Announcing the Massachusetts Landlord Defense Fund and Property Rights Fund
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Landlord Garth Meikle is having a very bad month. On April 27, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court decided against him in a case that he had been litigating himself, without an attorney, for over two years.
His lawful eviction has now been overturned due to roughly $3 in security deposit interest he failed to pay his tenant. This, despite the fact that the tenant owes him over $3,000 in rent.
The justices have egregiously refused to invoke their powers of equity to give the landlord his property back. They have pursued a cold policy of legal exactitude, without regard to fairness. They have denied this landlord the use of his property because the bank he hired failed to pay interest. They have allowed the entire state to be hobbled by the idiotic minutiae of a one-sided law.
Security deposits may now be considered outlawed. No mom-and-pop landlord can take one and expect to prevail in court without an attorney.
This decision is an embarassment for the justices, who could have upended the unfair law. It is an embarassment for the legislators that enacted the law. It is an embarassment for the tenant advocates that invented the law. Enough is enough!
This month, MassLandlords announces two funds.
The first fund is the Landlord Defense Fund. It has been created specifically to defend landlords like Garth Meikle against the likes of Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau is a donation-accepting nonprofit that, according to their 2014 IRS filing, grosses less than $50,000. Landlords in Massachusetts can do far better than that! You can read about the successful pilot of this fund below. If we had been there for Meikle, things might have turned out differently. He lost to a third-year law student.
The second fund is the Property Rights Supporter fund. This fund has been created specifically to change ALL of the egregiously one-sided laws in Massachusetts. Security Deposits. Rent escrow. Move-and-store. Late fees. Lead paint. The tenant advocates have pulled the pendulum far onto their side. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back. All we're asking for is laws fair to BOTH sides.
