|
Raquel Manzanares is a Staff Attorney in Community Legal Aid’s Housing Unit. Community Legal Aid’s Housing and Homelessness Unit provides legal services to help tenants facing eviction, homeowners who are threatened with foreclosure, homeless families who need to access the state’s Emergency Assistance shelter program, and people trying to get into affordable housing. The Unit also runs a housing discrimination testing and enforcement program. Raquel is going to talk about who Community Legal Aid is, where they are located, the various services they offer, including the ways they assist tenants, and how tenants can apply for their services; the different types of tenancies that can exist in MA, how to identify what kind of tenancy a person has, and what basic legal rights and responsibilities a tenant has as a result, both during and at the end of their tenancy; strategies for dealing with bad conditions and/or other landlord misconduct; and the basics of the eviction process, including what a landlord is required to do to start an eviction case in Court, what tenants can do to defend against the case, and resources they can access during the process.
| 
