Four police officers marched onto Lucinda Pitt’s backyard Thursday night and, over the course of a few minutes, held her son at gunpoint, handcuffed him, freed him, and finally said they were sorry for the city order that brought them there in the first place.
A water bill dispute has vexed Pitt for years, and the raid was its bizarre culmination.
Portsmouth city officials condemned the family’s rental house off Victory Boulevard in September, plastering it with bright orange signs ordering everyone out. Inspectors say it’s not safe — Pitt hasn’t had running water since last summer, when city technicians cut service for unpaid bills totaling more than $4,000. Since then, her daughter has walked to a nearby car wash every other day and plunked quarters into a machine, filling detergent bottles with water so the family can bathe and flush their toilets.
Meanwhile, Pitt is fighting the charges, and she is appealing both the condemnation and the cost. She blames a leak — one she says she reported but went unfixed — for drastically driving her meter readings up.
Her monthly water bills have routinely been $300 or $400 and sometimes well over $1,000.
“I want them to leave me and my family alone,” Pitt, 61, said from her living room couch about an hour before the officers stormed in. “I don’t know how they sleep with themselves.”
Her attorney, Joseph Sherman, says the city isn’t giving her a fair chance to keep her home. On Pitt’s behalf, he has submitted a request for an appeal and paid the city’s $100 processing fee for it. Sherman has asked for a city appeal hearing, but has not been granted one.
“They’re camping outside her house and making her life miserable. They’re not using the processes in place to resolve the issue,” Sherman said. “The city has a fleet of lawyers, and Ms. Pitt doesn’t have the same resources.”
City officials say Pitt has been behind on water bills since 2013, and she’s gotten plenty of breaks. Records obtained by Sherman and shared with The Virginian-Pilot confirm that, but also show she has long complained about the leak and urged the city to fix it. In late September, she followed through on a threat to call the city manager’s office, but call logs show she was transferred back to the collections department.
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City technicians have told Pitt for years that the leak is on the city’s side of the water main, and that the inflated readings wouldn’t affect her costs. But Sherman said that even after her water was first cut in June, Pitt’s bill continued to balloon.
In a statement, the city says that’s because someone cut a lock placed on the meter and restored water illegally.
“Ain’t nobody tampered with that stupid meter,” Pitt said. “I’ve told them to come look at it plenty of times.”
The property’s owner, Michael Smith, has been mostly absent during the dispute. He didn’t respond to The Pilot’s request for comment.
In its statement, the city said “several Public Utilities Customer Service Representatives spoke with the resident/tenant and informed her that to have service restored, a payment of 50% of the balance would be required and the remaining balance be placed on a payment plan.”
Pitt says she can’t afford even half the balance, which would be more than $2,000, and she shouldn’t have to pay for water she didn’t actually use.
The condemnation order issued in September gave the property’s owner the option to appeal. Sherman said he did so with Smith’s permission in order to represent Pitt. But notes from an Aug. 20 phone call between a collections employee and Smith show he won’t fight her removal.
“Even though they are paying their rent he do not want them to stay in the home and not pay the water bill,” the notes read. “He also stated if we have to condem (sic) the home then he will help in anyway possible.”
City officials told The Pilot that Pitt should have been out by Sept. 23, 2019, under the condemnation notice, but the city did not make anyone available for an interview and its written statement did not explain whether Pitt will be given the chance to fight the case.
The city says the house is unsafe and unfit for habitation because of the lack of water and sanitary facilities.
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Pitt has confronted Portsmouth before over renter’s rights for herself and other tenants, and she worries the city is retaliating against her.
She won a fight in the early 2000s over a dangerous slum that the city shut down while quarreling with its owner: neither wanted to claim responsibility for the deplorable living conditions that residents endured.
A Dec. 18, 2000, editorial in The Virginian-Pilot lambasted Fairwood Homes for its high crime rate and called the neighborhood “a cancer on the city.”
Its homes were so badly built and maintained that, between 1980 and 2000, at least 22 people died in fires there, according to a Pilot survey conducted 20 years ago. The Pilot reported that more than a third of Portsmouth’s fire fatalities over that time period had occurred in Fairwood Homes. Tenants often lived without running water — pipes would burst — or proper insulation. Some complained about fuel bills that ran as high as $200 per month to heat their small homes.
The mass evictions that resulted left hundreds of people — many elderly and poor — scrambling to find scarce low-income housing. But a class-action lawsuit that Pitt spearheaded yielded a settlement of about $2.6 million. Some plaintiffs got as much as $25,000 apiece. Her efforts also helped establish an advocacy group for low-income residents that provided education and counseling on housing issues.
The community has since been razed, and the site remains vacant. The city has struggled for more than a decade to develop the area. Today, city leaders want a casino there.
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Two decades later, Pitt is battling with congestive heart failure, renal failure, and asthma. Doctors have said her heart is functioning at 30 percent ejection fraction — that means she’s at particularly high risk of cardiac arrest. She relies on an oxygen tank and can barely step outside her house without losing her breath. She’s been advised not to lift anything heavier than 10 pounds.
She lives in the three-bedroom, one-bathroom house with her daughter, Laura Hargrove, and Hargrove’s young son. Hargrove works at a debt collection agency to help cover their $950 rent, and she’s the one that hauls in fresh water.
“I fill the tub every other day,” Hargrove said. “We use detergent bottles, soda bottles: whatever we can get our hands on.”
They use an electric kettle to warm the water for baths.
Pitt knows well what it’s like to live without basic amenities. When she lived at Fairwood Homes, their home’s pipes would rupture frequently, so her family adjusted. She’s frustrated that decades later, her daughter and grandson are having to do it all over again.
“As a mother, nobody wants their children to live like this,” Pitt said. “My concern is more my daughter. As a child and as an adult, it’s another generation.”
But difficult as life has been on Victory Boulevard, moving isn’t just financially out of the question. For the home’s matriarch, it would be physically perilous.
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Her latest row with the city came to an aggressive head last week when her son, Anew Hargrove, was briefly arrested.
Hargrove told The Pilot that he was spraying insecticide in the family’s backyard when an officer approached barking orders.
Hargrove had a gun holstered in his waistband, and he had a big white bottle of spider poison in his hand.
“Put it down!” Hargrove said the officer shouted. He said the officer repeated the command after he threw down the spray bottle and the gun.
“I’m in fear for my life,” Hargrove recalled saying as the officer pointed a gun at his chest.
Three other officers approached Hargrove and searched his criminal record. After Hargrove explained that his family was fighting the condemnation order, they took off the cuffs and handed him back his weapon.
“We are very new to this situation,” one of the officers told a Pilot reporter who showed up minutes later as they apologized to the family and wished them luck. “He was put into temporary detention just to find out what the situation was.”
The officers said they were doing a routine search for trespassers, something they do regularly for homes that have been condemned. (A Portsmouth police spokeswoman did not respond to a request for more information on the incident.)
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the officer asked. At their attorney’s request, the Hargrove siblings used their cellphones to snap pictures of each of the policemen.
“I really hope you guys can get this sorted out,” the officer told Pitt’s son before leaving. “Same ma’am, I hope between the city and everything we can get this sorted out.”
“I do, too,” Pitt said as her daughter scolded her for leaving the house to check on the commotion. “I’m just surprised the city pit the police against the citizens.”
The air was dry and chilly that night, which is tough on an asthmatic like Pitt. Her children urged her to slow down, have a seat and take a break.
In ailing health 20 years later, she still can’t seem to back down from a fight.
Ana Ley, 757-446-2478, ana.ley@pilotonline.com
