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.
Read more from our series on illegal evictions:
Unprotected at the margins of the rental market
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.