The email that I sent last night to the attorney at Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services:
Her response:
The "conditions" that she had told me I had to agree to were that she be able to talk to my psychiatrist and that I stop writing or talking online about there being hidden and illegal cameras in my apartment, because I have no proof that the cameras are there. In our last phone conversation, this past Friday, she told me that the lease has a clause saying that tenants can't "interfere with the property management," and that I was interfering with the property management by publicly saying that the cameras are in the apartment.
There are probably people who read and hear my blogs who don't realize that poor people are treated this way more often than not by people who are supposed to help them. When the voyeuristic landlord at my last apartment brought that eviction case against me, the judge ordered me to work with someone who was supposed to be an advocate from social services. That advocate visited me at that apartment, where I had baked some from-the-store things for her to have for the visit. When I offered them to her, she took some of them, but not before she rubbed her nose at me. Many of my other interactions with her were also like that, and she wasn't even at court for the last hearing, when I got evicted. During the process of my having to work with her, she told me that she had worked with the law firm that was evicting me many times before, which probably means that she has helped many abusive, lying, criminal landlords evict tenants for many years.
When I say that the judge for that case ordered me to work with her, what I mean is that he told me at the first court hearing that I could have her help. Knowing what social services are frequently like, I told him that I didn't think that I needed her help. He said "I can evict you today," and then I said I'd work with her; not that it prevented me from getting evicted from that apartment at exactly this time of year in 2014, because it didn't. There was a lot of snow then, also. I wouldn't say the repetition of all of this is eerie; it's what I thought would happen, but it's certainly not otherworldly in any way.
Speaking of worldly:
That's the address of a publication from 2016, saying that the last place that evicted me is being paid $40.5 million from the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency.
As I have said before, I applied for that apartment in 2013 because the mental health support agency that I was working with then had placed clients there before, and I didn't want my voucher to expire because landlords didn't want to accept it. It had nothing to do with code. While I was attempting to obtain another place to live, the conglomerate hacked my phone and email and attacked me about all of my attempts to contact other landlords. My code policies didn't help at all, even though there were entire suburbs of Boston where I didn't even think about applying for apartments because of what the suburbs were called. It's difficult to obtain housing when you're poor, and it's even more difficult when where you can apply is restricted by what people who don't care if you're homeless, raped and murdered say about you.
I think it's improbable that the property management and law firm that are evicting me this time are worried about what I say about them; it did nothing other than make the last people richer.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, February 15, 2017 @ 2:45 p.m./No code, all policies operative, all the time. I'll publish all of my preliminary pages again, although that hasn't stopped my life from falling apart.
