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Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Fights for Tenant Rights
Dan Mach and Mira Edmonds
Issue date: 1/18/07 Section: News
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The Harvard Legal Aid Bureau has recently embraced a new approach in its ongoing mission to ameliorate the dual problems of lack of affordability and dilapidated living conditions facing low-income tenants in certain Boston neighborhoods. While still representing a number of individual clients facing eviction, Bureau students have now begun using collective bargaining agreements between tenant associations and their landlords and meetings with community organizers and local government officials in efforts to set the stage for improved tenant-landlord relations in local low-income communities.
Beginning last semester, students in the Bureau, a two-year student-run clinical program, have been working with the Jamaica Plain-based community organization City Life/Vida Urbana and several tenants' associations based in Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Students have responded to unreasonable rent increases in these areas by forcing landlords to bargain collectively with tenants.
On this front, Bureau students have been successful in negotiating two agreements on a collective basis to protect groups of tenants from eviction and improve housing conditions. In November, Bureau member and Outreach Director Julie Park '07 concluded an agreement on behalf of eight teenage mothers who were being evicted from the Aswalos House, a transitional housing program run by the YWCA in Dorchester. The program was discontinued and the house scheduled to be closed due to funding cuts, but Park negotiated an agreement guaranteeing new apartments for the young mothers and continuation of the career and life skills counseling they had been receiving.
In early December, student attorneys Alison MacManus '08 and Jonathon Bashford '07 negotiated a settlement on behalf of a tenant association in Roxbury. The tenants, who had been living for years in conditions that Bureau Faculty Director David Grossman '88 describes as "squalid," had been unable to compel their landlord to undertake building repairs required by the Massachusetts housing code.
Beginning last semester, students in the Bureau, a two-year student-run clinical program, have been working with the Jamaica Plain-based community organization City Life/Vida Urbana and several tenants' associations based in Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Students have responded to unreasonable rent increases in these areas by forcing landlords to bargain collectively with tenants.
On this front, Bureau students have been successful in negotiating two agreements on a collective basis to protect groups of tenants from eviction and improve housing conditions. In November, Bureau member and Outreach Director Julie Park '07 concluded an agreement on behalf of eight teenage mothers who were being evicted from the Aswalos House, a transitional housing program run by the YWCA in Dorchester. The program was discontinued and the house scheduled to be closed due to funding cuts, but Park negotiated an agreement guaranteeing new apartments for the young mothers and continuation of the career and life skills counseling they had been receiving.
In early December, student attorneys Alison MacManus '08 and Jonathon Bashford '07 negotiated a settlement on behalf of a tenant association in Roxbury. The tenants, who had been living for years in conditions that Bureau Faculty Director David Grossman '88 describes as "squalid," had been unable to compel their landlord to undertake building repairs required by the Massachusetts housing code.
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