We were in housing court recently with one of our new clients. “Mary” has the kind of case that makes people shake their heads in disbelief, and explains why housing lawyers, like me, are sadly necessary.
Mary is a single working mother, who, thankfully, lives in a subsidized building. That means her rent is supposed to be based on her annual income, but because her work income fluctuates, and the landlord’s staff took only a small sampling of pay stubs to calculate what her rent should be this year, they were overcharging her quite a bit. She’s now facing eviction for unpaid rent.
It’s these kinds of very human errors — coupled with very human pride and unwillingness to acknowledge the errors — that lead to evictions.
We’ve provided all the documentation to the landlord’s attorney to show that they haven’t calculated Mary’s income correctly. Remarkably, we haven’t been able to get them to even read our papers explaining their error. So, we were in court again recently. This time they offered us a new rent, that was, once again, miscalculated. Although the landlord’s attorney was willing to listen to what I had to say (to some extent) it seemed that he mostly wanted the case resolved without it taking too much of his time. My client and I were both getting yelled at by the landlord’s representative almost as soon as he arrived on the scene. I shudder to think how things would have gone for Mary if we weren’t involved! We’ve adjourned the case once more, in hopes of resolving the differences, but if we can’t, we’re prepared to put everything in front of the judge, and I’m confident the judge will agree with our calculations, thus finally resolving the question of how much her rent should be.
Sandhya Reju Boyd, Director
