In last week’s Independent, staff reporter Sam Pollak wrote the latest sickening chapter in the story of slumlords David and Carolyn Delgizzi of Weston and their tenants at the Truro Motor Inn.
Five years ago, inspections of the 36 units at the motel — where up to 50 tenants were living year-round — found unsafe conditions including overloaded electrical outlets, an illegal failed septic system, and missing smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.
For five years, the Delgizzis avoided upgrading the property, ignoring orders from the town and from the state housing court. Back in 2019, town officials could have condemned the place but chose to extend the motel’s license for a year so that the tenants would not be thrown out on the street.
The landlords promised to remedy the problems. But their promises have proved worthless.
Now the last of their tenants — Nicholas and Angela Rose and their two children — have been evicted, and the Delgizzis have, predictably, ignored an agreement they signed with the town in February 2022 to help pay to relocate them.
The Rose family immigrated to Cape Cod from Jamaica nine years ago and lived at the Motor Inn for seven years. Now they are homeless.
No letters to the editor have appeared about Pollak’s report, and no Truro town officials have called to say what they plan to do about this tragedy. That’s probably because most of us have been persuaded that there isn’t much we can do other than hope that the grindingly slow process of building affordable housing moves forward.
The system enables sociopaths like the Delgizzis to do pretty much whatever they want. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Miles Howard, a Boston-based journalist at the independent Shelterforce, has written about the way slumlords all over the country have been shielded from accountability by state governments — including here in Massachusetts. “Forward-thinking legislation that aspires to deter landlords from neglecting their rental property has a way of triggering the landlord community’s gut aversion to government and beefed-up regulatory policy,” Howard wrote last year.
Massachusetts responded to the Covid-19 crisis in March 2020 with one of the strongest eviction freezes in the country. But then the legislature backpedaled. The moratorium was allowed to expire that October, and the Housing Stability Act that might have provided long-term solutions died without a vote.
Lisa Owens, executive director of City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston, named one of the reasons these policies faded: “This is rooted in racism,” she told Miles Howard. “Policies aimed at working-class people, people of color, and immigrants are typically punitive. The testimony we heard from landlords evoked imagery of greedy, sneaky, shiftless people who are irresponsible.” That sounds like a landlord we’ve been watching right here in rural Truro.
It seems that our legal system is able to effectively punish only the poor.
