Tag Archive for: housing

Staff Attorney: Housing and Homelessness

Central West Justice Center (CWJC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Community Legal Aid (CLA), seeks a staff attorney to work in its Springfield office. Together, CWJC and CLA have over 180 dedicated, talented staff working across multiple offices in central and western Massachusetts. Our core work includes effective client-centered advocacy and robust outreach to and partnerships with our client communities.

The attorney will represent tenants in eviction cases, tenants facing denials or terminations from public and subsidized housing programs, and families appealing denials or terminations from the state’s Emergency Assistance homeless shelter program. The attorney will regularly participate in a Housing Court lawyer-for-the day program. The attorney will have significant client contact and will engage in community outreach and education, and may be involved in some grant-reporting activities.

QUALIFICATIONS: Third-year law students, recent law school graduates, and more experienced attorneys are eligible to apply. Applicants should have a demonstrated commitment to poverty law and social justice work. Experience working with diverse communities, strong interpersonal skills, and an ability to work in a collaborative setting are important. Experience in landlord-tenant work preferred, as is fluency in Spanish, Portuguese and/or Vietnamese. Administrative agency advocacy experience, including law school clinical experience, helpful.

COMPENSATION: The starting salary for this position is $73,000, which is based on a union scale and adjusted upward depending on experience. CWJC offers a very generous benefits package that includes 401(k) with employer-paid contribution; low-cost health insurance (medical, dental, and vision) for employees and their dependents; malpractice insurance; paid leave (4 weeks vacation, 3 personal days, 12 sick days, and 13 holidays); law school loan repayment assistance; and relocation reimbursement. CWJC has a hybrid work environment and requires advocates to work in their assigned office at least three days per week.

APPLICATION PROCESS: Please submit your resume and cover letter online on our website: https://communitylegal.isolvedhire.com/jobs/. Alternatively, you can mail your application Recruitment Coordinator, Community Legal Aid, 370 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01608.

CWJC is an Equal Opportunity Employer and strives to ensure that our staff members reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. CWJC encourages applicants from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences.

Outreach efforts starting as eviction-sealing law takes effect in Mass.

Annette Duke, a Senior Housing Staff Attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI), has played a key role in advocating for the state’s new eviction-sealing law, which went into effect on May 5, 2025. This law allows tenants who meet specific criteria to petition to have their eviction records sealed, providing a crucial opportunity for individuals facing housing instability. Duke, along with other housing advocates, worked tirelessly to push for this legislation, which aims to remove barriers for tenants seeking stable housing. Her involvement underscores MLRI’s ongoing commitment to improving housing justice and access for vulnerable populations in Massachusetts. Read the full story from NBC Boston below.

Read the original story here. 

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Thousands of Massachusetts residents gained a new tool in the search for stable housing Monday, as a law took effect allowing eligible tenants to have their past eviction records sealed.

State Sen. Lydia Edwards, a longtime advocate for the law, said she already helped a constituent file an eviction-sealing petition Monday morning with the support of community organization City Life/Vida Urbana. Edwards said they used a website to fill out the paperwork.

“I was nervous. We got to, it was CourtFormsOnline.org — went to there, looked up housing, had the petition, just clicked on that. And then it literally walks you through: What’s your name, where’s your docket, your docket number — which everyone will need to have their docket number — and then what’s your address,” Edwards said at a press conference outside the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in downtown Boston, where the Eastern Housing Court is located.

“And then we just went through it together, and then filed it,” the East Boston Democrat, who co-chaired the Joint Committee on Housing last session, continued. “It was filed directly in the court that it needed to go to, and we did this all from the public library.”

Edwards, Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Attorney General Andrea Campbell, Senate President Karen Spilka, Boston Chief of Housing Sheila Dillon and other officials joined advocates and housing attorneys outside the courthouse to raise awareness of the new law, which was embedded in the Affordable Homes Act that Gov. Maura Healey signed in August.

The new law is intended to remove a major barrier to housing stability. Eviction records are publicly-accessible court records, which landlords can currently use to deny housing to prospective tenants. Records are public even if tenants won a case or reached an agreement with a landlord, advocates said.

Eviction sealing is not an automatic process under the new law. Tenants who win their case, have a case dismissed or had a no-fault eviction case can petition to have their records sealed immediately after the appeal period ends, according to a fact sheet. Tenants will need to wait four years to petition after the end of a non-payment case, and seven years after a fault-eviction case.

The law also blocks credit and consumer reporting agencies from including information about sealed eviction records in their reports.

Nearly 5,000 evictions are filed annually in Boston, with “many” submitted at the courthouse where officials and advocates had gathered, Dillon said.

“About 1,500 of those eviction filings turn into actual evictions, and it is really hard for those families to oftentimes move on because of the records that they have acquired along the way,” Dillon said.

She added, “It’s wonderful to have this new tool, but it’s also our work to make sure that less evictions happen every year by creating more affordable housing, providing more legal assistance, more rental relief. And so the work upstream needs to continue.”

Greg Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, said his organization initially opposed the eviction sealing law over safety concerns for tenants. Vasil said it’s important for building owners to know about certain past offenses when screening prospective tenants.

GBREB eventually backed the law after years of dialogue with Edwards, including during her tenure as a city councilor, and with House Majority Leader Mike Moran of Brighton.

There will be “growing pains” with the new law, Vasil told the News Service.

“It’s going to be a learning process for a lot of people. A lot of our owners are large owners that may have dealt with this in other jurisdictions across the country,” Vasil said. “It’s going to be a real sea change for the small owner, which a lot of us folks we don’t represent. It’s going to be very different for the mom and pops. They don’t have a team, they don’t necessarily have a legal staff that they can look at.”

The Massachusetts Trial Court launched an online tool Monday, called the Eviction Sealing Guided Interview, to help Bay Staters navigate the process and file petitions electronically. Annette Duke, senior housing staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, also encouraged residents to visit SealMyEviction.org for resources about the process.

Campbell called Monday a “historic and amazing day” for tenants. Black renters are 2.4 times more likely to have an eviction filed against them than their white counterparts, and Black women are at greatest risk of having an eviction record or case filed against them, the attorney general said.

“We want everyone today to know that if you have an eviction in the past, that starting today, this option may be available to us. So, it will be incumbent upon all of us to get this information out to the people across the commonwealth,” Campbell said. “I want to promise, and I’m making a promise, that our office will do everything in its power to continue our trainings, Know Your Rights, providing legal clinics, materials, all the resources that we are able to provide to ensure that folks have access to this critical information.”

Housing Attorney – SCCLS

South Coastal Counties Legal Services (SCCLS) seeks to hire multiple attorneys to work within its robust and dynamic housing unit. The housing unit is committed to ensuring that individuals and families throughout southeast Massachusetts have access to safe, stable, and affordable housing. The housing unit furthers this mission through the provision of high-quality direct representation to individuals in summary process (eviction) proceedings, challenges to public and subsidized housing denials, and termination of housing benefits matters. The unit also represents individuals by affirmatively filing legal actions to ensure safe and habitable housing, to remediate discriminatory conduct, and to recover terminated subsidies. In addition to direct representation, the housing unit engages in appellate advocacy, community outreach and education, and staffs the Lawyer for the Day Program in the Southeast Housing Court.

The Organization: South Coastal Counties Legal Services, Inc. (SCCLS) is the principal provider of free, civil legal aid to low-income residents of Southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. SCCLS’ core mission is to achieve justice for eligible clients through community-based advocacy. The organization prioritizes legal services in housing, public benefits, elder law, domestic relations, employment, education, immigration, and consumer matters. The organization’s law offices are located in Hyannis, New Bedford, Fall River, and Brockton.

Responsibilities include:

· Provide high quality zealous legal representation, counsel and/or referrals;

· Appear regularly in judicial and/or administrative proceedings representing tenants in their housing matters;

· Manage active and varied case load;

· Participate in, or conduct, community education and outreach;

· Participate in the housing unit’s Lawyer for the Day Program in the Southeast Housing Court;

· Participate in team meetings to engage in collective learning and evaluation of new cases;

· Identify and participate in impact advocacy projects;

· Engage in continuous learning in housing law;

· Participate in other program activities to further organizational goals and mission.

Competencies/Qualifications:

· Admitted in MA, eligible for admission in MA, or pursuing admission in a 2025 bar exam;

· Demonstrated commitment or experience working with diverse communities, including experience representing clients who may have experienced poverty, trauma, and/or discrimination;

· Commitment to providing trauma informed, client-centered lawyering;

· Strong organizational, time management, and case management skills;

· Strong oral and written communication skills;

· Ability to work independently and collaboratively within a team; ability to be flexible and adapt to client situations and changing program conditions;

· Proficiency or ability to learn legal case management systems, Microsoft Office Suite;

· Fluency in a language reflecting our client populations preferred (e.g. Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Vietnamese, Khmer);

· Prior housing law experience preferred.

Compensation and Benefits: Salaries are based on a collective bargaining agreement scale starting at $72,500 and increasing based on years of experience. Staff receive yearly standard increases and an annual increment for demonstrated language skills. Generous benefits package includes health and dental with supplemental coverage, life insurance, disability, flexible spending account, 403(b), and loan forgiveness. Generous paid leave including sick, vacation, personal, and holidays.

Apply: For full consideration, submit: letter of interest, resume, writing sample and references by June 30, 2025 to LThelin@sccls.org with subject: Housing SCCLS. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

South Coastal Counties Legal Services and its subsidiary are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate on the basis of age, class, color, disability, ethnicity, faith, gender, national origin, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression. We welcome applicants from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences. We strive to foster a healthy, inclusive environment where all staff, clients, and community members are valued, empowered and recognized.

Lawsuit alleges racial discrimination in tenant screening tool (CommonWealth Magazine)

CommonWealth Magazine recently reported on developments in the Louis vs. SafeRent Solutions case. An excerpt of the article is below. The plaintiffs in this case are represented by attorneys from Greater Boston Legal Services; the Washington, DC-based firm Cohen, Milstein, Sellers & Toll; and the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center.

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Two Black women from Massachusetts are at the center of what could become a landmark federal case about whether software that screens potential tenants is illegally biased against Black and Hispanic applicants.

Rachael Rollins, the US attorney for Massachusetts, weighed in on the case, Louis vs. SafeRent Solutions, in a court brief this week, arguing that the technology used by tenant screening companies must comply with anti-discrimination rules. “Algorithms are written by people. As such, they are susceptible to all of the biases, implicit or explicit, of the people that create them,” Rollins said in a statement. Rollins said her filing “recognizes that our 20th century civil rights laws apply to 21st century innovations.”

SafeRent Solutions is a company used by landlords to screen potential tenants. SafeRent gives rental applicants a risk score based on their credit history, other credit-related information including non-tenancy debts, and eviction history.

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Read more at CommonWealth Magazine.

‘I’m at my wit’s end’: Welcome to the underbelly of the region’s housing crisis (The Boston Globe)

Attorneys Zoe Cronin of Greater Boston Legal Services and Rochelle Jones of the Volunteer Lawyers Project, both pictured above, were featured in a Nov. 12 Boston Globe article for their work representing people in housing court in the aftermath of COVID eviction moratoria expiring.

An excerpt of the article is below.

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Criminal court proceedings where the defendant faces possible prison time guarantees the right to a defense lawyer, but there is no such safety net for housing court. This means that many tenants who can’t afford a lawyer are battling potential eviction by taking it upon themselves to duel with polished attorneys representing landlords.The tenants often struggle to navigate the complexities of housing law and courtroom procedure. Louis is one of the lucky ones. She has legal representation: Zoe Cronin from Greater Boston Legal Services.

Many tenants are not so fortunate.

As of the end of October, there were 15,556 residential eviction cases brought this year in Massachusetts for non-payment of rent. Those cases include 21,629 defendants, the vast, vast majority of whom are defending themselves without a hired attorney. (Nearly 97 percent are pro se.) By contrast, only about 12 percent of landlords who bring forward eviction cases do so without a lawyer to represent them, according to statistics from the Massachusetts Trial Court.

Volunteer lawyers help both pro se tenants and landlords craft motions or offer representation during a mediation session, and, in some cases they offer full representation. The “lawyer for a day” program sets up shop outside a bank of courtrooms on the fifth floor. Many tenants, said Rochelle Jones, the housing and appeals staff attorney for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, struggle to articulate and defend themselves, to explain to the court what is happening in their living situation.

“The legal system is complicated, it’s complex,” she said.

Read more in The Boston Globe.

With aid drying up, advocates fear wave of evictions (The Boston Globe)

The Boston Globe quoted Massachusetts Law Reform Institute Staff Attorney Andrea Park (pictured above) in an Oct. 12 article examining the impact of waning COVID-era relief funds and legal protections for tenants. New rental assistance requirements and fewer available funds have led to an uptick in eviction filings. Below is an excerpt from the article.

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The most drastic change to rent relief is the one Bertelson faced: the requirement tenants receive a Notice To Quit.

Legally, notices are not enough to boot tenants from their homes, said Andrea Park, a staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Yet most are threaded with strong legalistic language that threatens eviction. As a result, she added, some tenants leave their apartments in fear, rather than staying put and fighting.

Park said the state failed to consider how requiring the notice could trigger other problems, such as the impact on tenants’ credit scores and their ability to secure housing in the future.

“There’s this perception that it’s just a letter,” she added. “But that’s underselling the power of the NTQ.”

Read more in The Boston Globe.

SafeRent Solutions accused of illegally discriminating against Black and Hispanic rental applicants

Greater Boston Legal Services, the National Consumer Law Center, and law firm Cohen Milstein filed a federal lawsuit on May 25 against SafeRent Solutions, LLC alleging that the national tenant screening provider has been violating the Fair Housing Act and related state laws for years. SafeRent, formerly known as CoreLogic Rental Property Solutions, provides tenant screening services that disproportionately give low scores to Black and Hispanic rental applicants who use federally funded housing vouchers to pay the vast majority of their rent, causing them to be denied housing.  The lawsuit alleges that SafeRent’s algorithm has a disparate impact based on race and source of income, in violation of federal and state laws.

“As stated in the complaint, while SafeRent considers applicants’ credit history, including credit-related information, including non-tenancy debts, and eviction history in calculating SafeRent Scores,” said Todd Kaplan, senior attorney at GBLS, “SafeRent’s algorithm does not consider the financial benefits of housing vouchers in assigning SafeRent Scores. On average over 73% of the monthly rental payment is paid through these vouchers.”

“Racial disparities in credit history and credit scores not only reflect historical racial disparities in wealth, but also perpetuate wealth inequalities through reduced financial opportunities and fewer financial safety nets, which hinder a consumer’s ability to accumulate present or intergenerational wealth through homeownership or other financial investments,” said Ariel Nelson, staff attorney at NCLC.

Read more at NCLC or on Inman, a real estate news source.

MetroWest Legal Services: Fighting for Equal Justice for Over 40 Years

By John Carroll

The service area of MetroWest Legal Services (MWLS) encompasses the soon-to-be-city of Framingham (town residents voted to transition to city status as of Jan. 1, 2018) and 44 surrounding towns west of Boston. Despite a staff of just 22—including 15 full-time attorneys, the organization assists over 2,500 low-income people a year in resolving non-criminal legal matters related to basic but essential needs like housing, health care, protection from domestic abuse, and child support. Needless to say, the MWLS office is usually a pretty busy place.

Nonetheless, Tuesday, August 22 was more hectic than usual. By noon that day, three homeless families turned up at MWLS after being told they did not qualify for state-run Emergency Assistance (EA) shelter. Two of the families weren’t even allowed to fill out an application—they were simply turned away after cursory interviews in which they attempted to briefly explain the complex circumstances of their homelessness. These three families brought the total number of homeless families seeking MWLS’s help getting emergency shelter over 10-day period to six.

“As I heard these stories, one was worse than the next,” wrote MWLS Executive Director Elizabeth “Betsy” Soulé in a recent MWLS newsletter. A mother and child sleeping in their car at a local park. A mother and her severely autistic child who fled domestic violence in another country were made to leave the apartment of the mother’s sister, lest the sister be evicted. A disabled veteran, his recently unemployed wife, teenage son, service dog and aging cat who had been sleeping in their car for two months. The reasons they were turned away from emergency shelter were senseless. The mother and child sleeping at the park, for example, were denied because, lacking a camera or a phone with a camera, they couldn’t produce photographic evidence that they were sleeping in their car.

Fortunately, after a day and a half of meetings and negotiations with the legal department of the state agency that administers emergency shelter, MWLS saw to it that these families received the services they needed. Even better, in the interim, a generous MWLS donor provided funds to rent hotel rooms for the stranded families.

Aside from housing, MWLS includes units dedicated to elder issues, special education, domestic violence, immigration, victims of crime, worker related issues, and others, as well as an innovative medical-legal partnership with the Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center in Framingham.

MWLS was founded in 1976 as an arm of the South Middlesex Opportunity Council. Since then, it has merged through several iterations into the multi-service legal office that it is today. Soulé’s tenure at MWLS stretches nearly 30 years to 1988, when she joined the organization as a supervising attorney. She has served as executive director since 2008, overseeing MWLS’s vast service area, which encompasses 25-30 House districts and 10 Senatorial districts, with political aplomb. Soulé knows all of the area’s elected officials, and they know her. They also know that she serves their mutual constituents very well. With more than 40,000 people living in poverty in the MWLS service area, Soulé does her best to see that all eligible citizens are served well, but she knows the blanket is too small for the bed. As she lamented in a local newspaper profile on the occasion of the MWLS’s 40th anniversary last year, “there are just way more people who need our help than we can reach because of a lack of resources.”

Despite the daily struggle to meet the needs of as many clients as possible, MWLS staff are deeply committed to working to remove barriers to justice for low-income people west of Boston.

“Nobody goes into this for the money,” Soulé told the Boston Globe last year. “They’re doing it because it’s important and they’re committed to the mission. It’s tough work. It’s intense work, but the benefits literally mean the difference between life and death sometimes.”

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John Carroll is a partner at Meehan, Boyle, Black and Bogdanow, and the immediate past chair of the Equal Justice Coalition. He is a 2016-2017 fellow with the Access to Justice Fellows Program, a project of the Massachusetts Access to Justice Commission and the Lawyers Clearinghouse that enables senior lawyers and retired judges to partner with nonprofit organizations, courts, and other public interest entities to increase equal justice for all.

Civil Legal Aid Can Help Veterans Struggling With Homelessness

By Lonnie Powers

On any given night in the U.S., close to 39,500 military veterans are homeless. Nearly 1,000 of them are in Massachusetts.

These are men and women who have put their lives on the line in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the jungles of Vietnam. They fought in the Korean War, Panama, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf. And yet, after all they endured in service to our country, they are sleeping in shelters, and living on the streets or in homeless encampments.

The reasons for their homelessness are complex. There are the general stressors that contribute to homelessness such as a shortage of affordable housing and limited opportunities to earn a living wage, coupled with the fact that military training and occupations don’t always translate well to the civilian workforce. Those issues are compounded by mental health problems that result from, or were exacerbated by, their service and the absence of social support networks. Child support arrears have also been identified as a leading cause of homelessness among veterans.

Recognizing the scale of the problem, in 2010 President Barack Obama launched an initiative aimed at ending veteran homelessness by 2015. As part of that, cities across the country, including a handful in Massachusetts, joined the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness. And while the initiative’s ultimate goal has yet to be achieved, homelessness among veterans has fallen nationally by 47 percent in the last six years, while unsheltered homelessness has been reduced by 56 percent. Locally, Lynn became the first Massachusetts city to end veterans’ homelessness earlier this year. Boston has succeeded in housing all but just a small number of veterans who are homeless as of the beginning of this year.

Civil legal aid—free legal assistance or representation for low-income individuals facing non-criminal legal issues—has been an integral part of ensuring our veterans have safe, stable housing. The Department of Justice has noted that four of the most pressing unmet needs of homeless veterans involve legal assistance: preventing eviction/foreclosure, child support issues, outstanding warrants/fines, and restoration of a driver’s license. Recognizing the need, the Department of Veterans Affairs has made grant funding available to legal aid organizations to assist veterans as part of President Obama’s initiative.

In addition to working to get veterans into permanent housing, civil legal aid is often an effective intervention for veterans who are at risk of becoming homeless—an estimated 1.4 million veterans nationwide. For example, several years ago, Legal Assistance Corp. of Central Massachusetts, now known as Community Legal Aid (CLA) helped Iraq War veteran Michael Damon and his family avoid foreclosure on their Uxbridge home. The family fell into financial hardship when war-related injuries left Damon disabled and he was ineligible to receive workers’ compensation. His injuries made him unable to care for his two children, which prevented his wife Lisa from working full-time. It wasn’t long before they received a foreclosure notice. Damon’s legal aid attorney filed suit on the family’s behalf against Countrywide Home Loans and Deutsche Bank. Their case was ultimately settled after their attorney was able to assist the Damons in repurchasing their home with a more affordable mortgage.

In another instance, MetroWest Legal Services (MWLS) succeeded in helping a 17-year Air Force veteran keep a roof over her head after a layoff and a stretch of unemployment brought her close to financial ruin. An MWLS attorney helped the veteran file for bankruptcy and represented her at the hearing, which resulted in the discharge of a large credit card debt—and a more stable financial future.

The theme of Veterans Day this year is “Courage-Honoring All Who Served.” As we honor and thank those who have served in our military, we must remember that for far too many veterans, the perils of service do not end with discharge from the military. If we truly want to honor all of our military veterans, we must ensure that the most vulnerable among them have the services and support they need and deserve to thrive as civilians.

Lonnie Powers is executive director of the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation.