Housing

Several people described difficulties in finding affordable housing and problems with the quality of the housing that is available. Landlords may be reluctant to spend money on repairs, and if a tenant complains about unsafe living conditions it is likely that the landlord will evict the tenants and find other tenants or board up the house rather than make the repairs. As a result, many people who are low-income and are living in substandard housing tend to put up with problems such as rats, holes in the wall, no insulation, eroded plumbing, and broken appliances. Some interviewees had taken their landlords to court but felt that, due to political barriers, they had no effective legal means of getting their landlords to make repairs. As one respondent noted, "(Durham needs) to have a rent control commission. They need to have that. But every time you speak of it in North Carolina, you gonna get opposition out the wazoo … That's 'cause we got that good-old-boy mentality. Like I said, when you got a lot of slum lords in high places, it's no way you gonna pass a law that's gonna prevent them from making [a] profit. Simple as that. And the little people, you know, they don't even make a difference."

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