Community Legal Aid is a nonprofit that offers free legal support to low-income and older Massachusetts residents in Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, and Worcester counties. To celebrate Fair Housing Month, it’s using grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to expand its legal work around housing into Berkshire County. Peter Beck – who is also the chair of the Williamstown planning board – will be the designated Community Legal Aid attorney working on fair housing out of the organization’s downtown Pittsfield office. Beck discussed the legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act and today’s challenges around fair housing with WAMC.
BECK: It guaranteed equal access to housing regardless of your race, your national origin. It also now includes your family status, your gender, which includes gender identity and sexual orientation. But it ensures that landlords, and anyone involved in the housing market, basically in any capacity, can't discriminate against folks who are looking to access or keep housing based on who they are.
WAMC: How pervasive of a problem is that in Western Massachusetts?
So, it's pervasive in Western Massachusetts, just like it's pervasive everywhere. So, it remains a really difficult problem and a really important problem to tackle. Sometimes the different ways in which folks discriminate or are discriminated against can change, depending on the time period, depending on the location. Sometimes disability is the category that we see the most discrimination against, or sometimes it's race or gender. Sometimes it's more explicit and on its face, and sometimes it's more subtle. And sometimes folks don't even know they're being discriminated against, because they might be told the unit is not available when it actually is, and then someone who is different from them gets the unit when they got rejected discriminatorily.
Community Legal Aid says it's expanding their work in this field to Berkshire County- Tell us, what does that mean? And what's that going to look like on the ground for folks in Berkshire County who might need your services?
So, we've always had a presence in the Berkshires. We have an office in Pittsfield that covers most of the main units of our work- Family law, in housing law, in eviction defense work, in benefits work. We haven't had a specific fair housing attorney in our Pittsfield office until now, and it means that we can expand the kinds of housing cases that we can take on. So, we're already representing folks in eviction cases, for example, every day and every week- But now we can take on more of the cases where folks are being discriminated against, but they're not yet being evicted. Or maybe they'll never be evicted, but they're having trouble getting a house in the first place, or they're in an apartment, but their landlord won't make a reasonable modification or accommodation for their disability, let them live there in an equal way to anyone else in the building. So, we can take on more of those cases than we ever could before throughout the Berkshires.
When you think about a good example of the kind of case that Community Legal Aid intervenes, in what comes to mind?
You might have a case based on, for example, disability discrimination, where someone is having trouble with their landlord or with their unit because of a disability, a mental or physical disability, that's making it harder for them to access or enjoy their housing in the same way, and maybe some kind of modification would make, create an equal opportunity to enjoy that housing. Maybe it's a ramp, maybe it's a grab bar, maybe it's support, connection to resources to help with hoarding or cluttering, or a change in the alarm systems that’s flashing lights instead of noises or an accommodation for a service or assistance animal. So, those are the sorts of cases where someone might face discrimination because of their disability when they have the right to an accommodation, they have the right to enjoy their housing just like anyone else.
On a legal level, do you feel like currently laws in Massachusetts are more or less favorable to tenants as opposed to landlords?
One of the things that the law and legal services aim to do is provide a level playing field for everybody. So, our system as it's designed, is based on two parties, and often their advocates having discussion in front of a judge who then makes the call. And one of the major issues that we face with lower income clients is that they might not have a lawyer, and the opposing party does. So, whether the law favors the landlord or whether the law favors the tenant, when someone shows up with a lawyer and someone else doesn't, the system is going to favor the person with a lawyer. They'll be better versed in the law, they'll be better versed in just the court procedures, more familiarity with the courtroom and the judge, and it creates an unfair system where you might not even end up with the correct legal outcome or the fair outcome, because it's set up for either both parties or neither party to have an advocate. And when one side has a lawyer and the other doesn't, it creates a difficult situation. Now if you go into housing court, you'll see that the vast majority of landlords will have a lawyer and the vast majority of low-income tenants will not have a lawyer. And so, it's set up to create these unjust outcomes often, even contrary to what might happen if both sides have a lawyer. So, a major part of what we're doing is, we're just making sure that there are lawyers on both sides presenting the best possible case to the judge that a fair correct outcome can be reached.
How does this dynamic play into the ongoing housing shortage we see in Massachusetts? From your perspective, do you feel like some of the ambiguity around these laws plays into that problem?
It's a really great question, it's a really important question. It makes everything more difficult for us all to ensure fair and equal access to housing. The housing shortage that we face, and especially the affordable housing shortage that we face in the Berkshires makes everything harder, because when people are arguing over a scarce resource, it makes it that much more difficult for folks who are at a disadvantage to get access to that resource. So, at the same time that we're fighting for fair housing, we need to be fighting for more housing and more affordable housing. It all goes together.
Is there anything about this I've not thought to ask you, or do you feel like there any misconceptions about housing that you'd like to address?
I think more and more people recognize that housing is a right and housing is an essential issue to solve first, before we get to so many other elements of things that may make someone's life more difficult, and that if we can make sure that everyone has access to housing, to affordable housing, to equal housing, to fair housing, then we'll be setting everybody up for much better outcomes throughout the Berkshires and the commonwealth.
