Q: What are illegal lockouts and how do they affect working people?  

A:  An illegal lockout is shorthand for times landlords remove tenants from their homes in a way that doesn’t involve the legal court process. They can involve a literal changing of the locks, but can also entail an essential utility being shut-off or physically removing a person by force.

Illegal lockouts do not come with the right to due process involved in a legal eviction, where a tenant should be able to defend their right to stay in front of a judge. In this way, these removals rob a family of notice and time to line up alternate housing. They can strain budgets as people spend money on short-term stays or replacing essentials like food, medicine or furniture. They can endanger people’s jobs and make children fall behind academically. 

In much the same way that a legal eviction is disruptive, an illegal removal causes instability with the potential to impact people’s lives in ways that extend beyond housing.

Q: How did you become interested in illegal lockouts? 

A: I first heard about lockouts in 2020 and 2021. As the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, there was public recognition that having stable housing was a matter of public health. Enter the so-called federal eviction moratorium and the different versions that states and local governments adopted. And yet I would hear from tenants and their advocates that despite the protections, removals were still happening, they were just happening outside the courts.

Another intriguing aspect about this topic is that unlike others, like rent control for example, both tenant and landlord groups readily agree an illegal eviction should not happen. Only five states do not have laws in the books explicitly prohibiting lockouts, research spearheaded by BI’s Rosemarie Ho showed. So investigating lockouts entailed taking a step back from a “two sides” framing to evaluate the system and ask if the safeguards we have against this practice are working.

Q: Illegal lockouts are on the rise, what is driving the increase? 

A: It was surprising that complaints related to illegal evictions had increased. This was true in every city that gave us more than a years’ worth of information. The common wisdom was that now that landlords could file for a legal eviction, lockouts would be a thing of the past. That’s not what we found.

People pointed to different factors to explain this: one is that the pandemic brought tenant protections into relief and so individuals were more knowledgeable and more likely to report possible violators. A related theory is that the number of reports were a reflection of lingering effects of pandemic-era protections from a legal eviction.

Landlords and police officials said a tenant’s complaint about an illegal lockout didn’t mean one had occurred. Some also pointed out that it is already difficult to gauge how many legal eviction filings result in families moving, and that tracking illicit removals is an even greater challenge.

On this point, there is little data on how often illegal evictions occur. One study from 2015 surveyed Milwaukee, WI and found that for every formal eviction, there were two informal ones (including lockouts). Some theorized that as legal eviction filings picked up and surpassed pre-pandemic levels in some cities, illegal ones would also have gone up.

So unfortunately, there’s no definitive answer. To get a complete understanding, we need a more direct and public way to track complaints, including their individual circumstances and outcomes.

Q: Describe your overall investigative strategy. 

A: Since lockouts largely happen out of public view, reporting on them entailed piecing together times that such a removal would touch on public records. Police calls were one such source, as were complaints made to housing departments and civil courts, pursuant to statutes specifically laying out a way to fight an illegal lockout (it is rare for a state to have these statutes in place).

We focused on places with a high proportion of renters and populations above 500,000. We also included places with “hot” or competitive housing markets like Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas. Some places in our original list never answered requests for public records. In New York City, illegal evictions had already been the subject of a news investigation. This narrowed our focus to eight cities.

Since police end up becoming first-line responders to these lockout emergencies, reviewing body cam footage became an important window into how individual officers’ viewed their responsibility when answering calls for help. Also informative were training documents from police departments.

Integral to the series, however, were the experiences of tenants who spoke with me across many different parts of the country.

Q: Police officers often stand aside in the face of illegal evictions. Can anything be done to make the police enforce the law in these cases? 

A: Police department leadership and the elected officials that law enforcement answers to can be more proactive in asking for clarity and accountability. Only one city out of eight we looked into directly tracked emergency calls involving a lockout. No mayor agreed to an interview or provided comment on the investigation’s findings, despite some making it a hallmark of their political campaigns to reduce homelessness.

Ensuring police officers uphold the law when called to a lockout requires top-down investment in training and transparency so that outcomes are taken out of the discretion of individual police officers.

Q: What does it say about the role of police in our society that most officers aren’t trained to defend the clear legal rights of tenants? 

A: It partly reflects how tenants are viewed compared to homeowners. Over the past year, several states have explicitly made it a priority to pass squatter laws so that police officers can take swift action when responding to calls related to an alleged squatter. The same cannot be said of laws for tenants calling police for help in a potential illegal lockout.

Q: Did anything unexpected happen during the reporting of this story?

A: Reviewing information from calls and complaints highlighted the importance of covering the experiences of people living in a housing “gray zone.” These are families in places like an extended-stay motel, doubled-up with relatives or acquaintances, or relying on units that may be unpermitted for shelter. It’s not always clear whether those people are protected under landlord-tenant laws although our research showed that the living arrangements are becoming more common.

We are continuing to look into controversial practices like this one, and are interested in hearing from folks with experience with corporate landlords.