STUDIO
In this article:
Background
Across the United States, tenants, face a broad spectrum of housing issues that can undermine their quality of life and financial stability. These problems include escalating rental prices, which often outpace wage growth, making affordable housing increasingly inaccessible for many Americans. Furthermore, tenants frequently encounter substandard living conditions, with issues such as inadequate heating, plumbing malfunctions, and structural disrepair going unaddressed by landlords. In addition, the complexity and variability of housing assistance programs often create significant barriers for those seeking aid, leaving vulnerable populations at risk of homelessness.
Case Study: Alliance Park Apartments
These national concerns are mirrored in the experiences of residents at Alliance Park (AP), an apartment building located in the suburbs of Montclair, New Jersey[1]. Alliance Park Apartments, is a housing complex that houses both market-rate renters and renters enrolled in the United States federal Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP), commonly known as Section 8. This program is designed to help low-income families, the elderly, and people with disabilities afford what is supposed to be decent, safe, and sanitary housing in the market. Under this scheme, the rent is subsidized based on the tenant’s income, ensuring that no more than 30% of their income goes towards rent. However, renters utilizing these programs continue to face persistent issues such as delayed maintenance, security inadequacies, and difficulties in dealing with property management.
Facing these difficulties, Jamie Taylor and Jessie Jordan[2], two Alliance Park residents and community leaders interested in tenant organizing, found themselves overwhelmed. Seeking to address their specific housing problems and to advocate for broader changes within their community, they reached out to the Housing Justice and Legal Design Clinic of Seton Hall Law School[3], located 25 minutes away in the city of Newark, New Jersey. The Center for Social Justice (CSJ), the program that runs the clinic in conjunction with other housing-justice-oriented clinics, have represented several tenants from AP. Many of these tenants faced eviction for nonpayment, or health-related discrimination issues, and sought the CSJ’s legal services.
The Legal Design Clinic’s function outside of providing direct legal services is to empower tenants to seek justice outside of the courtroom. In the Spring semester of 2024, the clinic was dedicated to assisting tenants at Alliance Park Apartments in addressing their housing and landlord-tenant issues. The curriculum of the clinic was designed so that the professors of the clinic – Abdul Rehman Khan and Hallie Jay Pope – in conjunction with students enrolled that semester, would support tenants’ legal rights.
The clinic students broke up into three teams of two to three people. This case study is authored by one of these teams, Teams JNS (pronounced “Jeans”) consisting of Jake Collins, Nancy Moemen, and Siqi Li, three third-year Seton Hall Law students.
[1] The building name has been changed to protect tenant privacy.
[2] Names have been changed to protect tenant privacy.
[3] The Housing Justice and Legal Design Clinic is part of the New Jersey Legal Design Lab, an initiative of the Housing Justice Project at Seton Hall Law’s Center for Social Justice.
Tenant Experiences at AP
In February 2024, Team JNS, along with other members of the clinic, met with Jamie and Jessie in class at Seton Hall Law School. The meeting was strategically focused on uncovering the underlying issues at AP. The primary objective was to gather firsthand insights from Jamie and Jessie about the challenges they and their fellow tenants faced, setting the stage for the development of effective solutions.
Alliance Park Apartments is a Section 8 subsidized housing complex that embodies similar challenges faced by communities across the United States. Jamie and Jessie, through the initial meeting, delved into the specific management and maintenance issues prevalent in their apartment building, including: (1) upkeep below acceptable standards, with one of two elevators remaining out of service for over two years despite AP housing a large elderly population; (2) complete lack of maintenance and neglect of common areas like hallways and security cameras; (3) non-residents loitering in the building; and (4) persistent issues with rodents and bugs remaining unaddressed.
In addition to these issues, Jamie and Jessie addressed some communication failures, legal concerns, and organizational struggles: With constant management turnover, the new management has failed to improve service quality or engage effectively with tenants. Almost all tenants that interacted with students of the clinic complained of issues with management not applying rent payments and incorrect late fees on their rent ledgers. Several tenants also complained that they were approached by management with unprocessed “stop payment” orders. The inconsistencies on management’s end, in addition to a confusing recertification process for the Section 8 program, continue to escalate into claims against tenants of nonpayment leading to eviction actions.
Tenant Organizing
Jamie and Jessie approached the clinic having already set a foundation for tenant organization at AP. In New Jersey, forming a tenant organization has proven a critical tool for tenants to have more leverage in establishing their rights. Tenant organizations provide a collective voice for residents, making it more difficult for landlords and management to ignore individual complaints. By banding together, as opposed to acting individually, tenants can negotiate more effectively for improvements not just in their individual units but in common areas and building-wide services. In addition, New Jersey tenants may face threats of eviction or other retaliatory actions by landlords. An organized tenant association can provide support to individuals facing such threats, offering both legal guidance and a supportive community to help protect their rights.
On a broader scale, tenant organizations in New Jersey may more effectively lobby on issues regarding housing policies at the municipal and state level. By presenting a unified front, they can advocate for legislative changes that benefit a larger community of renters, such as rent control measures or improved living standards. At Alliance Park, where problems range from maintenance failures to security concerns and mismanagement of rent and fees, a tenant association could allow residents to leverage their group power when approaching their landlord and apartment management.
One of the primary concerns for the tenants at AP is their fear of retaliation from building management. This fear can prevent tenants from openly participating in or supporting the tenant association due to concerns about potential consequences, such as eviction or other punitive measures. Furthermore, tenants may not fully understand their rights or the benefits of forming a tenant association. This lack of awareness can lead to apathy or hesitation to engage in organizing efforts. The clinic invited activists that have successfully organized tenants in other apartment buildings in New Jersey. They emphasized the importance of educating tenants on how to be advocates and protect against retaliation.
Community Building and Trust
Next, building trust and a sense of community among tenants is crucial for forming an effective association. Jamie and Jessie noted the dissolution of the community spirit at AP over their twenty years of residence. AP also needed a community meeting place, ideally not in the building where management and landlords could potentially disrupt or coerce tenants. Additionally, financial mismanagement and the landlord’s conspicuous behavior have created a tense environment, intimidating AP tenants from taking organized action.
Foundational Materials to Design Lab
Figure 1. Image by Hallie Jay Pope
At the beginning of every class, Professor Pope would orient the clinic students in the above-diagrammed design process. The anchor chart helped facilitate the thinking and action behind that day’s activities. It also served as an example of the overall theme of the clinic: creative expressions of problem solving. The anchor chart was a visual representation of a bird’s-eye view of the class. Specifically, the twice-monthly clinic seminars were structured such that class time was dedicated to focusing on one part of the design process, from “Defining the Problem” to “Feedback and Iteration”. Each seminar, we discussed foundational literature, engaged with community stakeholders, or workshopped prototypes. The first two classes were mostly research-based foundations and philosophical underpinnings of the clinic. The remainder of the seminars served as a space where clinic students workshopped ideas, and later, prototypes, through various exercises discussed further below.
The New Jersey Tenants Organization (NJTO) created a 43-page handbook designed to educate tenants as to the benefits and methods of organizing. The NJTO handbook was one of the readings for the seminar but eventually became a launching point for our prototype, as it provided guidelines for effectively organizing an apartment complex.
Define the Problem/Explore
In our “discovery” stage, the goal for JNS was to define and explore the problems at Alliance Park Apartments . Below is an outline of the methodology used.
Figure 2. Image by Hallie Jay Pope. Stakeholder map exercise.
January 27 Meeting with Stakeholders
AP tenant association leaders Jessie Jordan and Jamie Taylor came to Seton Hall Law to discuss with clinic students the nature of the problems AP tenants were experiencing. Jessie, Jamie, and clinic students mapped out stakeholders on a matrix, identifying stakeholders by how systemically excluded or powerful they were (appearing along an x-axis, see Figure 2) and how aligned we assumed they were with the tenants’ rights movement (appearing along a y-axis, see Fig. 2)
February 17 Visit to Alliance Park Apartments
On February 17, 2024, clinic students went to Alliance Park to meet with tenants. The meeting space we used was the vending machine room adjacent to the laundry units on the first floor of the building. Jamie took us on a tour of the apartment building. We took photos of things she told us tenants were complaining about. We also conducted interviews with the tenants that attended the meeting. A survey was distributed at that visit asking tenants about their priorities and struggles.
Figure 3. Image by Nancy Moemen. AP tenants received notice about the lease’s policy against “propaganda”.
Figure 4. Image by Nancy Moemen. AP tenants expressed a strong concern with the untidiness of common areas like the staircases.
Figure 6. Image by Nancy Moemen. Pest control was a frequent complaint among AP tenants, which many hypothesized to be from a failure to repair holes in hallways.
Figure 5. Image by Nancy Moemen. Among the AP tenants’ complaints about their living conditions, a common theme arose of landlords doing a bare minimum, applying “band aid” solutions or exhibiting lackluster effort in addressing tenants’ maintenance and custodial concerns.
Interviewing Community Stakeholders and Reviewing Resources
In addition to the AP visit, JNS conducted several other methods of exploratory research. On January 20, 2024, JNS attended a Montclair Township Council Meeting to identify and engage with stakeholders. Clinic students were also assigned stakeholders to interview representatives of: active community-oriented organizations, academic instutitions involved in the tenants’ rights movement, and professors from Seton Hall Law in the Housing Justice Project. Below is a list of the contacts the clinic students made in the course of discovery.
Team
Role/Organization
The Creators
Montclair Landlord Tenant Advisory Committee
The Creators
Rutgers Tenant Solidarity Clinic
The Creators
Friends of Metcalf Park
Team REM
Newark Housing & Urban Development (HUD) Tenants Coalition
Team REM
Montclair Town Councilmember
Team REM
NJTO
Team REM
The HUUB
Team REM
Clinic Professor, Housing Justice Project, Seton Hall Law
Team JNS
Alliance Park Tenant, Center for Social Justice Client
Team JNS
Clinton Hill Community Action
Team JNS
Clinic Professor, Housing Justice Project, Seton Hall Law
Synthesis Map
Further, JNS, in collaboration with the other student teams, tenants, and organizers, conducted another sticky note exercise (see Fig. 7), where we wrote our findings, ideas, and questions on sticky notes and distributed them randomly onto a blank surface. This time there was no matrix or label around which to organize the sticky notes. To synthesize, the group organized the sticky notes by theme, clustering the notes that had similar ideas together, ultimately forming groups and subgroups.
Figure 7. Image by Hallie Jay Pope.
“How Might We” Question Exercise
On March 9, 2024, clinic students and stakeholders created “How Might We” (HMW) questions in a question-forming exercise. A HMW question tranforms a research insight into an open-ended question that is geared to help the exercise participants generate potential solutions. The example provided for us in the demo before the exercise, as well as one that ended up very relevant to JNS’ ultimate protoype, was “How might we provide information to tenants and the public in an accesible, digestible, and engaging way?”
The exercise consisted of the participants pairing up. One participant stated a problem theme. The other participant responded by asking “why” and the first participant provided a potential answer. The process was then repeated four more times. The “whys” were then framed into a HMW question.
For example, JNS found that across the board, tenants were facing issues with recertification.
The thematic problem one JNS member started with was: “Tenants are facing recertification issues because they are unaware of how much they owe the AP landlord”
Why? Because the landlords do not have an organized method of recertifying tenants.
Why? Because landlords keep tenants with Section 8 vouchers in the dark with regards to their recertification status.
Why? Because it is advantageous for landlords to evict tenants for nonpayment due to months of noncommunication.
Why? Because a tenant who does not understand their rights to know how much rent they owe is vulnerable to eviction.
Impact & Feasibility Matrix Exercise
With the same participants that engaged in the above exercise, the clinic proceeded to workshop the HMW ideas in another sticky note exercise via MURAL. Participants were instructed to sort through the ideas on a matrix, with “Feasibility” on the y-axis and “Impact” on the x-axis. Instructions were to arrange each idea on the matrix based on (1) how much impact participants thought it would have on the problems we identified in discovery, and (2) how feasible it would be to execute within the limitations of the clinic. At the conclusion of the exercise, student teams were encouraged to brainstorm a prototype that could bring prioritized ideas to fruition. The “sweet spot” was finding an idea that was charted towards the top-right of the matrix, so impact and feasibility were both maximized.
Figure 8. The completed result of the exercise
Prototype Design & Impact
We first came up with the idea of creating a leaflet because we wanted a practical, flexible, and creative tool to support organizing at AP. Supporting tenant organizing was charted towards the top-right of the matrix, which suggested it was a high priority because of its potential for strong impact and viability. The feedback we received from the tenant leaders was that a lot of the work in organizing was falling on two people. Management was also using scare tactics to intimidate tenants and discourage organizing. We understood low engagement with the AP tenant leaders’ organizing efforts as an opportunity to inform tenants about their right to come together and help their nascent tenant organization gain momentum. We wanted to provide an engaging tool that could be used to educate and empower tenants to take matters in their own hands with regards to their housing quality and security.
Team JNS, along with our peers, prioritized tenant organization as means to achieve effective problem-solving at AP. This meant supporting Jamie and Jessie in connecting with more tenants at AP and helping set the foundation for an effective steering committee of a tenant organization. The steering committee is responsible for the founding elements of the tenant organization: the first mass meeting, floor-by-floor organization, and official communications between the organization and the landlord. The clinic aimed to support tenants in resolving administrative hurdles that come with building momentum for the organization. Tenants also still needed information regarding legal rights to organize, and landlords needed a warning for interfering with such rights, as they attempted to with their “no propaganda” notice (see Fig. 3).
Team JNS Prototype: Informational Leaflet
Team JNS developed a leaflet intended for distribution to each tenant at AP. The leaflet was envisioned to inform tenants about their rights to organize and help get tenants communicating on one virtual platform. The leaflet’s purpose was also to encourage tenants to attend the mass meeting that would be held at a future date by the Alliance Park steering committee.
Team JNS thought it was best to create a leaflet that would immediately grab the tenant’s attention but also convey vital information in a succinct and efficient manner. In other words, we wanted to avoid a leaflet that overwhelmed the observer with information. With that in mind, Team JNS thought it was best to accomplish our goal by creating five thought bubbles projecting from cartoon persons. The five thought bubbles identified what a tenant organization is, informed tenants that tenant organizing is legally protected, and pushed for attendance at the upcoming mass meeting. Although the leaflet has yet to be finalized and distributed to all Alliance Park tenants, some tenants during the clinic’s visit to AP in April provided positive feedback, stating that the leaflet would encourage them to either join the steering committee or attend the mass tenant meeting.
On April 6, 2024, the seminar had a workshop wherein each team’s prototype was presented and feedback was provided. The feedback from professors and other clinic students is outlined below:
- Consider looking at leaflets distributed in other tenants associations
- Graphics of people on leaflet were not reflective of community we are serving
- QR code should be integrated into the leaflet more so people know how it fits in with other steps
- Wide range of visual styles in the leaflet, making it “busy”
- Individual action items on leaflet do not necessarily have to be linear
The rest of the workshop was designed to provide guidance on crafting feedback collection exercises for the following visit to AP where the prototypes would be tested with tenants.
Team JNS introduced the leaflet to several tenants during the clinic’s Alliance Park visit in April 2024. The methods Team JNS utilized to collect feedback were as follows: (1) the tenant would be told, “Imagine this was slid under your door. Show me what you would do with it”; (2) the tenant would then have time to review the leaflet itself; and (3) the tenant would then, when prompted, scan a QR code on the flyer that directed them to a Google Form survey that asked questions about how they experienced the leaflet. The survey also asked tenants about their willingness to join a tenant organization and whether the leaflet itself encouraged them to do so. The two other teams in the clinic also created prototypes that further supported tenant organization efforts, discussed below.
Team REM Prototype: Online Issue Tracker Form
Team REM created an online issue intake and reporting system via Google Forms. This tool could aid the tenant organization in crafting a list of grievances to bring to the landlord and provide a way to track whether and when complaints were addressed at AP.
The Creators Prototype: Newsletter Community Builder
The Creators developed a newsletter geared towards community building at AP. The contents of the newsletter addressed ongoing events, important dates, and tenant rights and resources.
Seton Hall Law’s Housing and Legal Design Clinic’s partnership with Alliance Park tenants is a strong case study exemplifying the great potential for tenants to achieve housing justice outside of the courtroom. The clinic created tools that can be easily replicable and transferrable to other communities that seek to organize. In a time of housing crisis in the United States, it may be tenant organizing, and not the lawyers, that can save the day.
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