Deshawn Harris moved around a lot as a kid, between Milwaukee and Chicago. But there was one apartment she remembers growing up in, both because it was clean and safe, and because of its location.
“Going to the library across the street, going to the arcade, and going skating,” she remembers. “All night skating, oh I miss that.”
Two kids and three grandkids later, she describes herself as family-oriented. However, her skating days may be behind her.
“Back then I could, but now? I don’t know, I might break my neck,” she says, laughing.
Harris' housing situations have often been tenuous, including a past landlord who used her social security number to pay bills in Harris' name. But today, Harris’ housing situation is worse than it has ever been. There’s a hole under the porch she says is “big enough to bury four or five people.” The knobs on her bathtub are stripped, meaning she needs to fill buckets of water from the sink in order to shower. There are wires running through overgrowth in the backyard, and a bullet lodged in her wall since last summer. Her rent is $925 per month.
We last met Harris in part one of this series at a Common Ground assembly in February, where she delivered a speech asking to “evict” her landlord, David Tomblin.
Tomblin is the founder of Highgrove Holdings Management LLC, a California-based real estate investment company that owns over 200 rental properties in Milwaukee. Thirty-seven percent of the properties are vacant, and many of them in disrepair, like Harris’ home.
In an interview with WUWM, Tomblin said he was not made aware of issues with the bathtub and said the hole underneath Harris' porch "should've been taken care of," adding that it was delayed due to being a non-emergency violation.
"I said 'Ms. Harris, this is not an emergency item, we will get to it,'" Tomblin said. "We had people going on vacation, we were going into wintertime, our priorities were DNS health and safety issues [...] but we would get there."
Tomblin added that Highgrove is "committed to the city of Milwaukee" and addressing outstanding code violations at Highgrove properties.
"We have been very, very, very committed, again, with the leadership and preservation of properties, and have always had a good working relationship with the city," Tomblin said.
But Highgrove’s property empire is under threat, as separate lawsuits from the City of Milwaukee and U.S. Bank threaten to place 224 properties into receivership. That would cut Highgrove off from collecting rent from those properties.
The City of Milwaukee’s lawsuits against Highgrove came after a year-long campaign led by the nonprofit advocacy group Common Ground and Highgrove tenants like Harris. The campaign documented code violations at Highgrove properties and connected tenants to each other. It also alerted the City Attorney’s office to thousands of code violations inside Highgrove properties.
Next week, WUWM will examine the city's case for declaring Highgrove a “public nuisance,” and how receivership has been used in the past to cut problem landlords off from rental income.
Today, we examine how Common Ground decided to focus on Highgrove, and how it reminded tenants of their collective power.
Channeling anger into knocking doors
Kevin Solomon, senior associate organizer with Common Ground, remembers canvassing Highgrove properties with Deshawn Harris last year. They met a Highgrove tenant who described a toilet not working properly, overcharges on her account, and unresponsiveness from Highgrove.
“And Deshawn says, ‘I’m pissed, because what she’s going through is what I’m going through,’” Solomon remembers. “‘And I loved meeting her because she wants to do something, she wants to stand up to a bully, and I want to stand with her.’”
Solomon and tenants like Harris had been canvassing Highgrove properties for months by this point, but the choice to focus on Highgrove was strategic. Solomon says Common Ground received "20-40 calls per week" from tenants of a variety of landlords about neglect or malpractice. Common Ground's members and associated organizations relayed similar stories.
Highgrove was not the only seemingly-negligent landlord on Common Ground’s radar. But it couldn’t take them all on at once.
“We picked three big corporate landlords we had heard about and went and talked to 30-40 tenants in each of their networks,” Solomon says. “Then we voted, and we said we’d recommend Highgrove Holdings as a starting point. So there was a collective buy-in.”
Solomon says Highgrove stood out both because many of Common Ground’s members were tenants, and because of external indicators of negligence like delinquent taxes, lead hazards, investors suing Tomblin, and the claims Highgrove was woman/minority owned without clear evidence of that.
From there, it was time to knock doors and meet more Highgrove tenants. This would help Common Ground collect testimonials about what was happening at Highgrove properties, and give the tenants a chance to get involved in the organizing. Solomon says this took a team of volunteers mapping out Highgrove locations, tracking Highgrove sales and tax records, and training a team of 67 volunteers to knock doors.
After knocking doors to reach hundreds of Highgrove tenants, it was time to bring them all together. But this gathering brought new challenges.
“It’s almost hard to get a conversation to focus on what we’re going to do, because there’s so much relief, hope, and ‘Wow I’m not alone,’” Solomon says. “Suddenly to hear that everybody’s dealing with all that, there’s a general darkness that gets lifted. A piercing of light that says ‘I’m not alone.’”
Harris remembers similar feelings when first working with Common Ground.
“Before I ran into Common Ground I felt like I was in a war zone,” Harris says. “But now my back ain’t against a wall,”
'Actions have consequences; we are the consequences’
Highgrove was aware of Common Ground well before the city brought its lawsuits in March. That’s because Common Ground had been in communication with the company, and founder David Tomblin, for months.
Solomon says Tomblin was the first to reach out, after hearing about Common Ground’s initial canvass of his properties. Tomblin and Common Ground would meet on a Zoom call in August, in which Tomblin said canvassers comments on the state of a Highgrove property “could be libelous,” that Tomblin bought distressed Milwaukee properties because “that’s where we can get good returns,” and that he would pay his delinquent property taxes by January 2026.
Common Ground then gave Tomblin three “tests” to show it was serious about being a better landlord: fix safety issues documented by 29 tenants, create a plan to demolish or sell 26 abandoned properties, and pay over $300,000 owed in taxes to the city.
In the meantime, it formed Tenants United, a nonprofit built to connect and organize tenants across the city. The group continued canvassing Highgrove properties, bringing new tenants into the movement and documenting code violations inside homes.
Between September and January 1, DNS records suggest Highgrove abated 25 outstanding code violations, while generating over 300 additional violation orders. Tomblin declined to sell or demolish abandoned properties, and Highgrove's network of LLCs still owed over $300,000 in property taxes.
Common Ground declared that Tomblin had failed all three tests.
Tomblin would not hear from Common Ground again until it announced its lawsuit in partnership with the City of Milwaukee, declaring Highgrove’s properties, and business model, a public nuisance.
To Solomon, the partnership with the City of Milwaukee was a last resort after months of inaction from Tomblin.
“To [Tomblin], Milwaukee may be a strategic investment — boasting ‘friendly-to-landlord city policies’ and ‘10-18% annual distributions’ for your investors. But this is our city. This is our home,” Solomon said in an email to Tomblin as the lawsuit went public. “Actions have consequences; we are the consequences.”
After years of hardship, a three-minute speech
Three weeks before the city and Common Ground announced the lawsuits against Highgrove, Deshawn Harris’ home was transferred to Elite Builders Group LLC in a foreclosure deal with Highgrove. Harris says she was notified after the sale was final, when a representative of her new landlord informed her.
“It’s scary, because you don’t know if [the new owner] is going to ask you to move,” Harris says. “I hope it don’t end that way for me, but it can go any way.”
Even after the sale, Harris remained intent on finishing what she started. She couldn’t leave Highgrove tenants behind just because her home had a new landlord, and she was slated to give a speech at the March press conference announcing Milwaukee’s lawsuit against Highgrove.
To prepare for the big moment, Solomon met with Harris a couple days before the press conference, to go over her speech. They hug, talk about family, and catch up before getting down to business.
“Are you a script person? A bullet point person? A ‘shoot from the hip’ person?” Solomon asks Harris about her preferred preparation style. “You’ve had six years of Tomblin and months and months of meetings to put into three minutes, that’s a hard task.”
Harris grabs a pen and paper to jot down some notes. “There’s so much. So I do want to hit some key points,” she says.
The two sit down, and Harris runs through notes on her home's issues: the bullet in the wall and the window left broken through early winter, the hole underneath her porch, overgrowth outside, bathtub knobs stripped, having to do laundry in the bathtub with water from the kitchen, and paying almost all her monthly income in rent.
Solomon and Harris practice together, trying out different approaches and timing her speech to keep it concise. But after a while, Solomon notices that the prep might be taking away from what makes Harris a special communicator.
“I don’t think you even want a script, I think it’s going to box you in,” Solomon advises Harris. “Don’t hide your anger. We often think when we get in front of the camera, in front of the news, that we need to hide our anger. No, speak your truth.”
“I’m glad you’re here, you didn’t have to take the time out to do this,” Harris says.
“Well first of all, we’re all in this together. You’re not going up there alone,” Solomon reminds her. “Second, this is the moment. We’ve got to meet the moment.”
Solomon reminds her not to stress about it, and leaves with a hug.
Two days later, Harris stands before a crowd of journalists and TV cameras, alongside Common Ground allies and Milwaukee City Attorney Evan Goyke. She’s taken Kevin’s advice and made the moment her own.
"Let’s evict this man, send him a message he’ll never forget,” Harris tells the crowd. “That we gonna fight against him and make sure that we take back all of our power.”
Support for Seeking Solutions: Keys to Homeownership is provided by Educators Credit Union, Greater Milwaukee Association of Realtors and Geis Garage Doors.
