Everyone should have a place to call home. Yet renters face many challenges to securing stable, safe, and affordable places to live:
- Landlords often charge predatory, unexpected fees, making rent unpredictable and expensive.
- Landlords frequently don’t maintain properties in low-income neighborhoods, forcing tenants to live with mold, broken furnaces, leaks, and other threats to health and safety.
- Rent court practices favor landlords, making it difficult for tenants to get a fair hearing when they’re in danger of eviction.
- Development efforts fail to address the needs of people with limited incomes and neighborhoods where residents are predominantly people of color and have lower incomes. Development projects ignore the needs of these neighborhoods or gentrify them, driving up rents that force people out.
The Human Right to Housing Project takes on these challenges. We stand with tenants to protect and expand their rights to safe, habitable, affordable, and non-discriminatory housing and their rights to fair and equal treatment by Maryland’s landlord-tenant laws, courts, and agencies. We defend renters facing eviction, demand repair of unsafe housing conditions, and represent renters seeking systemic relief from predatory landlord practices. We advocate to change the law regarding evictions and to demand the development of equitable and sustainable affordable housing.
The Public Justice Center provides free legal assistance, depending on capacity, to 1) renters in Baltimore City who are facing eviction or have questions about their rights and 2) renters statewide whose landlords are in foreclosure. Please call us at (410) 625-9409 for more information. If you are a renter outside of Baltimore City and your landlord is not in foreclosure, please contact the Maryland Court Help Center or another nonprofit legal services provider. You can also find information on our Get Legal Help page.
