Legal Aid to help more Cleveland renters
Soon after CLEVELAND — a blood test revealed that Janiece Moore’s year-old son was lead poisoned, the landlord posted a notice at her family’s Glenville duplex: They had three days to move, or she’d evict them.
A more than six-month legal battle has ensued, one that has forced the Moore family, like so many others, to face an all-too-common dilemma in a city pocked with older, deteriorating rental homes, many which have cycled through a manmade disaster of risky financing, foreclosure and abandonment: how to protect your children from damaging toxins or other health risks.
Stay and fight? Or move, at great cost, and risk ending up in similar conditions, or even worse?
Legal Aid Society of Cleveland took on the Moore family’s case, and will take on an estimated 1,300 similar cases in the next two years as part of a new strategy to help low-income families stay in place or move to safer, healthier homes.
The project was launched with $175,000 in support from the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation. The funding will allow the nonprofit law firm to represent families in landlord-tenant cases to prevent improper evictions, or force landlords to fix dangerous conditions or pay to relocate their tenants.
Legal Aid will “use the power of the pocketbook,” it says, to compel private landlords to identify and fix problems like lead hazards rather than face costly fines. The strategy includes making sure state and local authorities follow lead hazard laws. (Legal Aid this spring sued the city of Cleveland in a case involving a poisoned toddler. That case is ongoing.)
“We are enforcing tenants’ rights to live in habitable, lead-safe, rental units,” said Abigail Staudt, a managing attorney in Legal Aid’s housing practice group.
Staudt said landlords have an obligation to make their units habitable, without lead hazards, before tenants move in, or risk being sued.
As part of the project, Legal Aid has commissioned a study to examine areas of Cleveland where lead poisoning is most prevalent based on testing, and whether minority children are disproportionately harmed.
A suitable home
Moore, a 19-year-old mother of two, moved into the five-bedroom duplex on Gooding Avenue in January, along with her mother, Luquisha, and four younger siblings.
Latonya Walker was the family’s landlord. Her company, Adequate Consulting LLC, purchased the Gooding Avenue for $10,500 in the spring of 2016.
Adequate Consulting and Walker own at least seven other Cleveland homes, acquired since 2015.
In May, Moore’s son was screened for lead during a routine check-up. Tests showed he had had 14.8 micrograms per deciliter of lead in his blood, above a reading of 10, which triggers a health investigation under state law. Moore’s 2-year-old daughter also had lead in her blood; the level was about half as high as her younger brother.