Sipi Shubhra Gupta
Community Legal Services
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

WHAT MORE CAN YOU ASK FOR?

The past eight weeks at the Public Housing Unit of Community Legal Services have been the most incredible and eye-opening days of my law school career.  How can I even begin to describe the knowledge and understanding that I have gained as a result of my work there?  I have come to realize that when I assist a client in such a mundane matter as retrieving her security deposit or compelling her property manager to make small repairs in her units, I am also giving her the knowledge and confidence to resolve such problems in the future on her own.  In this way, I am engaging not only in providing legal services to a vulnerable population, but also in community building.  Landlord-tenant law in Pennsylvania is not incredibly complex – it is just incredibly inaccessible.  Once I show my clients the steps that they need to take to solve their predicament today, I know that I have given them tools that they will use for the duration of their days as apartment-dwellers and will share with their neighbors.

I have been exposed to a wide range of situations during my work.  Even when I know I am dealing with a lost cause, I do my best to do something for the client.  There was the case of the woman with ten pit bulls, whose landlord was trying to evict her for keeping unauthorized pets on the premises.   Even if her landlord was in the right, an eviction would mean that she and her three small children would be homeless overnight.  In such a case, I tried to negotiate terms with the landlord that would allow my client to stay there for just a few more weeks until she and her children could find another place to live.  In these situations, I am well aware that the mere fact that I work in a law office is almost enough to convince the landlord to deal with me on different terms than he would his tenant. 

One of my favorite success stories is that of a woman who came into my office during my lunch on the Friday before the Fourth of July – a day when most of the attorneys had taken vacation.  Her problem was that her landlord had informed her that she needed to move out by 4:00 pm that day.  Based on her unique circumstances, there was a question of whether landlord-tenant law would even apply, in order to compel the property-owner to comply with the eviction process.  The information I had at the time appeared to be almost enough for me to arrive at that conclusion, and although I wasn’t sure it would fly, I spoke with the property-owner on the phone and explained to her that she couldn’t “street” my client before the weekend was over.  Again, merely because I worked in a law office she agreed to keep the client for the weekend. 

I thought about the case in the following days – did I do the right thing?  The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that landlord-tenant law did not apply.  So was it wrong of me to use my influence to “buy” my client another three days on the property?  By Monday I had decided that even if the law was not on my side, everything else was.  Without my help, this woman (who was utterly grateful to me) and her ten-year old daughter would be cycled back into the shelter system.  I was instrumental in preventing such an outcome.  Also, it was appropriate for me to tell the property-owner that my honest hunch was that giving my client several hours’ notice before kicking her out could be illegal under the law.  I told her I could only investigate it further on Monday, when the attorneys would be back in the office and able to provide me with more guidance.  I later learned that landlord-tenant law did not apply and that the property-owner was within her rights to dismiss the client at her will, but I still feel good about what happened that day.