He responded, “Your cost of compliance is not my problem.”

July 28, 2022 7:49 PM

But Benford says the first complaint that put the couple on the city’s radar came from a white neighbor in 2003. “That lady would ask me to come help her move things, or fix something,” Benford says. “She’d ask for rides to and from the bus stop. Come to find out she was reporting us to the city the entire time.” Radley Balko for Nashville Scene with an extensive investigation into the explosion of Metro Code violation reports largely targeting Black and low-income home owners in the city.

Balko took his own (lengthy) battles with the city's Metro Codes and looked further afield, finding a department of the city that has been weaponized against poor and minority residents.

As an update to the story the day after publication, Balko notes that the city doesn't have one lien against Benford's home, it has three.

posted by Ghidorah (60 comments total)

This is the perfect distillation of the essence of Nashville.

(Bitter? Me? Surely you jest!)
posted by aramaic at 8:06 PM on July 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

“When you fuck with poor people, it pisses me off.”

Amen, sibling.
posted by bendy at 8:07 PM on July 28, 2022 [17 favorites]

Can’t even make it through the whole article.

What a travesty.
posted by Windopaene at 8:15 PM on July 28, 2022 [12 favorites]

I’m a white homeowner on a majority Black block, and before I even moved into my house I came to the conclusion that, for me personally, living in the place I do comes with certain responsibilities. It means being on at least a casual hi how are you basis with my immediate neighbors. It means patronizing the local businesses I can walk to to the greatest extent possible. And, above all, it means NOT SNITCHING ON MY NEIGHBORS FOR PETTY SHIT.

My neighbors have lived in their home for sixteen years, and worked to keep up mine at times when the previous owner wasn’t living there. What kind of shitty human would I have to be to get the city up in their business? Not trying to hold myself up as an absolute paragon of virtue here, just a human who has an obligation to the local community and also doesn’t much care about overgrown weeds.
posted by ActionPopulated at 8:28 PM on July 28, 2022 [68 favorites]

Wow.
posted by riruro at 8:46 PM on July 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing. Guessing Nashville isn’t the only place this happens. What is the best recourse here? Shame the city with social media campaigns? How much revenue does this bring in?

Snitching on your neighbors - what does that do to the potential for community in a neighborhood? How is the spiteful, vague beancounting worth that loss?

This just makes me sad and angry.
posted by jilloftrades at 8:53 PM on July 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

this makes my blood boil...I watched Minneapolis do this using inspectors targeting low income and non-white majority neighborhoods, it's goddamn legal modern redlining.
posted by djseafood at 8:58 PM on July 28, 2022 [13 favorites]

snitching on people who are more vulnerable to systemic abuse is shitty, for sure, but to me that's only part of the story. this specific roster of code enforcement division should be destroyed.
posted by glonous keming at 9:04 PM on July 28, 2022 [11 favorites]

Telling people what to do without being told what to do is the American dream.
posted by krisjohn at 9:21 PM on July 28, 2022 [35 favorites]

Telling people what to do is a dream for some, while a large number of us want to live simple lives without fear or oppression.

God, that article just keeps getting worse and worse.
posted by Jacen at 11:52 PM on July 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

Funny thing that Balko himself was targeted.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:13 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Count me as one of the people who got too mad and had to stop reading. Fuck all of this.
posted by aubilenon at 12:22 AM on July 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

…reading this article, I just understood what happened to a member of my family. This doesn’t just happen in Nashville. It needs to be destroyed everywhere.
posted by corb at 12:33 AM on July 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

The article is infuriating enough, but if anybody manages to make it to the end and needs still more reason to hate the system described, I would rate it a virtual certainty that Nashville's system probably does disproportionate harm to those who are physically disabled as well as those who are economically disadvantaged.

One part of the story that I'm curious about is whether the majority of complainants even realize what kind of torment they are unleashing on their targets. Pretty clearly some do - for example the developers abusing the system to try to force sales of properties they would like to acquire - but I'm horrified by the thought that there are ordinary people who either relish the ability to cause pain to their neighbors or who are so indifferent to the pain inflicted that they could, in the most extreme cases, drive people out of their homes over cosmetic or aesthetic issues.
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:16 AM on July 29, 2022 [12 favorites]

It’s basically an HOA given the force of law.
posted by TedW at 3:21 AM on July 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

I've witnessed this in Minneapolis also. Part of it is the culture within the inspections department. Part of it is a sprinkling of bad people in the neighborhoods with access to an easy reporting system, people who face no consequences if they engage in harassment. It only takes one racist neighbor to ruin your life.
posted by gimonca at 3:29 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

The concept of property values really does a number on people's values, damn.

I mean, also creating punitive bureaucracy to solve problems and raise revenue instead of community building and a predictable tax structure. If your budget is based on fines for petty violations, you're going to fine a bunch of petty violations. Not great!
posted by the primroses were over at 3:52 AM on July 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

i have a fucking hoa and it isn't even like this!
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 4:15 AM on July 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

the land of the free and the home of the brave
posted by flabdablet at 4:42 AM on July 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

We are in the process of buying a house in a diverse mid-century neighborhood without an HOA in an unincorporated area, and I'm still terrified of this happening to us. People's feelings about property values and aesthetics are completely irrational to begin with, and also some people are assholes.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:52 AM on July 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

There’s a dog-eared Bible and some old prescription bags on the dash, and a colony of COVID masks hangs from the transmission lever.

Still reading, but surely a "transmission lever" is a gear shift? Is "transmission lever" in common use, or did the writer blank on the more conventional name? I've never heard "transmission lever" before, so I'm just curious.
posted by Well I never at 6:02 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

i couldn't get through the article, either.
sounds like some gofundmes are in order for supporting a legal team to sue the living fuck out of the city and county. racism, discrimination, harrassment... the numbers are proof.
also, failure on the city's part to maintain the public space from impinging upon and/or endangering private property.
use the damn system against itself, and make it hurt.
can one sue the individuals who work for the city, or are they protected by their employment status? hateful shitty racist bureaucrats.
it just takes money.
i wish i had some.
posted by lapolla at 6:10 AM on July 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

lapolla, good points, though there may be existing organizations who can work on this. ACLU, IJ, SPLC?

Are there grounds for the feds to step in on this?

Ultimately, part of what's needed is objective law, with rules and limits.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:26 AM on July 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Well I never: Still reading, but surely a "transmission lever" is a gear shift? Is "transmission lever" in common use, or did the writer blank on the more conventional name? I've never heard "transmission lever" before, so I'm just curious.
I'll answer for Shirley, I imagined the 'transmission lever' to be next to the instrument stalks on the steering column and not the gearstick above the transmission tunnel in the midline of the car. USA Automobiles speak a different bunch of names from UK cars.
posted by k3ninho at 6:28 AM on July 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Still reading, but surely a "transmission lever" is a gear shift?

On a 1962 Coronet? It's on the steering column, kind of like where the wiper control would be on a more modern car. The phrase does clunk a bit. It seems like there should be a smoother way to say it, but it does get the job done: explaining that it's horizontal, not vertical in front of the console. And I'm danged if I can think of a better way to express that.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:31 AM on July 29, 2022 [9 favorites]

Here's a photo of the interior of a Coronet from that era. You can see the lever on the left.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:46 AM on July 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

(From Wikipedia:

A gear stick (rarely spelled gearstick),[1][2] gear lever (both UK English), gearshift or shifter (both U.S. English), more formally known as a transmission lever, is a metal lever attached to the transmission of an automobile. The term gear stick mostly refers to the shift lever of a manual transmission, while in an automatic transmission, a similar lever is known as a gear selector.

This aligns with usage I’ve heard in the US. The horizontal shift coming outbid the steering wheel column I know of as a column shift. I’ve rarely to never heard transmission lever - if I have, it’s only from real gearheads, but the ones I know also usually use the colloquial rather than technical term when talking to the rest of us.)
posted by eviemath at 7:03 AM on July 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

I hate municipal administrations sometimes, too many vague regulations and intentions with not enough means to actually do it properly without making everybody’s life miserable.

And ours are quite benevolent compared to that shit. The ‘show it to me and I’ll tell you if it’s ok’ part with the inspector really resonated, if we’re not allowed to know before hand what’s permitted from reading the code it shouldn’t be allowed to be restricted because inevitably city don’t have the resources to give the information beforehand in reasonable delays.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:04 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I grew up in the heart of the auto industry and had just never heard that phrase, and now I can’t think what I would call a gearshift on the column, though I sure do have a sense memory of putting cars in drive with one.

Mostly I am sorry for the bit of a derail. This article is painful, infuriating, and important.
posted by Well I never at 7:18 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Whenever we get inspected for anything (adding a fence, for instance), the inspectors are always hand-wavey and low key and don't give us shit over the infinite small details in the code. And so, I always think to myself, "So what are all those nitpicky little points for? And then I read this, and I see what they're for.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:19 AM on July 29, 2022 [24 favorites]

Yeah I think this is one of those cases where are there are a lot of rules and regulations in place that get applied only when those in power have someone specific they want to apply them to.
posted by obfuscation at 7:21 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

In Australia: gear stick = four on the floor, transmission lever = three on the tree
posted by flabdablet at 7:30 AM on July 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

It's all good, Well I never. We're a community of pedants and you probably weren't the only one wondering.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:41 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

What about six on the …console? WHAT THEN?
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:51 AM on July 29, 2022

This has some promise: Unconstutional Vagueness

"1) A constitutional rule that requires criminal laws to state explicitly and definitely what conduct is punishable. Criminal laws that violate this requirement are said to be void for vagueness. Vagueness doctrine rests on the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. By requiring fair notice of what is punishable and what is not, vagueness doctrine also helps prevent arbitrary enforcement of the laws.

2) Under vagueness doctrine, a statute is also void for vagueness if a legislature's delegation of authority to judges and/or administrators is so extensive that it would lead to arbitrary prosecutions."

Over at Balko's twitter, there have been some suggestions for a GoFundMe to pay to get the garage enclosed.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:00 AM on July 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

there have been some suggestions for a GoFundMe to pay to get the garage enclosed.

I would contribute to both that and to a GoFundMe as well as to a GoFundMe to paint a mural for the garage door of the a-hole inspector and snitch neighbor as rats, dancing in a pile of poop.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:24 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

MetaFilter: We're a community of pedants and you probably weren't the only one wondering
posted by Gelatin at 8:28 AM on July 29, 2022 [13 favorites]

We had a thing about a decade ago where a local club was getting noise complaints from the condo tower built on the adjoining parcel, and the city ruled in favor of the club, which has been there forever, on the thinking that the condo people moving into the tower would've probably noticed the club right there under their bedroom windows when they moved in. We'll see how long that lasts; I am not optimistic.

The entire city is currently embroiled in a zoningchange war where most of the city commission wants to eliminate single-family zoning to increase affordable housing. Their claim is that the arguments in favor of keeping single-family zoning are all from terrible rich NIMBY racist people. But the view from the street differs from the city commission's story. This has already been going on, starting with traditionally black neighborhoods of course. Old people's family homes torn down, condos mushrooming up everywhere. If past is precedent, the rich neighborhoods will not have condos moving in. It will be the marginal neighborhoods that'll see their "blighted" (actually gorgeous, irreplaceable, beautifully built, would last forever) 1920s housing stock razed and their grandmas booted out on the curb so that 10%-"affordable"-units towers can be built where the actually affordable housing once was. (That's the rule: 10% of your giant construction has to be affordable to pretty-rich people and the rest can be sold to filthy-rich people happy to pay Dubais prices.)

If they succeed in the zoning change, I predict weaponization of codes enforcement will follow and the club vs condo tower conflict will get reversed and many many people will be unhoused, Nashville-style. This is kind of like how roads used to be for people and slowly over years became for cars. And with similar results! Neighborhoods used to be for people and now they're for buildings. Both changes in mindset result in people getting hurt and ultimately with people lying dead on the street.

In conclusion, fuck the rich.
posted by Don Pepino at 8:30 AM on July 29, 2022 [12 favorites]

Metafilter: "[A]lso some people are assholes."
posted by riverlife at 8:31 AM on July 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

Some neighbor decided to make an issue of the cars parked in the driveway of my rented house (i.e., the place you park cars, despite other neighbors with boats and RVs); and managed to get the city to issue around $1500 of fines for 'abandoned' vehicles. The citations were sent only to my landlord's management company, and turned out to be issued on the basis that some of them are not currently registered (they aren't currently in use). The tickets failed to indicate which vehicles were at issue (the citations literally just say inoperable vehicle(s) and cite a code section).

My landlord insisted on paying the first few without disputing them, then agreed to dispute them and stopped paying in the interim, leading to the latest fine doubling while the dispute was open. I had to pry my way into the telephonic 'hearing' -- farmed out to faceless vendor, purportedly due to Covid -- as the real party in interest, at which point I asserted a bunch of objections to the process, including that the unilateral telephone proceeding denied any right to obtain and/or submit evidence so as to be a reasonable substitute for the in person procedure; that the code sections identified were not appropriate for the farmed-out quasi-judicial proceedings under way, in that they could lead to misdemeanor liability, and also that the City is well aware that I live here in that I have utility accounts with it and still failed to give me notice (not to mention that if the basis of the citation is the car's registration status, and so the City presumably looked that information up -- or should have).

So far as TFA is concerned, this procedure also abrogates other protections statutes require, such as the opportunity to submit requests to reduce or waive fines due to financial hardship, for those who qualify.

The code enforcement officer started getting very testy before the hearing officer cut her off and agreed to continue the hearing and told me to call the vendor's customer service number to arrange it. The vendor then had 'high call volume' every day for a week, and would just terminate the call when its timer ran out -- when it's comically-dark patterned phone menus didn't just disconnect the call earlier because its tone detection failed.

The landlord then notified me that the City had sent them a letter stating the dispute was denied and the matter final.

So now the City Attorney (probably an attorney in private practice moonlighting for the city) is dodging my calls and I have to decide whether it's worth my time and effort to go file a writ petition and/or other claims against the City and the vendor. I'm better equipped to do that than most, but you also can't get attorney's fees for your own time.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:44 AM on July 29, 2022 [22 favorites]

Don Pepino, we had a similar situation in my neighborhood. New condo went up, turns out all the clubs were beyond the legal noise restrictions. They always were, for decades, but no-one had complained before. The clubs won though, and now we're the only suburb in Australia with no noise restrictions. Just keep blasting all night. It's pretty rad. I mean, I think so, but if you disagree - don't fucking move here! Centre of the fucking universe, these people.
posted by adept256 at 8:51 AM on July 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

you also can't get attorney's fees for your own time.

You can, however hire a similarly-minded attorney friend to sue for you (returning the favor when that friend needs the help.) It can be a delightful sideline, although it's more about stickin it to the man, than actually paying the bills.
posted by spacewrench at 9:03 AM on July 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

I'm pro big-government, pro-regulation.

But there are, in amongst the howling glibertarian "don't tread on me" bullshit noise factory of whiny social-compact destroying greed fuckshits, genuine objections to regulations and government being used to crush people.

This is one of those cases, and is infuriating.

The sad thing is, of course that entities like "environment court" should be going after CAFOs, illegal dumpers of chemicals, coal-rollers, the myriad externalizing corporations that are selling our and our descendants future out, for a quick buck, at the mere cost of a hundred million tumors and a billion early deaths. It should be expropriating every ill-gotten gain of tax dodgers and environmental criminals, and publically flaying the perpetrators alive as a warning to other capitalists who game the system at all our costs - who cause more misery than all of the individual assaults and rapes and murders that you read about in the news, combined.

But instead it's used to crush poor black folk whose private yards are mildly untidy.
posted by lalochezia at 10:58 AM on July 29, 2022 [8 favorites]

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Failure to appear in court can result in a fine or incarceration.

Incarceration

What is especially galling is that he was reported by a person who is obviously poor, if she's asking him for rides. It's just fucking evil.

Has anyone ever seen the inside of a courtroom in deep southern cities? I have. The masses waiting for their hearings are almost 100% black, and sometimes are, except for the judge and lawyers. They're all "crimes" (and those are scare quotes, not quotes) of poverty. Driving without a license, driving with expired tags, driving without insurance, failure to pay said fines, etc. into the ground. Nashville is bad, but Seattle is just as bad, only whiter. All "crimes" of poverty. And these stupid racist, anti-working-class, anti-poor laws, everywhere. FUCK.

Anyone want to set up a donation scheme for this couple? I'll skip a couple of meals this week and donate to this couple. I mean it. Hundred percent.

I want to hurt the people who make these laws and the ones who enforce them. Physically. It's reached the point where if I found myself in a dark alley with a knife and a senator of either persuasion, I couldn't trust myself.
posted by liminal_shadows at 11:34 AM on July 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

The masses waiting for their hearings are almost 100% black, and sometimes are, except for the judge and lawyers.

This is also true in large northern cities, with the only caveat being that around here the people waiting are Black and/or Latino.

Our adversarial justice system is broken in so many ways, but it’s also just plain ill-suited to problem solving. It can dole out fines and punishment but is trash at finding solutions to problems.

In an ideal world, the agency tasked with adjudicating these disputes would be focused on problem solving. One guy is pissed because vines are growing into his yard, another guy needs the vines to help retain soil, and the entire community has an interest in aesthetics (I guess?), in not having a landslide, and in not losing a shade tree. Instead of coming up with a mutually beneficial path forward, the city came down hard on a small problem with no consideration for the bigger picture, and in so doing made everyone’s life worse.

Also, it 100% does not matter if the city’s enforcement person has a military background. They’re acting as a civilian and talking to civilians, and their service does not grant them a free pass to be condescending or abusive, especially when someone is trying to be conscientious and do the thing they themself insisted upon.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 11:50 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

pave over the entire city, it's the only way to be sure (/s)

or how about a class action suit against the 'non-court" for arbitrary enforcement and denial of due process. SOMETHING to get this system in check. I'm also reminded this is Nashville TN - nextdoor to Rutherford County where that Children's court Judge was removed from office after HOW LONG?

22 YEARS
posted by djseafood at 12:25 PM on July 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

> Nashville TN - nextdoor to Rutherford County where that Children's court Judge was removed from office after [...] 22 YEARS

great fuck what a travesty, this is even worse than the OP
posted by glonous keming at 1:15 PM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nashville prohibits residents from keeping inoperable or unregistered vehicles on residential properties unless they’re stored in an enclosed garage

That's weird, based on my experience living in Nashville I thought it was mandatory to keep a few junkers in the driveway, if not on the front lawn. Thought I was going to get fined for non-compliance. And for not owning a pickup truck.
posted by Pararrayos at 1:35 PM on July 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Some thoughts:

Anonymous complaints against the poor and minorities are a problem? Sounds like an opportunity to flood the system with anonymous complaints against the wealthy and powerful, including the members of the Code Department and environmental court.

Also, inspecting and documenting actual code violations by the above groups and filing non-anonymous complaints, and when many of those violations are predictably dismissed, using those dismissals as defenses against other similar code complaints.

Also, setting up a voter registration table outside the environmental court offices, fielding candidates against any and all relevant officials in the primaries and the general, and making sure to forward the campaign literature for those candidates to the people who registered at environmental court.

Also, what would it cost to sponsor lawyers in courtrooms like these across the country to announce that they'll represent the poor at no charge, like this guy did?
posted by Reverend John at 4:47 PM on July 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

I hope the folks who (understandably) couldn't bear to keep reading at least got to this part:

Hollin’s first exposure to the court was in 2015. He was representing a friend who operated a short-term rental property. Hollin was so upset at what he saw that he returned to the court over ensuing months just to observe. On one morning in 2016, he’d had enough. He stood up in the back of the court.

“I yelled out that I was an attorney, and if anyone in that room had a case pending, I’d represent them for free.” Over the following week, Hollin says he got over 60 cases dismissed.
posted by mediareport at 5:35 PM on July 29, 2022 [14 favorites]

he was reported by a person who is obviously poor, if she's asking him for rides.

I would doubt it, my read is that the rides were just a pretext to see on his property.
posted by Candleman at 6:44 PM on July 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Sounds like an opportunity to flood the system with anonymous complaints against the wealthy and powerful, including the members of the Code Department and environmental court

I just assume that those kinds of complaints will often be conveniently ignored. But if they go on record, every bit helps!
posted by ovvl at 6:52 PM on July 29, 2022

Wow, absolutely enraging. I'm not sure what I would have done had I been in that woman's place being spoken to in a condescending manner by a low level city inspector on my own property who then proceeds to sing the Clean Up Song at me!
posted by flamk at 7:15 PM on July 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

We had a code enforcement officer in Peoria who would go to a particular neighborhood he disliked (yes, it was majority-minority, why do you ask?) the morning after a big storm (tornadoey storms) at like 6 a.m. and ticket every single Black-occupied house for having garbage on their lawn ... when everyone's can had blown over the night before.

He eventually got caught, but only because he accidentally ticketed two white grad students who had just moved in, who talked to their neighbors and then used their research and bureaucracy-navigation skills to raise hell. I don't think the guy got fired, though.

What's infuriating is that there are legitimately very dangerous properties owned by slumlords, but tracking them down is hard, so firetraps slide by while asshole neighbors constantly call in petty complaints about faded paint or wildflower gardens. And often the "cure or pay" time is absurdly short -- "you have 10 business days to get the garage painted before reinspection." WHO CAN GET A PAINTER TO EVEN COME GIVE AN ESTIMATE IN 10 DAYS? HAS NOBODY IN CODE ENFORCEMENT EVER HAD TO HIRE A CONTACTOR?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:11 PM on July 29, 2022 [17 favorites]

I will also add, we had a neighbor in Peoria who called code enforcement on us about once a month, because the neighbor objected to us turning our yard into a local prairie habitat, with plants native to within a mile of us. And there was a lot going on there, a history of them harassing various neighbors for imagined slights/imaginary problems/complaints; it didn't really have to do with us in particular, but with their struggles to live in a community with other people, and it was a problem for everyone on the block. Anyway, it was both FINE, because we were both lawyers who had a social relationship with our councilwoman and got very friendly with the code enforcement officer who kept coming to our house, and because this person had a history of using code enforcement to harass people for no reason; but also MADDENING because I gave up a day of every month to deal with code enforcement, and it was ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to me that if we HADN'T been a pair of white lawyers who knew our councilwoman, the whole situation would have gone very differently for us. And we had friends for whom it DID go very differently!

Our garden was featured in our city's annual garden walk and was in the local newspaper -- it was locally very well-known! Just to emphasize that our garden was not only well within code, but LOCALLY HELD UP AS AN EXAMPLE OF A GREAT YARD. We had almost no lawn -- we'd converted almost the entire yard to native prairie plants -- but every bit of it was within code, which we'd meticulously researched, and it was well-kept. We knew that neighbors might be sensitive to our "wildflowers," so our front-yard plantings were structured more like traditional landscaping and everything was well-kept. Most of our neighbors knew what we were doing, and we provided seeds and plant starts to a LOT of neighbors (especially of milkweed, for monarch butterflies; and white dutch clover, which helps you not need to water or fertilize grass in droughts). But this one neighbor ABSOLUTELY HATED our native plants, which he called "weeds" in every complaint. My favorite complaint was when he complained we had "foot-high unmowed grass" and the code inspector, who'd been to see us several times by then for our wildly offensive coreopsis in the front yard, as well as our obviously-jerky phlox and daylilies along the front path, sighed as she brought us the complaint and said, "Do you have foot-high unmowed grass?"

We took her to our (much wilder) backyard and showed her our pride and joy, almost 200 square feet of six-foot-tall big bluestem. She laughed out loud and said, "Yeah, no, don't mow that," and asked if she could have a tour of our garden. (Which we happily gave, as a) we knew her by then and b) we KNEW we were within code.)

But there didn't seem to be any way to stop this guy from calling in complaints regularly. (Honestly, my theory is he had a calendar reminder, since they were so regular!) Not just on us, but on everyone on the block that he was offended by, which was pretty much everyone. One neighbor he called in weekly because THEY HAD TWO TEENAGERS. The quietest, most polite teenagers on the planet, who both had part-time jobs and got great grades and didn't speed or have noisy friends who parked awkwardly. This guy called to report their existence every single week, because he didn't like that they existed. He called in a complaint about the local church because an endangered hawk nested on their steeple (MOST. EXCITING. THING. EVER.). He was thanked for reporting it, was like, "No, I want them dead," and was told, "Uh, no, they're endangered." So he called them in every week as a code violation. He called in complaints about the other local church having weddings, which was borderline fair because they parked like assholes? But also it was 90 minutes once a quarter, and everyone moved there in part because of the churches and their positive effect on property values. He called in complaints about people in wheelchairs using the sidewalks (we had a nursing home at the end of our block), because they were "blocking" the sidewalk he might, theoretically, want to use (he didn't go for walks). He called CPS if he didn't like how parents were walking their children to the neighborhood school. (He felt that letting your children run ahead of you to the corner and wait there was abusive, and not holding their hands the entire time was neglect. Quiet residential neighborhood with little traffic and good sidewalks.)

And again, the maddening part was, there wasn't any way to stop him. He could just keep calling in complaints to code enforcement (and to CPS) AS OFTEN AS HE WANTED, and they could be constantly unsubstantiated, but there were zero consequences for it. Everyone else around him suffered the consequences of routine visits from code enforcement (and thank God our lady was pretty cool!) and irregular tickets. But he never suffered a single consequence for wasting the city's time and money and harassing all his neighbors. He was using the legal process as intended, so he got off scot-free, and the rest of us had to explain our gardening choices to code enforcement once a month.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:18 PM on July 30, 2022 [14 favorites]

Wild guess, old white guy?

…I mean, call me crazy and all.

Lawyers sometimes talk about how there’s a concept called “barratry” and how it’s important. Y’know, purity of the legal process and all that.

Funny how “barratry” doesn’t apply to old white guys. Ever. By definition, more or less.

Brown person files a complaint for terrorist threats, they get hassled. Old white guy says someone crossed the street the wrong way oh my god we’ll look into it right away sir! Step to it lads, double-quick time now!

Purity of the legal process my ass. Be nice if lawyers just stood up and admitted yeah, ok, it’s all a scam and we profit by it, so uh thanks for the scam-money.
posted by aramaic at 9:41 PM on July 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wild guess, old white guy?

Here it's mostly old women, not exclusively white.


Funny how “barratry” doesn’t apply to old white guys.

This, in its modern guise as 'vexatious litigant' status, is the one thing that actually does tend to get them; if they're unhinged enough to pursue actual in-court litigation and piss off a judge. It tends not to attach to abuse of administrative/bureaucratic functions, as the remedy there is just for the administrative office to ignore them or give them only cursory attention (in the way courts and defendants sued can't ignore a duly filed complaint).
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:50 AM on July 31, 2022

he never suffered a single consequence for wasting the city's time and money and harassing all his neighbors

Sounds like a case for a neighborhood GoFundMe to pay for the services of Hired Goons. Did the local codes have anything to say about credible threats of crippling violence?
posted by flabdablet at 10:40 AM on July 31, 2022

Nashville resident here. There's a bit of a follow-up.

The mayor's office issued a statement in the article's aftermath.

Not that this means much if anything will happen (we know better than to hold our breath), and yet, there are examples like the WPLN/ProPublica report (mentioned above) that at least got the evil, petty, serial childhood-ruiner of a judge in Rutherford County to retire. (I mean, sure, we would have liked to see more consequences, and yet, etc etc)

We hold out hope for small incremental changes. And as someone who has had Codes called on him before, even though my run-in with them was pretty simple compared to Balko's or any of the folks he interviewed: fuck anybody that calls Codes for stupid shit. Thank you.
posted by pianoblack at 7:53 AM on August 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

Nashville Scene follow-up: Mr. Benford may not have been completely forthcoming about the nature of the complaints against him, but we also meet the neighbor making them, and she does not come off well.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:50 PM on August 3, 2022 [5 favorites]