Megatrends," told Business Insider.

To be sure, Russia's import of Indian products — particularly engineering and electronic equipment — has surged by 35% over the last fiscal year, added Biswas. But, it's from a low base.

Vinay Kwatra, India's Foreign Secretary, said after Modi and Putin's meeting that the two have pledged to boost bilateral trade from nearly $65 billion last year to $100 billion by 2030.

In addition to oil, India is looking to import more fertilizers. Russia is looking to import more Indian agricultural and industrial products.

On the political front, India — which has been mired in a border dispute with China since 2020 — is also looking to leverage on Beijing's cozy relationship with Moscow.

"Security is an increasingly important factor driving India's relations with Russia," said Biswas.

"Due to Russia's close ties with China, India can turn to Russia to help defuse crises when bilateral geopolitical tensions flare up between India and China," he added.

After all, Putin chose to head to China — rather than to India — in his first foreign state visit in May after he was sworn in for a fifth presidential term.

Xi definitely welcomed Putin; after all, the Chinese leader initiated the hug.

Alfred Perry got word on Labor Day weekend. He'd just thrown one of his signature cookouts in the courtyard of his apartment complex in Las Vegas.

It was the kind of laid-back life he came southwest for. A Chrysler retiree from the Detroit suburbs, Perry enjoyed the warm weather and lights of Vegas as he was driving through over three years ago. He decided to stay. As luck would have it, he said, he had enough left from his pension and Social Security checks when Dan Wright offered him a studio apartment downtown. Perry put down the first month's rent and a deposit and moved in shortly after.

But when a relative told him to come back to the Midwest to handle a family emergency that September of 2022, Perry didn't hesitate. He had paid that month's rent, he said, and set out on the long trek to fetch his 5-year-old son, whose mother was in crisis.

When Perry arrived back home with the boy about a month later, his keys no longer opened the door.

Wright had been having issues with Perry over visitors to his apartment. So Perry was anxious that Wright wanted him out. The night Perry came back in the wee hours, he said, he and his son stayed with a neighbor. The next day, he said, Wright refused to let him back in.

Perry and his son started living out of his Jeep.

Previous convictions for drug possession made finding a new apartment difficult. Months passed with the pair living out of Perry's car. Someone reported the situation to law enforcement, a spokesperson for the North Las Vegas Police Department said, and officers pulled Perry over to do a welfare check on his son. Officers arrested Perry on charges including child neglect and driving without a license and turned his son over to Child Protective Services.

Perry said he spent a year trying to regain custody.

"I take my share of the blame for having my son out there like that," Perry said. "But if Dan hadn't locked me out, I'd still have my son today."

Perry filed a complaint saying Wright had locked him out illegally. That's when a landlord turns off utilities, changes locks, or otherwise keeps tenants from their home without first getting a judge's consent.

Protections against these kinds of extrajudicial evictions date back centuries. Today, lockouts are criminalized in six US states, punishable by imprisonment, and are banned by civil statutes, enforceable by fines and civil suits, in those states and 39 others.

But a Business Insider investigation has found that in cities across the United States, complaints about lockouts are on the rise. Tenants in crisis are mostly stuck calling the police, who rarely take action against property owners who may have broken the law, BI found.

Some police departments even instruct responding officers not to get involved, leaving tenants to face sudden homelessness despite civil and criminal laws intended to protect them from precisely that fate. The absence of a federal law banning lockouts, a patchwork of state laws, the lack of police action, and an uphill battle for tenants in court have together allowed many landlords to lock tenants out with impunity.

The nature of illegal lockouts means they are hard to track directly. To gauge how often they happen, BI reviewed thousands of 911 calls, housing complaints, and court records and found evidence suggesting that illegal lockouts have increased in recent years.

Their rise comes as half of all US renters — more than 22 million households — are facing financial stress over housing costs, spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, a burden that makes it easy to fall behind on rent, and catastrophic to be abruptly thrown out into a tight rental market.

The rise in lockout complaints also came as more investors sought to cash in on residential property management and ownership during the pandemic. Some of them were inexperienced first-time landlords who may have been unfamiliar with landlord-tenant laws. Others were corporations and private-equity firms.

Landlords have a variety of motivations for wanting a tenant out, from unpaid rent to simply not getting along. Even if their reasons are legitimate, landlords in most jurisdictions are required to go to court to seek an eviction and provide a tenant with notice of the eviction filing. Bypassing that system is illegal in most states, whether the landlord's grievance is justified or not.

The lack of due process in a lockout means someone like Perry never gets to show a judge his rent was paid up or prove that he'd followed the rules of his lease. And the lack of notice robs tenants of a window in which to line up alternative housing.

In Perry's case, Wright claimed that Perry left voluntarily, with his possessions. "I know the laws — I don't mess with them," Wright said.

But Wright has a history of wrongful evictions, according to documents from the Las Vegas Justice Court: In 2022, his LLC was ordered to pay back nearly $900 for turning off the electricity on another tenant in Perry's building, and in 2020, he was ordered to restore access to a renter at another property after a judge found he'd illegally removed her.

Of the 2022 case, Wright said one of his employees got "overzealous"; of the other case, he said he'd tried to let the tenant back in.

"Just because tenants file something, it doesn't mean something is true," he said.

A judge never decided who was right in Perry's case. His complaint was tossed on a technicality. He'd missed the window to file.

Tenants and their advocates say lockouts are extraordinarily disruptive. People often miss days of work or lose their job as they prioritize finding somewhere to stay. Children fall behind academically or have to leave school altogether. Losing everything means starting from scratch, straining savings to pay for motels or to replace furniture, clothing, or medications.

"It is such a traumatic thing for a family to be locked out without warning," Charlie Bliss, the director of advocacy at Atlanta Legal Aid, said. "It's the beginning of a real bunch of trouble."

'I'm sick of calling the cops'

Lockouts largely happen out of public view.

But research shows they may be widespread. In 2015 a Princeton sociology professor, Matthew Desmond, surveyed Milwaukee tenants and found a ratio of two informal forced removals to every one where landlords went through a formal court process and got a judge's eviction order.

To piece together how often lockouts occur, BI sought records left in the wake of these illegal eviction attempts from police departments and housing agencies in eight large cities that have a high proportion of renters or tight housing markets, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Las Vegas. We obtained 911 call logs and audio, police reports, bodycam footage, arrest data, and housing complaints.

Lockouts briefly gained visibility during the coronavirus pandemic, as landlords sought to bypass a federal moratorium on evictions. But the expiration of the moratorium has not resulted in the abandonment of these illegal tactics.

Our investigation unearthed hundreds of cases in which data shows that the police did little to nothing when answering emergency calls for help with an illegal eviction.

The landlords rarely faced consequences.

In South Chicago, a landlord was ticketed for changing the locks on a tenant in January 2023; the ticket was tossed and he was let go with a verbal warning. On Christmas Day 2022 in Phoenix, a woman who called 911 said her landlord was hooking up her trailer to his red Chevy truck in an effort to evict her. When the police called her back two hours later, they couldn't reach her. The incident was closed as "no action required."

911 records from the winter of 2022-2023 indicate that a pregnant woman in Jersey City's McGinley Square neighborhood was locked out of her apartment for five days. She said she was stuck doubled up with her grandmother in a local YMCA.

"I'm sick of calling the cops and nobody doing anything," she tells a 911 dispatcher, frustrated after describing her situation multiple times to different police officers and call takers. "I'm freezing, I haven't took my prenatals in days, changed my clothes in days."

The first time she called 911 about being locked out, her landlord said it was because he did not want her dog in the house. He sat in the entrance to the apartment, undeterred by police officers telling him he could be arrested.

Lockouts are a crime in New Jersey. But the officers didn't arrest him or give him a citation, telling him to let the woman inside and take her to court. The landlord locked her out again two months later for four days, she reported to 911. A different pair of officers responded; bodycam footage shows them trying to reach the landlord by phone after the tenant says he's blocked her number. Then, they tell her to get a locksmith. She called 911 again not long after, saying the locksmith had asked for cash but her cash was locked inside her apartment. It was a Catch-22.

Bodycam footage shows an officer again trying to call the landlord, but the call goes straight to voicemail. One of the responding officers calls a sergeant over, who says there's nothing else they can do. Jersey City officials did not respond to requests for comment.

If she breaks back into her own home, the sergeant says, she'll shoulder the risk.

"We're advising against it, but you're a grown woman," one officer tells her. "What you do is what you do — it's on you." Meanwhile, with her uniform locked inside, the Jersey City woman says she missed days of work.

Lockout calls on the rise

In Jersey City, where a residential lockout can result in a criminal misdemeanor, a city clerk said he would be surprised if more than a handful of tenants had called 911 over an illegal lockout. In response to a records request, the same city clerk later identified 90 emergency calls alleging illegal evictions in 2021 and 2022. In Atlanta, a public-information officer at the Atlanta Police Department said officers did not get involved in such cases and initially identified only 13 calls over three years in response to a freedom of information request. They later found more than 2,000 such calls.

The Atlanta police did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.

Of the cities we examined, only Chicago dispatchers had a specific label for 911 calls reporting an illegal lockout — a code that was introduced recently, in 2021. Some departments had categories for landlord-tenant issues, while others lumped calls about wrongful evictions under umbrella terms such as "disturbance." A few cities had no relevant categories at all. In these cities, BI requested service calls to 911 filtered by keywords such as "lock out," "shut off," and "landlord" dating back to at least 2020.

BI excluded calls with sufficient information to show they were not pertinent to a lockout. The analysis shows that calls to the police for help regarding illegal evictions haven't fallen since the federal COVID eviction moratorium was halted by the Supreme Court, in response to a challenge by landlords, in August 2021. Instead they have roughly held steady or increased. In Atlanta, the volume of these calls rose each year from 2020 to 2022. And in Houston, calls mentioning lockout keywords went up from 2021 to 2022.

Tallies based on police calls are likely an undercount, tenant advocates say. Some renters don't know lockouts are illegal; others are hesitant to call the police or report an illegal eviction to the city for a variety of reasons, including distrust of the police.

Data from other agencies showed a similar increase. BI examined more than 41,000 housing complaints from 2020 through 2023 to the Department of Housing in Los Angeles — the same kinds of complaints cited by city council members in 2021 when passing an ordinance to prohibit landlords from using harassment and coercion to force out tenants. We found that these complaints rose 71% from 2020 to 2023. The volume of housing complaints illustrates how difficult it can be to track off-the-book evictions. For 2022, the Los Angeles Police Department turned over about 1,000 calls made to the police with keywords related to illegal lockouts or utility shutoffs. For the same year, complaints to the housing department totaled more than 11,000.

In Nevada, a state law lets tenants who were wrongfully evicted sue their landlord to get back into their unit. The number of such cases in one Las Vegas courts has modestly increased year over year, rising from 300 cases filed in 2020 to 353 in 2023. Texas has a similar law. In Harris County, petitions over lockouts and utility shutoffs — mostly from Houston — nearly doubled from 2019 to 2023, data shows, going from 88 cases to 153.

David Leibowitz, a spokesperson for the Arizona Multi-Housing Association, a group representing landlords and management companies, said that while the association does not condone self-help evictions — another term for a lockout — he didn't know whether the problem is pervasive.

"People call the police for all sorts of reasons," Leibowitz said. "Statistics are hard to come by in the legal circumstances — now you're talking about these illegal situations and it's even harder."

Lockouts by corporate landlords

Advocates for both landlords and tenants say, in their experience, unsophisticated mom-and-pop landlords are more likely to lock out their tenants. Buoyed by low interest rates in 2021, many new investors — perhaps unfamiliar with landlord-tenant law — purchased apartment buildings, only to find that profits had not kept up with debt obligations or the cost of regular maintenance.

But aggressive tactics to remove a resident are not confined to small landlords who may lack familiarity with the law. A congressional investigation into four major corporate landlords published in July 2022 found that they had collectively filed more than 14,000 evictions at the height of the pandemic, despite a federal eviction moratorium. The investigators describe the eviction filings as "aggressive" but not unlawful. Spokespeople for two of the landlords named in the report — Invitation Homes and Pretium — reiterated the latter finding in response to BI's queries.

But Kristi DesJarlais, a spokesperson for Invitation Homes, took issue with the characterization of the company's practices as aggressive. Words like that are not "accurate words to describe a company following a legal process," she said by email.

The investigators also found evidence that one of the companies, The Siegel Group, had engaged in "potentially unlawful practices," including instructing managers to threaten residents with calls to Child Protective Services, replace a functioning air-conditioning unit with a broken one, or threaten to tow their car to get them to move out.

Counsel for The Siegel Group, a real estate investment firm that services multifamily units and extended-stay apartments in several Western states, confirmed in an email to the congressional subcommittee leading the investigation that the company used lockouts instead of evictions in some states.

Sean Thueson, the general counsel for The Siegel Group, said the company's email only confirmed lockouts were used at hotels or motels "under state law that specifically authorize lock outs" and said "each individual property handles its own lock outs / evictions and follows the laws of the specific state."

When asked about specific cases in which tenants were granted judgments after wrongful evictions in Las Vegas, Thueson said that The Siegel Group had been improperly named and bore no responsibility.

In Las Vegas, BI found more than one in three landlords facing illegal-lockout claims are companies, including The Siegel Group and such major players as Progress Residential, the largest corporate landlord in the Nevada county and a subsidiary of the investment firm Pretium, and Invitation Homes, the single-family rental company founded by Blackstone. (Blackstone sold off its remaining shares of the company in 2019.)

BI found a similar pattern in Harris County, home to Houston, where about one in three tenant filings alleging lockouts from 2019 through 2023 named corporate landlords, including Progress Residential. (Some related to commercial tenants.)

Of the complaints against Invitation Homes and Progress Residential, none were upheld, according to justice courts in Texas and Nevada, whether because the lockouts were deemed legal, because no one showed up to a hearing, or because the tenant had been locked out by a family member.

"At no time has Invitation Homes ever evicted a resident without pursuing the action by legal means and obtaining a court order," DesJarlais of Invitation Homes said. "We cannot and will not unilaterally evict a resident from one of our homes."

"Progress Residential complied with applicable laws," a company spokesperson said by email. "Any implication of the contrary is false."

In March, Minnesota's attorney general settled a lawsuit for $2.2 million with Pretium, Progress Residential, and other related companies over chronic disrepair and illegally terminating people's tenancies at hundreds of single-family homes. While Pretium requested to be dismissed from the case, and denied any wrongdoing, Assistant Attorney General Katherine Kelly said there was no question Pretium was involved in the management of the units.

"They knew about it," she said. "They didn't stop it, they let it go on."

Corporate landlords have recently come under fire for other potentially illegal tactics. For example, in the past several months, attorneys general in Arizona and Washington, DC, have sued RealPage over claims it had assisted landlords in systematically jacking up rents above market price, an arrangement state officials described as a "rent-setting cartel."

"The lawsuits are wrong on both the facts and the law," Jennifer Bowcock, a spokesperson for RealPage, said by email. "The complaints are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how revenue management software works and the significant benefits that it offers for residents, property managers, and the rental housing ecosystem as a whole."

Enforcement failures

The right to due process during an eviction is one of the country's oldest laws. Based on English criminal statutes that date back to the 1300s, some American colonies banned extrajudicial eviction tactics even before they formally joined the Union, considering violators a threat to public safety.

At least as far back as the 18th century, courts were involved in the adjudication of landlord-tenant disputes and tended not to support a tenant's immediate eviction, recognizing the hardship it would entail.

"Few things are more likely to lead to a brawl than an evicting landlord, throwing out his tenant by main force," William Prosser, author of the seminal work "Handbook of the Law of Torts," argued in 1941. "The public interest in preserving the peace would seem to justify the temporary inconvenience to the owner."

Today, however, illegal evictions are often left in the hands not of experienced judges but of undertrained police officers who sometimes abysmally fail to protect tenants' rights.

In four of the major metro areas BI examined, agencies explicitly direct tenants to call the police if they're locked out. So does guidance for New Jersey's superior courts.

In Los Angeles, which is governed by a state directive encouraging law enforcement to treat lockouts as a criminal offense, the city's Housing Department website instructs tenants to "call the local police at the closest precinct to help with re-entry." Welcoming Atlanta, a program of the mayor's office in Atlanta, where police typically treat lockouts as civil matters, directs people to "call your non emergency police line and report them as a trespasser," referring to the landlord. "The police officer should tell them that they must leave the property or face charges for criminal trespass."

But even in places where the police are clearly responsible for responding to an illegal eviction and taking action against the landlord, many officers choose not to get involved.

In cities across the nation, calls about a lockout very rarely lead to a police report, BI's analysis shows. For the rest, officers took some other course of action, whether persuading landlords to let a tenant back in, referring the tenant or landlord to another agency — or simply leaving landlords off the hook.

BI reviewed 8,268 911 calls about lockouts received as far back as 2020 in four cities — Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami — that included information on how police departments resolved them. BI also analyzed data on 911 calls in Phoenix from January 2020 through 2023 coded simply as landlord-tenant disputes.

Of 3,600 calls to the police in Chicago from February 2021 to July 2023, 17% led to a police report. Police officers filed even fewer reports elsewhere.

In Phoenix, where lockouts are civil violations, most landlord-tenant 911 calls were tagged as "no action required" and only 14% led to a police report.

Atlanta, Miami, and Houston were in the single digits. In Atlanta, 9% of lockout calls from January 2020 through early 2023 ended in a police report. Houston police officers wrote reports after only 8% of calls from 2021 to early 2023. And Miami police officers wrote reports for 8% of calls in 2022.

Police departments in Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

The Houston Police Department issued a statement saying officers were trained in identifying criminal versus civil matters and officers were guided not to enforce the latter.

A Phoenix police spokesperson, Donna Rossi, said by email that calls about lockouts "could refer to both legal and non-legal situations" and that "police involvement would end if no crime has been committed."

The lack of reports stands in sharp contrast with enforcement of other, often less consequential, property crimes like shoplifting.

Police data from the start of 2020 through the end of 2023 in Phoenix shows an inverse ratio. While only 14% of lockout calls led to a police report, 86% of calls about shoplifting did. The Council on Criminal Justice has found that the median cost of shoplifted goods in 2021 was $100.

Even in Chicago and Los Angeles, where the police are explicitly mandated to stop illegal evictions — up to and including making an arrest — BI found a similar pattern.

From 2020 through the end of 2023, Chicago police officers made eight arrests of landlords accused of illegally locking out tenants. By comparison, they made more than 6,300 arrests of people suspected of shoplifting merchandise worth less than $300 over the same time period.

"If it's illegal to steal a candy bar from a store, why is there seemingly no consequence for turning someone's heat off?" said Sara Heymann, a community organizer in Chicago who advocates on behalf of tenants who are experiencing a lockout.

Though California issued guidance directing law-enforcement agencies to treat illegal eviction as a crime, police officers rarely make arrests, according to LAPD arrest data. BI tallied more than 41,000 housing complaints — which can range from landlords giving insufficient notice in the course of a formal eviction process to landlords locking tenants out or cutting off utilities — from January 2020 through the end of 2023 in Los Angeles. Yet over the same time period, the LAPD arrested only six people under the main statute cited by the attorney general as having to do with an illegal eviction.

An investigation by The City found this pattern in New York City, where the NYPD made just 39 lockout arrests in 2020 and 2021 out of more than 2,600 complaints.

"We respond to the calls as best we can if it's within what we can enforce," an LAPD spokesperson, Detective Meghan Aguilar, told BI, but she declined to answer questions about the department's training on responding to lockout calls and its enforcement of criminal laws banning lockouts.

'What's your plan for tonight?'

Records show relying on the police for help on lockouts is a gamble.

In bodycam footage BI obtained of police responses to 911 calls about illegal evictions, officers' behavior appears almost improvised. Some recognize a lockout as illegal and direct landlords to the courts for a lawful eviction. But others don't appear to know the law, even in states where the police are tasked to uphold it. Some resort to searching the internet for guidance.

In one Jersey City incident in December 2022, a police officer appears to misunderstand a judge's order "staying" a lockout — a decision that the eviction may not be enforced — as meaning the tenant should "stay" locked out.

In another February 2023 case there, a baffled tenant asks officers responding to her 911 call whether her landlord could legally lock her out: Yes, they can, the officer wrongly says. New Jersey law states that even after a legal eviction is granted by a judge, only a court officer can remove the tenant.

Tenants' outcomes vary dramatically according to which officers happen to respond.

In two separate instances in 2021 and 2022, the Jersey City police conducted criminal investigations into landlords accused of locking out tenants or shutting off their utilities. In one case, a landlord cut the building's electrical wiring, leaving multiple families without power, heat, or fire protection for days. He received two court summons for the offenses. In the other, a woman said she came home to a padlock on her door and about $10,000 in missing property, including clothing and appliances. But the police could find no record of an arrest in connection with the event.

Other landlords were let off easy.

In January 2023, a woman identified as Misty Skinner called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department after she and her daughter were locked out of their home in Spring Valley, on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Wearing only a fleece jacket on a day with a low temperature of 34 degrees Fahrenheit, bodycam footage shows Skinner telling police officers her landlord demanded they leave within 24 hours. Scared, she and her daughter left, she says, but now they can't reach the landlord to arrange to gather their belongings, including her daughter's nebulizer.

"What's your plan for tonight?" one of the officers asks her.

"I don't have a plan — this is our plan."

"Do you have a car?"

"No, I do not, or we would be in our car, waiting."

"Do you have money?"

"No, I don't have money, 'cause we spent our money for two nights on a B&B."

Skinner says her landlord, Levi Wilhelm, lives next door. As they walk over, one of the officers tells the other to look up "illegal lockout" on his phone. In the footage, lights are on in the house and cars are in the driveway. But there is no response when officers knock on his door.

"It's gonna be on her," one of the police officers says to his partner.

"So what do we do now?" Skinner says, her voice breaking. "It's not right. It's not fair."

"Do you have any friends?"

"I don't have anybody here," she says, wiping tears from her cheek.

The officers say that since she hasn't been formally evicted, they won't arrest her if she breaks back in, say, with a rock. "I've had these before where we've actually supplied them crowbars from the tac vehicle to get inside their homes," one officer says.

Then the officers think better of her breaking in, expressing concern that Wilhelm could return and become violent.

They approach two neighbors to ask whether they'd let Skinner and her daughter come inside for a couple of hours. When the neighbors refuse, the officers advise Skinner to head to a gas station to warm up and give her a card to document the incident. Nevada has a procedure to let tenants back into their homes quickly in the event of an illegal lockout, but police officers direct her to the wrong agency. Records show the incident was closed that same night without a police report. Wilhelm filed an eviction with the courts 10 days later. He did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

In bodycam footage of another lockout call four months earlier, a different pair of officers respond. This time, the officers coach the tenant on how to break down his door and stand by as he does it. The Las Vegas Metro Police declined to comment.

Police training materials from multiple departments describe their role as keepers of the peace during a lockout, rather than enforcers of the law. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of housing activists in Los Angeles began to break tenants back into their homes before calling the police, since they'd noticed that whoever is inside the residence when the police show up is often the party who will stay inside.

"Folks are left to their own devices as far as getting themselves back in," Jeffrey Uno, managing attorney for the eviction-defense center at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said. "There are punishments on paper, but in reality, they're being ignored."

Training failures

BI found training for police officers on how to respond to a lockout is spotty. Some departments, such as Miami's, said they didn't have any training materials on lockouts.

In Las Vegas, officers are trained on how to identify a squatter and on the criminal charges for breaking into a vacant property, but the guidance makes no mention of the laws surrounding illegal lockouts or the remedies they can offer tenants. Other departments effectively direct cops to turn a blind eye.

The Phoenix Police Department instructs officers to "not take enforcement action" after observing violations to the state's landlord-tenant laws.

The Atlanta Police Department treats calls about evictions as civil matters and tells officers to "not render any aid or assistance in official capacity to either party" in civil disputes.

The Atlanta police declined an interview request, directing BI to the county marshal. Maj. Deirdre Orange, a spokesperson for the Fulton County Marshal's Department, said marshals don't get involved in any eviction that isn't ordered by a judge.

In Avondale, Arizona, a policy manual says cops are to "persuade" people to comply with the law when it comes to tenant-landlord violations, but not to make any arrests.

But Daniel Benavidez, a community resource officer with the Avondale Police Department, said officers are trained to identify criminal behavior when responding to these calls. "One of our roles is to make sure that people are protected in their homes," he said.

"If someone removes someone from a home without lawful authority, that would be kidnapping," he clarified. "It could be stealing, it could be criminal damage, it can be criminal impersonation, fraudulent scheme. It could be any type of crime."

In a subsequent email, Sgt. Jenny Chavez said the department referred callers complaining of lockouts to the county constable.

In at least one case, police training openly undercuts state law-enforcement directives.

In July 2022, the California attorney general issued new guidelines on the illegality of lockouts to police departments and sheriffs statewide, directing officers to tell landlords to let tenants back into their homes. The state doesn't have a law explicitly criminalizing lockouts, but the bulletin emphasizes that lockouts violate other criminal laws and directs officers to "intervene to enforce the law and stop self-help evictions."

Nevertheless, an LAPD training bulletin, updated just two months after the AG bulletin, tells the police that while tenants behind on their rent will "very often" be locked out by their landlords, "officers lack the legal authority to demand that the landlord allow re-entry to the tenant."

A spokesperson for California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, did not make him available for an interview. The LAPD declined to comment on its training bulletin in light of the AG's guidance.

Only one department, in Jersey City, turned over training materials that detail how to enforce lockout laws. BI separately obtained a Chicago police training video, in which Eric Carter, then the first deputy superintendent, lays out that the police department "can use its authority to compel landlords to end unlawful threats or actions."

"Officers can and should respond to lockout complaints," John Bartlett, the executive director of the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, says in the video. "It is a common misunderstanding that lockouts, like most landlord and tenant disputes, are a civil matter in which the police cannot intervene. That is not the case."

"Both landlords and tenants are suffering through hard times, and the temptation to resort to unlawful threats and actions has never been greater," Carter says in the video.

A patchwork of laws

Complicating matters is a patchwork of disparate states laws governing what constitutes an illegal eviction — and the penalties for violating the law.

In Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, no laws are in place that explicitly ban lockouts. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York, lockouts are a crime carrying penalties of up to six months in jail; with the attorney general's directive, California became a sixth state with criminal penalties.

State law in New Jersey establishes that even a landlord's verbal threats can be criminal. Delaware, on the other hand, one of 39 states with only civil penalties for lockouts, bans only landlords' removal or exclusion of tenants from their home without a court order.

Even within states, definitions vary on what constitutes an illegal eviction.

While Illinois forbids landlords from tampering with utilities, the city of Chicago goes further, forbidding landlords from threatening a tenant with removal, attempting to keep a tenant from their home, or "incapacitating" appliances unless it is to fix them.

A 2006 bill that would have defined illegal lockouts for all Illinois residents was defeated.

In the 39 states where lockouts are only a civil infraction, landlords could be subject to fines and locked-out tenants may sue to recoup their losses. Texas has a uniquely complex statute on the books that prohibits lockouts only under very particular circumstances.

That Texas statute allows some landlords to lawfully change the locks or withhold electricity, for instance, as long as they have a signed lease that outlines this power and the tenants are behind on their rent. But landlords can't cut off a tenant's electricity if the National Weather Service projects a high temperature of less than 32 Fahrenheit. And it's too hot to cut off electricity if there has been a heat advisory within the past two days.

The law also states tenants can contest an electricity shutoff with a note from a health provider saying someone will suffer serious illness because of it, but that note is only good for up to 63 days.

After a legal lockout, Texas landlords must provide the new key upon request.

"Not all the landlords who do it, do it correctly," Fred Fuchs, an attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said of the law. "That other states don't allow this or that doesn't get you very far in Texas."

Calls for greater enforcement

During the depths of COVID, there was a brief moment of consensus among federal officials on the importance of housing stability.

In March 2021, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen introduced a bill in the House that would have standardized the need to go to court for an eviction nationwide during a national emergency — and set civil penalties if landlords did not comply. The act reflected a pandemic-era recognition of how important it was to public health to keep people housed. But it stalled in committee.

A year later, an effort led by Senate Democrat Michael Bennet to fund data collection on lockouts similarly stalled.

Even in the face of congressional inaction, Sarah Saadian, a policy expert with the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says there's room for federal regulators to step in. Both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission, she said, have a mandate to monitor abusive consumer practices and could "focus more explicitly on renters."

In fact a White House Blueprint for a Renters' Bill of Rights released in January 2023 notes that the FTC was exploring ways to expand its authority and "take action against acts and practices that unfairly prevent consumers from obtaining and retaining housing."

Douglas Farrar, the director of public affairs at the FTC, declined to comment on any new enforcement measures. The CFPB also declined to comment.

Kelly, Minnesota's assistant attorney general, said state AGs could step up in enforcing tenant laws. "Every state has the authority to protect consumers," she said.

Fuchs from the legal clinic in Texas suggested that better police training could make a difference — as could solutions that don't depend on the police at all. Other states could learn from the model in Texas, he said, where locked-out tenants can file a complaint with a local justice court to quickly regain access to their home. Other tenant advocates said guaranteeing the right to counsel would help tenants assert their rights.

Heymann, the Chicago community organizer, said she'd like to see education and oversight efforts targeting private landlords as well as an increased investment in public housing. She suggested landlords who've been found to have locked people out should face mandatory classes, or sanctions if they're repeat offenders — including barring them from renting at all.

"Housing should not be dependent on some random person," she said, "who gets no training whatsoever."

In April 2022, a young aspiring permanent makeup artist named Henisha Dunn rented a basement unit in Atlanta's Venetian Hills neighborhood from an old middle-school acquaintance who lived on the home's first floor. The damp, poorly lit unit wasn't ideal for Dunn and her fiancé, but the couple had a baby on the way and the rent was much cheaper than anything they could find in the city.

Problems quickly emerged.

"We noticed leaking four days after we moved in," Dunn said. After making some inadequate repairs, she said, their landlord, a woman named Zion Griffin, refused to do any more work and instead tried to get them to leave.

Griffin tried everything to get rid of the young couple, repeatedly filing for eviction in court and then pursuing informal, in some cases illegal, tactics to get them out. By October, one of those tactics was blocking the couple's rent payments, an email Dunn shared with BI shows.

Griffin then hired an attorney, who wrote to Dunn that Griffin would agree to forgive all of the back rent for $2,000, later $1,200, if the couple agreed to leave. If they didn't take the deal, the attorney wrote, Dunn's family could have their electricity cut off.

"It is in everyone's best interests for you to agree to move out," the attorney wrote, adding that the power would be "disconnected for non-payment" if Griffin "does not obtain the funds to pay it."

One afternoon in February 2023, Dunn and her fiancé were watching TV while their infant daughter took a nap. She heard the sound of a circuit break, a "voom," and then silence. Everything went dark.

"What the hell was that?" Dunn remembers saying.

The illegal pressure tactic worked. As their groceries spoiled in the refrigerator, Dunn said, the young family stayed first with relatives, then in a hotel, returning to their rental only to care for their dog, Poppa. Meanwhile, Griffin filed a third eviction in April 2023, court records show.

(Reached by phone, Griffin denied breaking the law in seeking to evict Dunn and her family, saying they had not paid for their portion of the electrical bill. She did not answer a follow-up email with detailed questions.)

Evictions require a judge's sign-off in most states, including Georgia. Strong-arm tactics like cutting off power or changing the locks to get rid of a tenant are against the law in almost every state. Even so, few states offer tenants easy remedies for reversing an illegal ouster, a Business Insider investigation has found.

In most states, locked-out tenants have no recourse but to sue their landlord over an illegal removal, if they hope to recover the costs of losing all their possessions and abruptly becoming homeless. So after the shutoff, Dunn set out to try to find a lawyer.

What she didn't know is that even a win in court might not mean she could get back into her home — or reach a settlement large enough to help her find a new one.

'What's the worst I'm going to owe?'

Business Insider pored over state laws regarding evictions, and found that 45 states have statutes that bar landlords from locking tenants out without first going before a judge. Five states, such as New Jersey and Minnesota, explicitly make lockouts a crime punishable by fines or jail time; California has an attorney general directive that accomplishes the same thing. A handful of states, including Texas and Nevada, have set up dedicated systems designed to restore tenants to their homes after an illegal lockout. In most states, however, lockouts are only a civil violation, enforced by fines or the prospect of paying a court judgment.

That means for most tenants across the country, like Dunn, their only official recourse is to sue.

The hurdles are extensive.

Data from the 2021 American Housing Survey indicates that many renters would struggle to pay for an attorney. While homeowners had an average household income of $78,000, renters had an average household income of nearly half that — $41,000. Few attorneys will take cases on contingency, tenant advocates said — an agreement in which attorneys get paid only if they win a case — as many states don't guarantee that lawyers can recoup fees in illegal-eviction cases. And data from the Department of Justice shows that fewer than half of those who seek pro bono representation for civil suits through legal aid organizations receive it.

"It's a barrier to even get to court," said Caryn Schreiber, a housing attorney who has represented tenants in New Jersey and New York.

Damages in lockout cases are often small — capped by state law in proportion to the cost of lost possessions or temporary stays, or capped at two or three months' rent. Tenants' damaged or stolen possessions may not be worth a large amount of money, and the lost wages for days of missed work caused by a lockout may not be high.

"The landlords who are doing this intentionally are doing a cost-benefit analysis," Paul Panusky, an Atlanta attorney, said, "thinking to themselves, what's the worst I'm going to owe?"

Panusky has represented dozens of tenants in wrongful-eviction suits. His most successful cases, he said, have involved six-figure settlements, a large enough penalty to offer real deterrence for a landlord. He's been able to recoup those amounts in part because landlord-tenant laws in Georgia, which don't explicitly ban lockouts, also don't set specific limits for damages related to an improper eviction. Other states explicitly ban lockouts, but cap damages at very small amounts: In Nevada, tenants are awarded actual damages, plus up to $2,500. Michigan sets it as three times actual damages or $200, whichever is greater.

Jeffrey Uno, the managing attorney for the eviction defense center at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said that he counsels locked-out tenants that lawsuits can be lengthy and costly and may not solve the immediate problem of a place to live.

"Where are people going to cook, sleep, to take their medicine?" Uno said. "What happens to your memorabilia, your old pictures? Those things matter."

David Brogan, the executive director of the New Jersey Apartment Association, a group representing landlords, property managers, and developers, said his members would not engage in illegal lockouts because of the state's protective tenant laws. "To be a landlord in New Jersey," he said, "I'd recommend you fully understand the law, because it's at your own peril if you don't."

For Dunn, the electricity shutoff was a turning point. She tried to find a lawyer but couldn't afford the fee. An Atlanta Legal Aid attorney offered Dunn some guidance, but she said the organization was overwhelmed with cases and couldn't take hers.

Meanwhile, Griffin's third eviction attempt was granted, court records show. Still without a lawyer, in disbelief the judge had awarded her nothing, Dunn filed an appeal, again bringing up the unrepaired water leaks and electricity cutoff.

This time, the court found the utility shutoff was tantamount to an illegal eviction. A judge awarded her $250 for it and $1,000 for the landlord's lack of repairs. But her eviction was still granted. What the couple received didn't even cover the amount of rent the court said Griffin was due.

The ordeal was draining, Dunn said, especially with a new baby in tow. She and her family still don't have a new apartment, she said, and the eviction cases on her record don't help.

"I feel like the judicial system failed us," she said.

Few tickets, fewer fines

Some cities offer more significant protections than state laws require. BI looked at how eight major cities with a high density of renters handle illegal lockouts and found only one, Chicago, that uses municipal fines as a way to discourage landlords from breaking these laws.

There, where more than half of the city's residents are renters, a residential lockout is a municipal violation and the police can issue tickets, similar to a traffic infraction.

Those citations are processed by the city's administrative hearings department. If sustained, they result in a fine paid out to the city, commonly about $500.

But such outcomes are rare.

BI reviewed two years' worth of lockout cases from the department and found city lawyers routinely dismissed tickets, often without documenting why.

Some citations were dismissed because of paperwork errors. Others were thrown out because the tenant did not attend the hearing, a common occurrence. Administrative law judges — lawyers contracted by the city to rule on the cases — often spent less than two minutes on each ticket and sometimes appeared unfamiliar with relevant city law.

Records show most final hearings are held more than a month after a lockout occurs, long after the tenants would have been forced to find a new place to live.

No part of the fine ever goes to the tenants. And the judges don't have the power to order a tenant restored to their home. For damages, as in other locales, the tenant has to sue.

From the first day they began tracking the phenomenon in February 2021 through March 2023, the Chicago police received more than 3,000 calls complaining of illegal lockouts. Police officers ticketed only 79 landlords over that time period, according to data from Chicago's hearing department.

More than half of those tickets were thrown out. In the end, landlords were found guilty of locking out their tenants seven times over those two years. Fifteen other landlords were fined after failing to appear.

That means in Chicago only about one in every 140 lockout calls results in a fine.

In January last year, for example, a police officer ticketed a landlord for switching the locks to the front door in his six-unit building. Four months later, the owner attended a hearing where the citation was thrown out at the request of the city.

Chicago's hearings department did not provide documentation of why city lawyers dropped the case, and the administrative judge didn't ask, according to audio of the hearing. Instead, he issued a weak warning to the landlord to follow the law.

"I know you like to do certain things, but you just stick to the landlord-tenant ordinance, OK?"

The office of Chicago's mayor, Brandon Johnson, which oversees both the hearings department and the city attorneys who appear there, did not respond to requests for comment.

The case of one landlord, Rolando Quebrado, illustrates how ineffective the tickets are in deterring landlord lockouts. Quebrado was cited at least twice in 2021 over illegal evictions in Chicago's Jefferson Park neighborhood. The first time, a police officer wrote a ticket for illegally changing locks. About three weeks later, an officer wrote another ticket because Quebrado turned off the electricity at the same duplex.

The administrative judge dismissed both citations because the officers did not write the date of the hearing clearly.

"This is the second citation in a row for the same person where the only scribble, the only problem, the only illegible section is the date of the hearing," the administrative judge said. "Either they deliberately are trying to make certain that the respondent shows up on the wrong date … or they're deliberately giving the respondent an out of being found not liable."

Quebrado said the tickets were a big misunderstanding. He said he had recently purchased the home, not intending to become a landlord to the family living in the basement.

He said that he changed the locks only because he didn't know which keys corresponded to which door, and that the basement electricity was cut off by accident when he registered meters for the home's other floors with the electric company.

"I should have done more research," Quebrado said. But he said he had a young family of his own and felt overwhelmed.

"That was me not being knowledgeable about being a landlord," he said.

Chicago has also repeatedly cited big landlords. One of them, Pangea, which is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit over unsafe conditions and disrepair at hundreds of properties in the city, was ticketed for locking out tenants at least three times in recent years. (Pangea has denied the claims in the suit and declined to comment to BI on legal matters.)

For Troy Marr, the words an officer chose when issuing his landlord a ticket became a sticking point at his hearing.

Marr's access to his building's common areas was cut off through an app in November, leaving him unable to get into the lobby, garage, or elevator. He had a physical key to his 22nd-floor apartment in a swanky new building in River North, but he found himself in the bizarre situation of having to follow other tenants inside or wait for the concierge to escort him in.

He called the Chicago police multiple times, Marr said. An officer issued a ticket to the building's management company, then Common Living, but only after he took a trip to his local precinct and talked to a sergeant, Marr said.

"Building access was terminated without court process," an officer wrote, telling Common Living's James Byczek to restore Marr's access.

Byczek told the administrative judge at the hearing that there had been no lockout, a claim he repeated to BI.

"How is it a lockout if he is in and out of his unit?" Byczek said.

After briefly questioning whether he had jurisdictional standing, the administrative law judge, Michael Dudek, sided with Common Living. He wasn't convinced Marr had been locked out for several days, pointing out that the lone police ticket didn't mention the chronic access problems that had preceded it.

"Maybe it's a little inconvenient," Dudek said of Marr's tortured access to his unit. "Did he get kicked out? No way."

Marr was flabbergasted by the result. (He separately filed a lawsuit against his landlord over the lockout, which remains pending. According to the building's website, Common Living no longer manages the property.)

"This is not deterring landlords," he said of Chicago's ticketing process. "I'm a tenant. They're a landlord. I can't get to my unit now. Black and white, that's it."

A quick relief option in Nevada

Business Insider visited Las Vegas, where tenants have a pathway to fight lockouts that's not dependent on the police. The state of Nevada has a system of justice courts in which a tenant can file a petition for "expedited relief" after an illegal lockout or utility disconnection.

The system is designed to offer quick results. But tenants have to move fast, too. By statute, they have at most eight working days to file a complaint and get an independent third party to serve notice to their landlord. In Las Vegas, tenants need to have an email address to make an electronic filing.

Last fall, Hearing Master David Brown presided over hearings BI attended virtually and in person at Las Vegas' Regional Justice Center. The sounds of fidgeting children, crying babies, and the occasional snore would sometimes rise above hushed chatter. During one early-November court session, locked-out tenants who filed for expedited relief waited for nearly an hour for their cases to get called: Landlords' formal eviction cases were heard in the same courtroom and got called first.

In front of the judge, two long tables with placards reading "tenant/defendant" and "landlord/plaintiff" hinted at how the courts are dominated by landlords seeking evictions — rather than tenants seeking redress.

That afternoon, Brown had three cases on his docket in which tenants were alleging they'd been illegally locked out and dozens of cases in which landlords were seeking formal evictions.

Nearly two hours in, Brown started calling the lockout complaints. Brown denied one because the tenant hadn't properly served her landlord, which he said violated the landlord's due-process rights.

The woman offered up that she had been in the hospital and her home was infested with mold. Brown cut her off:

"Ma'am, you're starting to testify," he said. "Today I only can proceed if there is a hearing."

Another case met the same fate. That tenant, also a woman, said she had asked the constable to serve her landlord but had been turned away.

Brown countered that she should have found another way to serve her landlord. The woman was desperate and tried to plead her case.

"I have texts of them saying they'll throw my stuff away," she said. Brown simply directed her to the courthouse's self-help legal center, a sort of help desk.

The woman was in tears afterward and told BI she would likely sleep on the streets that night.

"It's a hard statute because of the timing," Brown told BI after the hearing. "Sometimes tenants don't know what they're doing."

BI requested data on filings for relief after an illegal eviction since 2019 in the Las Vegas Justice Court. To gauge how often tenants prevailed by filing lockout complaints, BI analyzed the outcomes for 67 cases, a 5% sample. Out of those 67 cases, BI identified 11 petitions where relief was granted, compared with 56 that were denied or dismissed.

According to details the courts provided, the most common reason tenant complaints were set aside was tenants failing to file on time or improperly serving their landlords. Others were denied or dismissed over lack of sufficient proof, or because the hearing master judged them irrelevant — such as a flooded unit that didn't constitute a lockout. In seven of the complaints BI sampled, the removals were deemed legal after all.

BI observed similar patterns in court. One woman filed the wrong court form. Another gave notice of the hearing by email, which the judge didn't consider valid. A third tenant was unaware of the requirement to serve notice.

A few tenants did receive help. Two family members were able to stay in their home and won a $600 rent reduction after their landlord admitted to locking a gate to their rental. Two other landlords were ordered to let their tenants back in.

No anti-lockout judgment precludes a landlord from pursuing a legal eviction later.

Brown heard the case of a woman whose landlord had sent a maintenance worker to change her locks while her 11-year-old daughter was home alone. The landlord had started the eviction process, the judge noted, but shouldn't have changed the locks prematurely. He ruled in the woman's favor and ordered the landlord to change the locks back.

"You haven't been removed, so I guess that's the good news," Brown said. "And I guess I'll see you when the case comes before the court."

The modest penalties appear to have done little to dissuade landlords from locking tenants out. BI's analysis of data from the Las Vegas Justice Court found at least 100 landlords who faced multiple lockout complaints from 2019 through 2023.

A streamlined system in Texas

Business Insider examined another state — Texas — where tenants can file an emergency petition to reenter their home after an illegal eviction, in this case by getting something called a writ of reentry. The Texas process has a key advantage for tenants: They're not burdened with having to serve their landlord before a justice of the peace can make a ruling on their case. The landlord doesn't even have to be present, though they can later contest the findings.

BI requested data from 2019 through 2023 on such filings in Harris County, where Houston is the county seat. We received 742 tenant petitions (some of them filed by commercial tenants) and analyzed the outcomes as of March 1. Of those, 326 cases — nearly half — showed residential tenants were granted an order to get back into their home or their landlords were ordered to turn their utilities back on.

These orders ranged from judgments for tenants of less than $200 — to cover the cost of filing and serving their landlords — to same-day orders to let tenants back into their homes.

In one case, constable officers tried on more than one day to contact property managers to get a tenant back in. In another, a tenant's successful petition to have her electricity turned back on resulted in fixes to other units as well.

Dana Karni, the litigation director at Lone Star Legal Aid in Houston, said few locked out tenants know they can ask a justice court for help.

"For every illegal lockout where a tenant actually stands on his or her rights, there are multiple lockouts where a tenant has no idea they have rights," Karni said.

And there is little evidence that these outcomes were enough to deter landlords from future lockouts. BI found that at least 26 landlords were sued repeatedly over claims of illegal lockouts, a likely undercount given that landlords are named in a variety of ways.

Brooke Boyett, a spokesperson for Harris County's Office of County Administration, declined to comment on the efficacy of the system in dissuading landlords from locking out tenants, referring BI to the court, but noted that the county has put $9 million in COVID recovery funds toward eviction defense. The county's court management office declined to comment.

As with Nevada, a Texas landlord can file for a lawful eviction at any time, even after a justice court determines they illegally locked out their tenant. An eviction order overrides one to restore a locked-out tenant to their home.

Marlon Coleman thought filing a complaint would be his ticket back into his apartment. But he was wrong.

Coleman said his property manager, Texas Excel Property Management, cut his electricity in the middle of a Houston summer. With temperatures climbing to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Coleman left his place in the Greater Inwood neighborhood to stay with family. When he returned a couple of days later, in the evening, his apartment locks were changed, he said, and there was a note from property management saying they would consider the unit abandoned. Coleman's bed, his TV, and most of his clothes, he said, were gone.

Coleman called 911. But when the police arrived, he said, they didn't even get out of their squad car, saying there was nothing they could do. Records show his call was closed as civil the same night.

Shay Awosiyan, a spokesperson for the Houston Police Department, said Coleman was directed to the "best avenue" after he called. "Mr. Coleman was provided the phone number for the constable's office," Awosiyan said. "Our officer was out there, helped him out, and provided information to him."

Coleman said he confronted property managers at Excel's Villa Nueva apartments the next day.

"They couldn't give me an explanation," Coleman said. "To be done like this, it's ridiculous."

He filed a petition with the court alleging he'd been illegally locked out, asking a judge to order the landlord to let him back in. On the day of his court appearance, he said, a woman representing the landlord told him he'd get a key and a chance to get back his furniture and his other possessions.

Coleman's complaint was voluntarily dismissed.

But Coleman said he was never let back into his unit.

Texas Excel, which manages Villa Nueva Apartments, confirmed Coleman was no longer living at the building but did not respond to additional queries.

Leaving the burden on tenants

Schreiber, the housing attorney, said housing remedies for tenants are fundamentally flawed. They're not strong enough to deter landlords from locking out tenants. They rarely result in what tenants most want: getting back into their apartments. And they depend entirely on tenants taking legal action on their own behalf in the midst of a crisis.

"There needs to be a shift away from burdening tenants with the responsibility to prove they are entitled to habitable condition, access to their homes," she said. "Someone's right to property isn't greater than someone's right to a home."

Some cities and counties have sought to strengthen protections against evictions in recent years, only to face a backlash.

In 2022, Miami-Dade County passed a tenant's bill of rights that underlines the illegality of lockouts and limits a landlord's ability to harass tenants. It also bars landlords from requiring a prospective tenant to disclose their eviction history on a rental application.

The following March, a Republican state senator, Jay Trumbull, introduced a preemption bill specifically to undercut it.

"One of the more egregious local ordinances happens to be in Miami-Dade County," Trumbull said on the Senate floor. He had the backing of the local real-estate lobby, Florida Realtors, who have said local laws risk discouraging development and worsening rental costs.

"We supported both of those bills due to their emphasis on the protection of private property rights, which is a priority of our organization," Tom Butler, a spokesperson for Florida Realtors, told BI.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law last June.

In Houston, where Coleman was locked out, the city council can't easily enact a law to help tenants like him, either.

Texas lawmakers followed Florida's lead in dissolving municipal tenant protections by passing a far-reaching preemption law that nullifies local regulations on not only housing, but also labor, agriculture, finance, and natural resources, if they're inconsistent with state law.

The bill's backers argued that it simplified a patchwork of local laws. Detractors called it the "Death Star bill."

Dallas and Austin had in recent years passed protections for tenants that included the right to remedy a lease violation or late payment before an eviction is filed. A last-minute amendment took aim at them, explicitly barring local laws that "prohibit, restrict or delay" an eviction.

Houston city attorneys challenged the state law, arguing for the right of Texas cities to govern themselves, and a district judge agreed that the law was unconstitutional. But that decision is stayed pending appeal, so the new state law went into effect in September.

Since Coleman's failed attempt to reverse the lockout, he has been staying with an uncle in Houston, working at Applebee's as a server.

Like Dunn, the Atlanta mother, he must also contend with a recent eviction on his record. Coleman was unaware, until BI told him, that after locking him out, Texas Excel filed a suit for his official eviction.

Court documents hint at why he'd been unaware of the filing. A server noted they couldn't make contact with him because his apartment door had a "lock-out device on it."

The eviction was still granted.

It was a Tuesday afternoon just after Labor Day weekend in 2020 and a flurry of 911 calls were coming in to Dekalb County police dispatchers from the Efficiency Lodge.

One man called to report that armed security guards were being aggressive toward long-staying residents at the motel in Panthersville, a community just southeast of Atlanta.

Then a woman called, saying she lived in unit 118, to report that "people are being kicked out, illegally evicted without notice."

Another woman called in concerned about the security guards with guns. "Somebody needs to come take control of this, because it's getting ridiculous," she said in the recording.

Dekalb County police officers arrived on the scene. Though they'd responded to the panicked calls of residents, the officers described them as suspects.

Officers interviewed two motel residents who called 911; they said they did not want to leave their homes. In the police report, the residents were not referred to as tenants, even though some had lived there for over a year. Instead they were recorded as "guest/suspect" and "offender." Their alleged debts, down to the cent, were listed next to their names: one woman owed $2,508.70; one man $2,468.00. The report noted that the motel staff had previously warned those who were behind on their rent that they would change the locks on their units — and were now proceeding to do so.

In this and other cases, whether a person qualifies as a tenant would prove crucial.

In Georgia, an eviction requires a court order, but the law doesn't explicitly make lockouts illegal. In this case, an officer classified the incident as a "crime against property" — a crime committed by the residents themselves.

A Business Insider investigation has found that in cities across the United States, complaints about illegal lockouts are on the rise. Most states require landlords to seek a judge's approval before removing a tenant, a process that gives tenants a chance to plead their case — and offers them notice if an eviction is approved. But court filings and 911 calls BI obtained from several major cities record tenants complaining of landlords bypassing the legal process, instead resorting to tactics such as changing the locks or cutting off utilities to get them out.

People in informal housing arrangements are particularly vulnerable to lockouts, housing advocates say, because laws in many states leave them out of tenant protections. And a recent wave of anti-squatter laws, in states including Florida, Kentucky and Georgia risks muddling tenants' right to due process, advocates say.

"Any time somebody doesn't have formal legal protections they're at risk of others taking advantage of that," said Eric Tars, the senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center.

An outreach worker, Marshall Rancifer from the Justice for All Coalition, arrived at the Efficiency Lodge that afternoon, hoping to halt the removals. He called 911 to report the lockouts, claiming they violated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new COVID emergency order banning evictions. Then someone from the hotel called 911 to report that Rancifer was engaging in obstruction.

Police officers returned to the motel, where the showdown had escalated. Rancifer had by then been joined by members of the community group Housing Justice League and local journalists. By the end of the day, Larry Johnson, then a DeKalb County commissioner, had called on Atlanta Legal Aid to get involved.

"When I got over there, I was like in a war zone," Johnson said. "I saw people with vests on with guns. I saw people outside scrambling around and it was just so surreal." In the midst of it all, he recalled seeing a young girl playing quietly with her toy kitchen set.

"They kicked out about two dozen families that night," said Lindsey Siegel, an attorney who worked on the case for Atlanta Legal Aid. "It was a traumatic event for the community."

"DeKalb County botched this," she said.

Millions of rental gray zones

Traumatic events like this are playing out across the nation, as ambiguous housing arrangements have become more common in the face of a national affordable-housing crisis. Half of all renters in the US spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities — a benchmark used to gauge affordability — pushing more people into less traditional modes of housing. Lacking a traditional written lease or other documentation of their status as renters, these tenants exist in legal gray zones.

A 2019 survey of extended-stay motels in one Atlanta suburb, called "When Extended Stay Becomes Home," found that roughly a third catered mainly to travelers; the rest were primarily residential. And nearly two-thirds of the residential tenants surveyed said they had stayed there for a year or more.

Data from the US Department of Education shows that during the 2021-2022 school year, nearly 107,000 students reported hotels or motels as a primary nightly residence. More than 900,000 reported living doubled up — meaning they were staying with family or friends without being named on a lease.

Hundreds of thousands of other US families live in unpermitted units, making it difficult to exercise their rights as tenants. A 2008 report from the Pratt Center for Community Development estimated 114,000 illegal rentals, such as basement apartments and rooming houses, in New York City alone; in 2014, a researcher at UCLA estimated 50,000 illegal backyard or garage units just in the city of Los Angeles. A 2020 report from Freddie Mac identified approximately 1.4 million so-called accessory dwelling units nationwide, with the vast majority likely unpermitted.

Others in search of housing have settled long-term into Airbnbs.

Even in locales with more protective laws, tenants in informal or unpermitted housing situations may think twice about rocking the boat, said Harrison Bohn, an attorney at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.

"The hardest part about people who live in these really odd lease scenarios of either renting a room or renting a couch," he said, "is that if you do want to start a process of enforcing your rights, you are disrupting that relationship with your landlord."

The tagline of the Efficiency Lodge is "stay a nite or stay forever." But residents, even longtime residents, had to sign a contract stating they were not tenants. For some, the motel was their only home. The property's address was listed on residents' IDs; school buses made stops at the motel to fetch children.

"Many of them were never intended to be people's homes," Charlie Bliss, another Atlanta Legal Aid attorney who worked on the Efficiency Lodge case, said of long-stay motels. "They're the home of last resort because there is not affordable housing."

Some states, such as Nevada and California, spell out when a resident earns tenant status — after, say, 30 days. But Georgia's regulations leave room for ambiguity. According to rules governing hotels and motels, the state stops collecting hotel taxes after 30 days, at which point a rental becomes an "extended stay," but those rules are silent on whether the renter gains the protections of landlord-tenant laws. A statute defining the landlord-tenant relationship is vague, saying it begins "when the owner of real estate grants to another person, who accepts such grant, the right simply to possess and enjoy" it.

Asked about how the police handled the lockouts at the Efficiency Lodge that day in September 2020, a Dekalb County spokesperson, Andrew Cauthen, said in an email that while officers told two people they were trespassing, they "were not arrested or required to leave."

Brandon Turner, the president of Natson Hotel Group, said his company had acquired this and other Efficiency Lodge properties in 2022. He declined to comment on an incident that took place prior to the purchase.

'It can't be obvious that people live here'

Darlene DeLaRoca was actually hopeful when she attended her own eviction hearing.

That day in November 2023, she thought she'd get a chance to expose what she saw as her landlord's illegal pressure tactics. Instead, she found herself out of a home in a matter of minutes.

DeLaRoca and her partner, Mike Rausch, had been renting backyard space on their landlord's property in unincorporated Clark County, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, for at least three months at that point. After living out of their truck for a few months, the couple said they traded it for a motor home that, even if it wouldn't run, got them closer to stability.

They invested over a thousand dollars to move, the couple said: from the cost of towing the motor home to paying the deposit for the backyard space and buying a special extension cord to plug into the electricity in a shed behind the house.

"It was all worth it," Rausch said. "It was getting us a home and getting us power and off the streets."

The two lived in the backyard with their dogs and, they said, five other trailers of families who shared the space.

They had found the listing for the lot on Facebook and, at the time, considered it a godsend because of how close the location was to Rausch's work at Harry Reid International Airport's car-return center, less than an hour's walk away.

The couple used a rented U-Haul as their main form of transport. As they were driving back from a Walmart run one day, DeLaRoca said, police officers stopped them in front of the landlord's house, saying the U-Haul had been reported as stolen. The couple, it turned out, had failed to return it on time.

Once officers walked into the property's backyard and saw their living arrangement, DeLaRoca said, the couple's relationship with their landlord, a man named Luis Barraza, soured.

After that, Barraza told them they had to leave.

In a subsequent recording reviewed by BI, DeLaRoca asks for a receipt for $300 she had paid toward her monthly rent. In the recording, a man she identified as Barraza tells her others haven't asked for receipts and he won't give her one. After telling him that she's recording, DeLaRoca asks why he wants them out.

"We established some rules," the man tells her. "One thing I said is that it can't be obvious that people live here." In unincorporated Clark County, where the property is located, operating a short-term rental without a license is illegal.

Barraza cut off their power, DeLaRoca said, blaming a code inspection. County records show inspectors had visited the property after receiving an anonymous complaint that the owner was using his land for short-term rentals; photos they took document at least half a dozen mobile homes there.

But the records make no note of inspectors asking for utilities to be discontinued.

"Code Enforcement did not order utilities to be disconnected in this case," Stacey Welling, a spokesperson for Clark County, said by email. She said that "it was a violation of County Code to reside in an RV on the property" but that Barraza was not fined.

Barraza did not respond to a request for comment.

When DeLaRoca brought up the utility disconnection during her November hearing in the Las Vegas Justice Court, she hoped her landlord would be held accountable.

Hearing Master David Brown told her their situation wasn't a normal tenancy, she said. But he still issued a "no cause" eviction order; in Nevada, landlords don't have to name a reason. DeLaRoca and Rausch had 10 days to move out.

Landlords are generally given wide leeway to use the eviction process even for people not strictly considered tenants, according to Eric Dunn, the director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project.

"Even if the property is not a space that somebody should be living in, if the landlord is seeking to remove the person from it, then you want them to at least go to court," he said.

A debate over what constitutes a tenant

The battle over the Efficiency Lodge lasted for years.

Lawyers at Atlanta Legal Aid filed suit in 2020 on behalf of three former residents who were locked out of the motel: Armetrius Neason, who had lived there continuously since 2016 before falling behind on his payments in 2020; Lynetrice Preston, who had lived there with two of her children and a grandchild for two years, when she fell behind on her weekly payments after her pandemic employment benefits ran out; and Altonese Weaver, who lived at the motel for a total of 11 months prior to being locked out in July 2020 after she fell behind on her weekly payments, with all of her possessions locked inside.

The case largely centered on the ambiguity in Georgia state law: whether the residents were tenants or merely guests. The Legal Aid lawyers argued that their clients had made a life at the motel and that it was illegal to evict them without going before a judge. "When you leave families susceptible to being locked out of their only home with no notice at the whim of a landlord, that's a very troubling situation," Bliss said. "It creates the possibility of abuse and exploitation."

The Efficiency Lodge had high-powered representation — former Gov. Roy Barnes, whose brother was then a co-owner of the motel chain, who argued that the residents were just like any other inn guests and, having signed a contract accordingly, could be removed without a formal eviction process.

Courts ruled in the residents' favor in 2021 and 2022 and ordered the Efficiency Lodge to file an eviction if it wanted to remove them. But Barnes appealed the rulings to the Georgia Supreme Court, which finally issued guidance in June 2023 on what constitutes a landlord-tenant relationship, saying it hinges upon a person's use of a place as a home, with the permission of the owner.

These questions, the guidance states, are dependent on the intent of both parties. The Supreme Court did not make a ruling on the Efficiency Lodge residents, remanding the decision back to a lower court. But the Supreme Court laid out specific factors for courts to take into consideration, such as the length of time someone lives in the property, whether they routinely clean their unit, and whether they can have guests. The court said the granting of permission to occupy the property as tenants can be implicit.

The case settled in August 2023 before the lower court decided the question of whether the three plaintiffs qualified as tenants. Bliss declined to comment on the terms of the settlement; Barnes did not respond to a request for comment sent to his law firm.

Landlords and loopholes

In Nevada, state law is more explicit, laying out that people who stay in a hotel or motel for more than 30 days gain the protections of a tenant. But the Desert Moon Motel in Las Vegas appears to have found a way around the provision.

Tera Strawter and her boyfriend, Khari Varner, had been living at the vintage downtown motel for nearly three months at the time they were locked out in October 2023, far longer than should have been required to trigger the status change. During that time, she gave birth to twins, the couple said in a court complaint. All of their possessions were inside, Strawter said, including her medications.

The night of the lockout, Varner said, he and Strawter managed to get back into the room and slept there. The next day, Strawter took to Facebook to livestream at least two law-enforcement officers as they arrested Varner after telling the couple to leave the unit. Police officers stood by as a motel representative read Strawter a statement warning her that she would be considered a trespasser and would be arrested if she came back.

Varner filed two complaints with the Las Vegas Justice Court, claiming the Desert Moon had illegally evicted them. The second complaint, which BI obtained, asserts that the couple had been living at the motel for almost three months.

One detail would prove critical as the couple fought the motel in court: They had received financial help from two different nonprofit agencies — Puentes Las Vegas and Lutheran Social Services of Nevada — which had each paid for 28-day stays, Strawter said, before she and Varner took over the weekly payments themselves.

Puentes' president, Guy Girardin, declined to confirm details of this case but said the organization does provide housing assistance and sometimes refers people to extended-stay motels. He said the group caps its payments at 28 days at the request of the motels.

Puentes has seen an increase in the number of people who have made homes at extended stays in recent years, Girardin said, turning a model once geared to business travelers to "almost 100% housing."

BI sat in on the couple's hearings over the complaint. The first hearing ended quickly after a judge ruled that Varner had failed to give Desert Moon proper notice, a common occurrence with tenant-lockout complaints, according to a sample of outcomes BI examined and hearings one reporter attended.

At the second hearing over the lockout, in November, the couple explained to Brown, the hearing master, that they had been living in the motel since August through a variety of payment structures. First, the cost of the room was covered by one nonprofit, then another, and then the stay rolled over into their names.

The motel's owner, Brian Michael Schwalbe, said he thought the couple had agreed to leave. The couple countered that they had verbally told the motel of their intent to stay for at least 90 days.

When Brown said continued occupancy of the motel would make them tenants, Schwalbe said he thought the payments from other entities would change the situation.

"I'm really grappling with the fact that you've been there," Brown said to the couple, adding that if they had proof they had personally paid for even two days after their last, self-funded, 28-day stay, he would rule in their favor.

Varner started to cry. The couple could not provide proof of payment, Strawter later told BI, because they had paid in cash. Brown denied their petition, stating their relationship with the Desert Moon didn't qualify as a landlord-tenant one under the law.

"I'm sorry, it's not fun for the judge at all," he said.

Natalie Bergevin, the manager of Desert Moon, said the motel always considered Strawter and Varner as short-term guests, not tenants. Though the couple had stayed for more than a month, the motel's agreement was with the paying agencies, not with Strawter and Varner, she said. Bergevin said they had each signed written agreements that they would not be considered tenants.

They weren't locked out, she added; their key was simply deactivated. She insisted, as Schwalbe had in court, that the couple had previously agreed to leave.

"Long-term residency is never our intention," Bergevin said, calling the situation "truly unpleasant and unfortunate."

Matthew Main is an attorney who has represented residents in similarly precarious housing situations in New York City, where state law also grants residents tenants' rights after 30 days. He said courts had become overly restrictive about whom tenant laws cover, making them less effective at preserving housing stability than at protecting the economic interests of landlords.

"Removing someone from their home is a violent act," he said, adding that public officials shouldn't tolerate landlord gamesmanship.

Main said he had seen hearings about illegal evictions of residents in "shady gray areas of housing" get bogged down in fights over whether residents are tenants under the law. "The litigation should take five minutes: Was this person there with permission? That's the end of the question," he said. "The reason these proceedings become so lengthy is occupants have to litigate their status."

Makeshift rooming houses

Paul Panusky, an attorney in Atlanta who represents tenants in unlawful-eviction cases, said he had been getting more calls lately from people living in unlicensed makeshift rooming houses. And Sara Heymann, a community activist with Únete, a volunteer-led housing advocacy group in Chicago, said rooming houses had also become more common in her city.

One single-family home in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood, converted into a 16-unit rooming house, illustrates how these illegal conversions increase tenants' vulnerability. In this case, lacking formal leases, the tenants were even accused of being squatters.

In August 2022, the landlord, Go Home LLC, filed for eviction against one named resident along with "all unknown occupants" of its "single family home" and was granted an eviction through the courts.

BI obtained bodycam footage of what followed: two attempts by the Cook County Sheriff's Office to execute the eviction on what they discovered was a far cry from a single family home.

On the first attempt, in February 2023, the footage shows several rooms connected by a long hallway, each door bearing a number. "You know I've had a problem with him before," an officer said, "where he told us it was one house and there were separate rooms." The officers departed without removing anyone.

Two months later, the sheriff's office made a second eviction attempt.

That time, a representative of the landlord assured the officers that individual rooms were not being rented out anymore.

"If we go in there, and it's numbered, turn right the fuck back around," one officer said.

The first room they checked was small, with only one window. In the video, the bed was pushed to the end of the room and toys were strewn all over the floor. This time, only remnants of the numbers were visible on the doors; a resident later told a deputy the owner took down the numbers just hours before the deputies showed up.

At one point an officer asks, "Does anyone have a rental agreement? A lease?" But no one appears to have one; one resident says he has text messages.

The lead officer calls off the eviction.

"We can't pick apart the house," he told Michael Duckworth, the CEO of Go Home, which manages the property. "The way that you guys are going about this is just really illegal."

Duckworth told BI that he'd described the property in court as a single-family home on the advice of counsel but that in fact "each room was its own entity." He said that while he didn't usually offer traditional leases, the sheriff's officers declined to evict only because the occupants were colluding to create confusion. "Basically, if there's anything that looks like it may be off a little bit or if they're not 100% sure," he said, "they're kind of tasked to call it off."

He wanted the residents out because, he claimed, they were "maliciously refusing to pay" and the company had "lost control of the house." But he insists he handled the eviction by the book and did everything legally.

Matthew Walberg, a spokesperson for the sheriff's office, said Go Home failed to properly serve notice to the home's occupants. "The order for eviction did not describe the property as it was," he said. "It was all these multiple units and officers couldn't enforce" the eviction order.

In April of last year, Go Home filed a new motion asking for emergency intervention, claiming all of the tenants were squatters. The judge denied it. He pointed out that Duckworth, representing himself as the landlord's agent, had admitted that several tenants had rented from him at other properties, casting doubt on his claim that everyone at the property was a squatter.

The eviction order, however, remained in place. Ultimately, the City of Chicago vacated the home over building safety concerns.

Left living under a freeway

After their hearing last November, Darlene DeLaRoca and Mike Rausch faced a 10-day deadline to vacate their trailer home outside Las Vegas. That wasn't much time given that the trailer still wasn't working and they'd have to repair it before they could move. If they weren't out by then, the court-ordered eviction meant a county constable would remove them by force.

But DeLaRoca wasn't ready to give up. Instead of using their savings to pay for a tow or repair the trailer, she told BI, she and Rausch decided to pay a bond of $250 to appeal their eviction.

Without an attorney, DeLaRoca said, she had trouble figuring out the paperwork and wasn't sure whether she had filed the appeal correctly. She worried she had doomed their chances of being heard by a judge.

Meanwhile, the constable's visit loomed. On nights she couldn't sleep, depressed about the prospect of spending Thanksgiving on the streets, she'd work on drafting a post for a GoFundMe. "The judge says we need to be out in 10 days, we don't have enough money to move," she and Rausch wrote. "In 10 days we will be homeless. We are asking for help, because if this landlord can do this to our family and 5 other families and get away with it, he will do it to other families."

On the day the constables came, DeLaRoca said, everything went wrong. They had been able to pack some things but, in the shuffle, left their bags inside, along with the motor home's keys.

"We left with the clothes on our backs," DeLaRoca said by email shortly after they were put out. "I should have been more prepared. It's my own fault, but it's kind of hard when you're not really sure what you're doing or have the means to do it."

They didn't have even a day's worth of food for them or their two dogs.

The removal upended their lives. The pair spent some nights under a freeway overpass; some days, they resorted to panhandling for food.

Eventually, they separated. On Christmas Day, Rausch sent Business Insider a text message. It was too cold on the street for DeLaRoca, he wrote. He sent her and the puppies to California, where her daughters live. "I am still in Vegas," he wrote. "Alone."

The promise of a stable life had gone as quickly as it had come.

DeLaRoca said she wished they had never answered that Facebook rental ad.

• My husband and I wanted to raise our daughter differently than how we were raised. 
• I followed gentle parenting influencers when she was little and having regular meltdowns. 
• I realized that techniques that work for neurotypical kids don't work with my neurodivergent child. 

I was raised with a style of parenting that leaned more toward authoritarian. My husband's upbringing was strict and punishment-heavy. He has distinct memories of hearing "Stop crying, or I'll give you something to cry about" frequently.

From personal experience, fear-based, punitive parenting does not lead to healthy adults who can manage their emotions well. That's why respectful and empathic gentle parenting that acknowledged a child's feelings had a real appeal to me.

I looked into gentle parenting

Early in my daughter's life, I started following gentle parenting influencers. This included Big Little Feelings, which debuted on Instagram just as we were entering the difficult toddler years. Although I had years of experience working with children, my daughter's meltdowns felt overwhelming and unmanageable. I didn't like the concept of time-outs, and I also didn't like how frustrated her explosive reactions made me feel.

I purchased Big Little Feeling's "Winning the Toddler Stage" course in the hopes of discovering the magic words to say to tame my daughter's tantrums, as they said. I hoped learning the scripts they provided would transform my daughter into a more cooperative toddler and me into a calmer, more patient mom. But even though I watched all the videos and tried to implement their advice, most of it didn't seem to work with my daughter. And OKing her feelings started to feel ridiculous after a while.

The next big influencer whose advice I tried to follow was Dr. Becky. I waited months for her book to be available from the library. The waitlist was so long I ended up with the audiobook. I spent hours listening to techniques that I tried to implement (unsuccessfully) with my daughter, some of which seemed to make her more upset. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.

Until the end of the book, when Dr. Becky admitted that the behavioral techniques she discussed in the book weren't effective with neurodivergent children. Eight hours wasted (and many bops from a dysregulated, angry child) on a book that wasn't even written for her. I was pissed.

I thought I was the problem

After several years of trying to gentle parent in the style of influencers like Big Little Feelings and Dr. Becky, I had started to believe that the problem was me. If I couldn't make their expert advice work, then obviously I was just a bad mom. Eventually, I discovered that the disconnect was that my daughter is autistic. As a result, advice developed for neurotypical children was usually not a good fit for her.

The frustrating thing is that these influencers seem to be selling one-size-fits-all behavioral techniques when there is no such thing, especially with neurodivergent children. Even with neurotypical children, there is no one-size-fits-all way to deal with difficult behaviors. The rigidity of that seems to harken back to the strict way of parenting my husband and I grew up with that refuses to acknowledge that every child is an individual.

I've changed how I parent her. Since my daughter thrives on consistency and is very focused on schedules and time, we try to keep things as structured as possible for her, which recently has meant implementing a visual schedule and timer. Although it's incredibly frustrating sometimes, she might not react in the same way to something that she did yesterday, and we have to be flexible as well.

These days, I'm not sure what label I'd put on my parenting style, perhaps mostly authoritative, a parenting style that is more focused on being responsive and supportive while still setting boundaries. Sometimes it feels like we are throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.

I am done with following gentle parenting experts and taking their advice on how to parent my child, though. The parenting choices I make are very much customized to my daughter's own specific needs and struggles. And how I parent is constantly evolving as my daughter grows and changes.