Perfectly Legal

As he snatches the deed to her home from the poor heroine, the movie villain always sneers that "it's all perfectly legal." In real life, eviction can be just as cruel. One spring day in 1972 when some prospective buyers stopped by, Lillian K. Ware, 58, a black private nurse, learned for the first time that she no longer owned her $25,000 home in Evanston, Ill.; the title had been taken over some months before by a local real estate speculator. Barring some legal miracle, Mrs. Ware's subsequent two-year court battle against tough lawyers and a notably harsh Illinois tax-delinquency law will end this week, when she is forced to leave the home in which she has lived for 24 years. The reason: she neglected to pay a 1968 tax bill that came to all of $41.57.

The villain in Mrs. Ware's case is a tax law enacted by the Illinois legislature two decades ago. Drafted with the help of real estate operators, the measure authorizes local governments to auction off a two-month-overdue property-tax bill--if the owner does not respond to a warning notice within three weeks. The buyer of the overdue bill can take full title to the property two years later--again, after giving notice --if the owner has paid no part of the taxes or the interest. Ostensibly, the law is meant to provide an incentive for private enforcement of property taxes. Indeed, the rate of Illinois property-tax delinquencies has dropped from 33% to 3%. But the law has also proved to be highly profitable for professional speculators, who buy up tax bills in the hope they will get at least a few properties for next to nothing.

One such speculator, Chicago Attorney David R. Gray, bought Mrs. Ware's $41.57 bill--the last of ten annual installments on a special assessment for the paving of an alley behind her home. There is significant doubt about Mrs. Ware's claim that she was never notified by Gray that she owed him the taxes. But her lawyers have pointed out that in 1968, when she was hospitalized with a heart condition, she asked a lawyer to check out her tax liabilities; he found a $500 debt for general taxes, which was promptly paid, and he missed the paving-assessment installment.

When she learned the trouble she was in, Mrs. Ware offered to pay the tax --plus interest and penalties. Gray was not interested. The case has been up to both the Illinois and U.S. Supreme Courts, but almost every judge has seemed satisfied that a speculator can indeed get a $25,000 home for $41.57 in unpaid taxes, evict the owner and sell it for all he can. In Illinois, that is--as they say in the movies--perfectly legal.

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