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States of abandonment: In evictions, who abandons whom?
“Zones of abandonment … accelerate the death of the unwanted. In this bureaucratically and relationally sanctioned register of social death, the human, the mental and the chemical are complicit: their entanglement expresses a common sense that authorized the lives of some while disallowing the lives of others.”
João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
This story is about a day in the life of Sherry Gudger, a resident of Halethorpe, in Baltimore County, in Maryland. Sherry Gudger is a single mother living with multiple sclerosis. On or around August 7 of this year, Sherry Gudger received a notice stating that she would be evicted on the 25th of August. According to Ms. Gudger, she “did her best to remove her personal possessions from her third-floor apartment”. She didn’t manage to remove everything. August 25th was the first day of school for her 8-year-old son. Ms. Gudger walked her son to school, returned to the apartment, and found that all her belongings had been thrown away. These belongings included “her passport card, clothing, work tools, her eight-year-old son’s bed, and other furniture.” The trashing of her estate was completely legal. Baltimore County has a “Placement of Personal Property” ordinance, which says that a tenant’s belongings removed during an eviction “shall be considered abandoned”. Sherry Gudger has joined a lawsuit challenging both the loss of her possessions and the law itself. The action was “lawful”, but was it right? Further, and really, did Sherry Gudger “abandon” her personal property … or was she abandoned by the processes of eviction?
These questions have already been asked and answered. In 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down a similar law in Baltimore City. According to Maryland Legal Aid, representing Sherry Gudger, “In that case, the court held that tenants are entitled to clear notice that they could permanently lose ownership of their possessions during an eviction and that due process requires a meaningful opportunity to determine whether property was truly abandoned.”
Sherry Gudger explained, “I became part of this lawsuit because I believe everyone should be treated fairly. A lot of people are going through hard times right now, and what happened to me and my family could happen to someone else. People deserve to know what can happen to their property and have a chance to recover the belongings that are important to them.”
People deserve to know, and people deserve a chance to recover. For residents, and often for neighbors and friends, evictions are an existential crisis. That crisis does not endow the State or any entity with the power to reduce them to nothing. That’s what was supposed to happen in Halethorpe. Management told maintenance to go in, grab everything and dump it. Sherry Gudger was supposed to simply disappear … but she refused and refuses to do so. She refuses to be a citizen of the state of abandonment, a zone of social death through forced and unremarkable disappearances. It’s just business as usual. People deserve to know. People deserve a chance to recover. I believe everyone should be treated fairly.
(By Dan Moshenberg)
(Photo Credit: Julie Shields / “The things people told me“)
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