Got an eviction notice? This California website will help you file a response
In April, Juan Carlos Cruz Mora received a notice of eviction from his landlord in which he alleged that he caused property damage and dirty, unsafe living conditions in the Sacramento suburb duplex he has been calling home for the past 10 years. He only had five days to file a response in court.
Mora, who held his landlord accountable for those matters, tried to file a response in court himself but feared a mistake could leave him, his wife and their two young children on the street. She said she paid $ 1,000 to a lawyer to help her.
“In a word, he could lose the case,” he said in Spanish.
Thousands of California tenants lose their homes each year because they don’t file that initial response in court. Failure to tick the correct box or submit a timely response could, in fact, trigger a default sentence against them.
A group of tenant advocates and lawyers released a tool on Tuesday that they hope will change that.
More than 50 attorneys and tenants’ attorneys The debt group, LA Tenants Union, Anti-eviction mapping project, UCLA’s Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and the Californian Alliance for Community Empowerment worked on the “Tenant Power Toolkit” for the past two years, a mostly voluntary effort, explains Hannah Appel, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, who came up with the idea based on her work as a co-founder of the program. Debt Collective.
The website they created looks like tax filing software. That asks tenants a long series of questions in relatively simple English or Spanish that produces a legal document that they can print and file in court. Los Angeles County tenants can file the documentation electronically. If they wish, tenants can connect with other tenants and legal aid organizations through the website.
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Questions vary depending on the type of eviction and location. For example, if your city has rent control for people over 65 who have lived in the building for five years, the tool will ask tenants their age and time they lived in the building and invoke that defense on paper, even if the tenants they did not know that protection existed.
Of the more than 129,000 eviction proceedings filed between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019, at least 24,000 tenants lost their lawsuits in default judgment, according to data from the Justice Council. It is 46% of cases in courts that have reported their results, something most courts do not. Default trials fell to 7,600, or 40% of reported results, last year as a result of statewide eviction protections, which researchers say does not reflect a typical year.
“As a lawyer it gives me a lot to see tenants lose cases just because they couldn’t file a paper,” said UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, one of the top housing lawyers behind the tool. He called it the first of its kind nationwide.
Legalese is not the only one preventing a tenant from filing an answer, according to Amber Crowell, an associate professor of sociology in the state of Fresno and housing coordinator at Faith in the Valley. Tenants often evict their homes before going through the eviction process because they don’t believe they have any chance in court. Losing a case can damage a person’s credit and the ability to rent another home.
The tool buys tenants at least 10 days to file a modified response and find a lawyer before the trial. But its creators warn that the website is not a substitute for a lawyer. Access to legal aid remains rare for tenants, who at the national level are represented by a lawyer in 10% of cases, according to the ACLU. That statistic shrinks 1% in FresnoCrowell found in a 2019 study. Blasi expects the tool to have a greater impact in places where people have greater access to legal aid.
“In an ideal world, the tool would not be necessary at all,” Blasi said.
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Mora will defend himself at his next trial because he was dissatisfied with the private lawyer he hired and was unable to find free legal assistance.
Although drawn up with a “cordon budget,” the group hopes to attract more philanthropic and state funds to keep the tool up to date, especially as local jurisdictions approve new protections for tenants.
But money is not all they want from lawmakers. The groups argue that tenants should have the right to legal representation in the courts, efforts that have had little traction at the state level. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a diluted version of that last year, a bill to create an ongoing bill. Legal services trust fund for tenants because he argued that there was already money for the tenant’s legal assistance in the budget.
Got an eviction notice? This California website will help you file a response Source link Got an eviction notice? This California website will help you file a response
