He told her to move out. Now what?
The scaffolding of help and the humans that fall through it
Welcome to Allison In Wonderland, a budding lawyer’s newsletter. I’m opening two new “sections” on this Substack:
“Field Notes”: Reporting real encounters with clients navigating the bitter and the sweet of the legal system
“Legalese”: 2-minute reads answering common questions that affect you, like: “Can I get fired for complaining about work, at work?” and “Will I lose my sign-on bonus if I leave before the X-year mark?”
From now on, articles on law school will go into a section called “First Gen Help.”
I’ll never write more than 1x a week across all three. But so that you can get the content you want to read — and not more — please navigate to your.substack.com/account to turn your notifications on or off for each section. Thanks for being here!
The air is asps in January in Upstate New York. It coils with wet, flurrying snow and strikes at the nose and cheeks. The virgin flakes pick up grime when they land and are repeatedly packed and heaped into dappled gray beasts on the curbs.
It has been winter since October, and C is about to lose her home.
I stripped C’s identifying information (C is for “Client”), but she is a real person. She called my school’s legal hotline in late November— that time when we swipe jellied cranberries and canned green beans off the shelves and return to
Home...the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
Robert Frost
Her lease ended on December 1. Three weeks later, I read so on her intake and subsequently emailed her with my breath held.
Are you... still in your home?
She answered. Yes, I haven’t been kicked out yet.
But as she unfolded her story in our successive calls, I discovered that she did not need professional legal help. She needed a fearless friend.
This past August, the landlord raised C’s rent by 23% and shortened the lease to four months. This, despite the fact that she and her son had lived there for more than two years, during which her relationship with her landlord had been cordial, uneventful.
But at the beginning of 2023, she developed PTSD and lost her ability to hold a job. So she reached out to disability services for help. Disability services agreed to make supplemental rent payments. Since they were made directly to her landlord, he was aware of the whole matter: her joblessness, her inability to pay rent, her need for help.
So her landlord had raised the rent and shortened the lease— a way of saying, “it’s not working out between us.” If you feel like someone’s life is going down the drain, can you be faulted for taking steps to break off a rental agreement? It’s time to move on, right?
Throughout the four month lease, the landlord pestered C about “missing rent.” To be honest, C herself wasn’t sure. She never saw what disability services wired over, and the landlord never provided documentation of what he received.
This turned out to be critical. According to New York State Law, landlords must provide receipts after every rental payment to avoid exactly the kind of uncertainty plaguing C. If C’s landlord tried to evict her — the only legal way is with court papers— there’s a good chance the judge would dismiss the case. Judges aren’t sympathetic to landlords who flout their duties. Shape up and come back in a few months, they say.
Until she was served those court papers, C had a “month-to-month” lease. Even if the date of the written lease had passed, she had a legal right to stay if she paid her rent each month. I was confident when I called C back.
Worst case scenario, you are brought to court but the lawsuit will probably be dismissed, I said. You won’t be on the street just because the expiration date has passed, C. But you need to keep paying rent. Is that something you can do?
I… don’t know if I can. My contact at disability services got shuffled to another part of the organization, and disability services ghosted me.
Maybe first we get to the bottom of whether the rent is really $1,300 or $1,600 a month. Do you have it in writing? Or did he only tell you he wanted to raise it? Because he can’t just tell you verbally.
So she told me the story again.
When her landlord learned that she would hook into disability services to help make rent payments, he acquiesced, but asked if he could have “a little extra, since disability services is helping.”
I hadn’t heard this before. He said what? Was he trying to make a fast buck off of her vulnerable state?
But I don’t think he could even get $1,600 per month for this place. Because of the holes in the walls.
On afternoons, her son crouched in the opposite corner and leveled BB-shots at squirrels that wormed their way through the holes. Failing to keep the home habitable is unlawful, period. But it hadn’t yet occurred to me that he had asked for more rent while knowing he wouldn’t find another tenant willing to rent at that price.
C kept talking. I’ve asked him to fix it, but he’s old and sometimes I feel like I have to repeat myself over and over. Like he’ll ask me a question, and then I’ll answer, and then he’ll ask me again. I get overwhelmed.
And he keeps threatening to kick me out. Like he’ll come in my home and threaten to kick me out if I don’t clean the place up.
…he’ll come in my home and threaten to kick me out…
As I wrote up a legal memorandum for C’s case, I stacked up arguments in the offensive. There was the fact that he shirked his duty to provide her with the rent receipts. There was the fact that he threatened to kick her out — the forbidden “self-help” eviction. There was the fact that he failed to make the home habitable; no home in Upstate New York should have gaping holes in the winter.
And there was the fated lease change. Legally, his actions discriminated against her on the basis of her disability. But there was also the human argument: How did he have the audacity to increase rent when the home likely wouldn’t be rentable to someone at that price?
These were claims for which C could be compensated. She could sue with the full force of the law. And I told her so.
But that was not her goal.
She wanted one thing: She wanted to retain custody of her son. C explained that her ex-spouse and her were in custody battles. Losing her home could tip the scales against her. But her son’s 13th birthday— when he could choose for himself which parent he wished to live with— was just around the corner. She didn’t want to sue with the full force of the law. She wanted to be allowed to stay for just that little bit longer, or until Section 8 housing came through.
I could find a couch to crash on, but I really can’t do that to him.
C had leverage to negotiate with the landlord about staying a little longer. She could propose a reduced rent on the basis that the home as it was could not be rented without repairs.
I think you have a solid place from which to negotiate, C.
I paused. The legal hotline was designed for “brief advice.” I was purely in the business of providing information. But I had to blurt out:
Do you feel like you can do it?
...honestly, I don’t... think so.
Between PTSD, a bumbling landlord, and the real possibility of losing her home, C was scared. She needed a tough nut to stand by her side and press her case with the landlord. Someone willing to stick with her through the weeks, even months, of negotiations. Someone willing to plop down in front of the laptop and comb through emails from the landlord. Not necessarily (and probably best if not) a lawyer.
Teetering on a brink, C is not yet in Section 8 housing, not yet before a courthouse judge who will likely sympathize with her. She is in that hole in the administrative safety net, that empty air between the bars of scaffolding— not quite at a definitive moment where the law will swoop in on her side. In a society where the ties that bind us are discrete transactions and the state, people like C fall right through.
But imagine, for a moment, that C belonged to a community of faithful, available humans— what difference it would make. As a follower of Jesus yearning to bring heaven to earth, I want to believe it can be true.
Remember to navigate to your.substack.com/account to turn your notifications on or off for each section!
“Field Notes”: Reporting real encounters with clients navigating the bitter and the sweet of the legal system (like this post)
“Legalese”: 2-minute reads answering common questions that affect you, like: “Can I get fired for complaining about work, at work?” and “Will I lose my sign-on bonus if I leave before the X-year mark?”
“First Gen Help”: My usual content on how to navigate law school and the legal profession
I enjoy the way you use your poetic flair to add interest to what could easily have been a dry, legal story. Homelessness might be the #1 saddest everyday sight in our town. Have you read the book "Evicted?" I found that to be a fascinating description of the vicious cycle of housing-related poverty.