Former tenants outside court Wednesday after case dismissal.
A local landlord has dropped two longstanding back-rent lawsuits against her former tenants, citing a recent protest outside of one of her rental properties as inspiring her change of legal course.
That’s the latest in the now-concluded small-claims cases 264 Huntington LLC v. Francisco Mendez Perez and 264 Huntington LLC v. Honorio Ramirez.
The plaintiff in both cases is a holding company controlled by local landlord, state economic development official, and city zoning board commissioner Alexandra Daum.
On Friday, Daum’s company formally withdrew the two small-claims lawsuits in these cases. So a hearing on the cases scheduled for Wednesday did not need to take place.
That puts to an end a pair of court cases that dated back to May 2021, which is when Daum’s company first sued Ramirez and Mendez Perez for $5,000 and $3,845, respectively, in a bid to try to collect a portion of the debts she claimed they owed for months of rent-free living in a Huntington Street house she upgraded during the pandemic.
As first reported in this Independent article, Ramirez and Mendez Perez pushed to have the small-claims cases dropped. They argued that they and their families haven’t lived in the house for nearly two years; that they both fell behind on rent in the early months of a global pandemic; that rising rents had forced them out of their long-time homes; and that the amounts sought by their former landlord paled in comparison to the profits she has made buying, fixing up, and flipping houses during the pandemic.
Daum’s company’s decision to drop these two small-claims lawsuits came roughly two weeks after a state court magistrate continued the cases in order to give the landlord time to try to reach a settlement with her former tenants.
It also came roughly two weeks after nearly 20 members of the immigrant rights group Unidad Latina en Acción held a protest outside of one of Daum’s downtown rental properties, announcing the formation of a new tenant union and calling on the landlord to drop the two back-rent lawsuits.
Asked for comment on Tuesday about why her company decided to withdraw these two small-claims cases, Daum pointed specifically to ULA’s May 10 protest on Trumbull Street.
“A group representing the defendants in these small claims cases protested in front of my current tenants’ home for an hour, trespassed and attached signs to the building,” she told the Independent by email. “I don’t believe that people should be able to bully their way out of paying their debts, but I also don’t want to put my tenants in harm’s way just so I can stand up for what I believe in.”
Tenants: "A Concrete Victory"
Maya McFadden Photo
A May 10 protest outside landlord's property, as immigrant-rights group announces formation of tenants union.
Ramirez, Mendez Perez, and lead ULA organizer John Lugo Wednesday heralded the withdrawal of these lawsuits as a victory for these two tenants and their families in particular — and for working-class immigrant renters across the city more broadly. (Both Ramirez and Mendez Perez are immigrants from Mexico. Ramirez works as a house painter. Mendez Perez co-runs a food cart.)
“I’m relieved that finally they dropped the case,” Mendez Perez said.
He said the rent at his current home in the Hill is about to increase. Not having to pay the $3,845 in back rent demanded by this now-withdrawn lawsuit will make a big difference for his family’s budget, he said.
Ramirez said he doesn’t have $5,000 to spare: “We didn’t have the money.”
“I think this is a good victory, a concrete victory,” Lugo said. “I hope this good news encourages more people to fight back” when they feel unjustly pressured by landlords.
Asked about Daum’s criticism of the recent ULA protest outside of her Trumbull Street rental property as a bullying tactic, Mendez Perez and Ramirez said that she was the one who bullied them — by increasing their rent from around $1,000 to $1,400 at the start of a pandemic, by failing to negotiate with them so that they could stay put in their families’ longtime homes, and for suing them to collect on back rent owed at apartments they haven’t lived in for nearly two years.
(In this article, Daum detailed her efforts to negotiate with these and other tenants to try to find a way for them to stay in place in renovated apartments at higher rents. She also described how she originally filed the small-claims lawsuits as soon as she was able to find where Ramirez and Mendez Perez had moved to, and that these cases have dragged on for as long as they have not because of anything she has done, but rather because of the pandemic’s impacts on the state court system.)
Lugo defended the protest as an important tool for immigrant and tenant advocacy groups like ULA to draw attention to what they see as an injustice.
“As ULA, we have been using this tactic, exposing not just landlords but also bosses and owners of businesses when they take advantage of the immigrant community,” he said. “They try to use the law, but the law is not always on the side of the poor people. That’s why it’s important to mobilize the community” and to bring a cause out of the confines of a courtroom or a business, and into the public view of the street.
What a sad result. In the last few years, the narrative has changed from “I’m poor so I need more time to pay my legitimately owed debts” to “I’m poor so I shouldn’t have to pay my legitimately owed debts because someone else has more than me and they can bare the loss”. This change is palpable in so many different settings. And it’s encouraged by the activist class who can mobilize a small but loud group of people to “protest” the gripe/injustice of the day on private property inconveniencing the lives of other tenants who just want peaceful enjoyment of their units.
And then the activists recruit and brainwash more sheep to the cause and this mushrooms into an anti landlord, anti capitalism, “woe is me” movement for tenant unions, eviction right to counsel, aggressive but biased enforcement, affordable housing, and on and on.
This was a debt that was acknowledged to be owed and, had the plaintiff prevailed, the tenants likely would have been paying $20-$50 per month for years without interest. But an outcome like that is no longer enough.
This is like when protesters visited the mayor at home in the most inappropriate manner imaginable, cursing at him in front of his family. The traditional boundaries just don’t apply any longer. The strategy is now to embarrass, harass, inconvenience, and annoy until you reach your perceived goal. And the NHI just loves to give these groups coverage to make them seem more legitimate while never passing judgment on their tactics.
It’s not the New Haven I want. It’s not a betrayal to liberal ideals to believe that people (regardless of income) should have to pay something reasonable towards their debts. Courts have discretion to set such an amount.
Undermining our civil system with outside pressure is not scalable. And landlords will just pass all this aggravation on to tenants as higher rents, so it’s a pointless and shortsighted approach.