2019 NLADA Annual Conference-Innovative Justice

For decades, low-income tenants in Detroit have been forced to choose between homelessness and living in substandard housing rife with hazardous conditions. Although Detroit has stringent rental regulations, landlords and judges routinely ignore them. As a result, tenants in Detroit, a city with a population that is 79 percent black and 8 percent Hispanic, are treated worse than tenants in nearby majority-white cities. This session will introduce participants to the severity of the problem and explore the challenges tenants face when seeking to enforce their rights. Presenters from Center for Civil Justice, Detroit Justice Center, Lakeshore Legal Aid, and Michigan Legal Services will engage with the audience to brainstorm creative solutions to this complex problem. The advocates will address recent efforts to enforce local health and safety regulations, the movement to crack down on slumlords and predatory land contract vendors, and the obstacles people with criminal records face is this context.