© Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Lakisha Briggs, a victim of domestic violence, faced eviction last year under a public nuisance ordinance in Norristown, Pa., that punishes landlords for 911 calls.
The police had warned Lakisha Briggs: one more altercation at her rented row house here, one more call to 911, and they would force her landlord to evict her.
They could do so under the town's "nuisance property" ordinance, a law intended to protect neighborhoods from seriously disruptive households. Officials can invoke the measure and pressure landlords to act if the police have been called to a rental home three times within four months.
So she faced a fearful dilemma, Ms. Briggs recalled, when her volatile boyfriend showed up last summer, fresh out of a jail stint for their previous fight, and demanded to move in.
"I had no choice but to let him stay," said Ms. Briggs, 34, a certified nursing assistant, even though, she said in an interview, she worried about the safety of her 3-year-old daughter as well as her own.
"If I called the police to get him out of my house, I'd get evicted," she said. "If I physically tried to remove him, somebody would call 911 and I'd be evicted."
Over the last 25 years, in a trend still growing, hundreds of cities and towns across the country have adopted nuisance property or "crime-free housing" ordinances. Putting responsibility on landlords to weed out drug dealers and disruptive tenants, the laws aim to save neighborhoods from blight as well as ease burdens on the police.
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