Law students bar the doors

As the tangled web of loans and defaults in the national mortgage crisis snares more Boston residents, local law students are reaching out to tenants facing foreclosure and helping them fight back with the law’s most potent weapon: information.
Last weekend the ‘No One Leaves’ campaign teamed up with non-profit organization City Life, a local housing activist group, to go door-to-door to inform Boston tenants of their basic legal rights after foreclosure and to offer further legal council.
‘Our goal is to get people to stay in their homes,’ said Tony Borich, a third-year student at Harvard Law School and intern at City Life.’
City Life, which has been promoting local housing political action in Boston since the 1970s, organized the Bank Tenants Association earlier this year to inform tenants of foreclosed properties in Boston about their legal rights, Borich said.
The BTA was not reaching enough people until the campaign began canvassing on the streets, he said.
‘The personal contact we have with the door-to-door approach is many, many times more effective,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you need those personal connections before people will trust you.’
Borich said there have been more than 250 foreclosures in Boston since September, and about two-thirds of them were on rented properties. Of those two-thirds, a great number of the properties had multiple housing units, he said.
‘So in not even two months, many more than 250 families have faced eviction,’ he said. ‘It’s a huge problem.’
When a bank forecloses a rented property, the bank becomes the landlord. Borch said banks often send all tenants in that building an eviction notice, no matter the circumstances of the other tenants.
Only a judge can legally evict a tenant, however, despite what some notices might say, Borich said.
‘The bank phrases [the eviction notices] in a way that causes a great deal of fear,’ he said. ‘Even if it doesn’t misstate the law, it’s still very deceptive.’
Banks also have obligations to uphold when they assume ownership of a rented property, Suffolk University Law School professor William Berman said.
‘You have rights as a tenant, and the new landlord, which is the bank, has to step up to the plate and deal with these obligations,’ Berman said. ‘There have been tenants living in apartments with no gas, no heat and roaches, and they don’t even know who owns the building.’
Berman, who runs the Housing and Consumer Protection Clinic at Suffolk, said banks do not have to evict all the tenants after foreclosing property.
‘Banks . . . need to reconsider the policy of just evicting everybody right away and creating this wave of displacement,’ he said. ‘By drawing them to court, we’re sending a strong message to banks to take more seriously the lives of tenants getting evicted.’
The work of these student volunteers is part of a much larger effort to deal with the large number of home foreclosures in the recent years, Boston City Councilor Charles Yancey (Dorchester) said.
‘We’re all responding to the tremendous human tragedy taking place not just in Boston but around the country,’ Yancey said. ‘I’m so proud of the law students that have volunteered their time to work with us to find an equitable solution to this problem.’
Yancey held a summit last week for families facing foreclosure to speak with lawyers about legal options and another summit was held this week for families to speak with representatives from utility companies about rising costs. He plans to hold more of these meetings in the future, he said.
‘We’re entering a recessionary period, and unemployment is only going to go up,’ Yancey said. ‘We need to provide as much information as possible to help the families make it through.’