Tenants Win Protections In Court Ruling

The Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that landlords of federally subsidized, low-income housing can seek to collect only back rent, and not legal fees or late fees or utility payments, when filing an eviction against a tenant for alleged nonpayment of rent.

The state’s highest court issued that decision Monday in the case Presidential Village LLC v. Tonya Perkins Et Al., in which local landlord Matthew Harp had tried to evict a tenant for allegedly not paying rent for her apartment in the Presidential Village housing complex at 158 and 200 Shelton Ave. in Newhallville.

In the opinion, written by state Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald and co-signed by five fellow justices, including Chief Justice Richard Robinson, the court found that Harp had improperly included $1,300 in legal fees and hundreds more in other non-rent-related fees in the ​“pretermination notice” he had issued to Perkins, now 30 years old, back in February 2015.

The pretermination notice said that Perkins owed a ​“total rental obligation of $6,189.56,” even though her monthly rent at the time, and the alleged nonpayment at the core of the attempted eviction, came to just $1,402. The rest of the charges, the pretermination notice declared, included ​“late fees, utilities, legal fees, and any other eviction proceeding sundry cost.”

Federal law requires that landlords provide pretermination notices to tenants in federally subsidized, low-income housing before they move to evict those tenants for alleged nonpayment of rent or for some other alleged lease violation.

New Haven Legal Assistance Association Attorney Amy Eppler-Epstein represented Perkins all the way from when the initial eviction filing in early 2015 through oral arguments before the Connecticut Supreme in October 2018 through the court’s issuance of its decision this week. Eppler-Epstein said those federally mandated pretermination notices represent a critical housing protection for low-income tenants. (Perkins declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Pretermination notices allow for landlords and tenants to work out their disputes before and outside of housing court, she said, affording tenants one last stop before having to face a judge who might order them to pack up and move immediately.

Tuesday’s ruling, she said, affirms the importance of protecting low-income tenants’ rights and rebukes landlords who seek to confuse or intimidate tenants by presenting them with a host of fees technically unrelated to their alleged nonpayment of rent.

“The whole idea of it is that subsidized housing is an important right,” Eppler-Epstein said. ​“An important property interest, in legal terms. And the Supreme Court affirmed that and recognized that in saying that due process concerns are important, and you can’t just terminate it and end this right without giving people enough information to be able to defend against the eviction action. To know what the case is about, and to be able to prepare a defense.”

Harp, who is Mayor Toni Harp’s son and whose Presidential Village LLC owns the 84-unit Shelton Avenue complex, said he ​“respectfully disagrees” with the Connecticut Supreme Court decision.

“I have read the opinion and believe that the tenant would have had enough information to defend her case,” he told the Independent by email. ​“Outside of changing the pretermination notice, nothing will change in how we manage or prosecute evictions.”

“I believe in the court system,” he added. ​“I believe that we have the ability to adjudicate issues of law for a reason. And I believe there was a material question as to whether we were right. That’s why the court took its time to issue a decision.”

Click here to read the Connecticut Supreme Court’s full decision in the case.

$1,300 In Legal Fees ​“For Which The Defendant Was Not Even Liable”

The case itself dates back to February 2015, when Harp’s company first filed a summary process, or eviction, action against Perkins in state housing court ​“solely on teh ground of nonpayment of rent.”

According to McDonald’s opinion, Perkins had lived in a Section 8‑subsidized apartment in the Presidential Village complex since March 2010. She had signed a year-long lease at that time, and then continued living in the apartment afterwards on a month-to-month lease per the terms of her agreement with the landlord.

Her initial 2010 lease set her rent at $377 per month. By January 2015, the first month that Harp alleged Perkins had not payed her rent, her monthly rent had climbed to $1,402.

On Jan. 14, 2015, McDonald noted, with Perkins’s January rent still unpaid, Harp sent a pretermination notice to the tenant, in accordance with federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations. On Jan. 25, the landlord served a notice to quit, a formal eviction notice filed in housing court, for Perkins’s alleged nonpayment of rent.

‘‘You have violated the terms of your lease in that you failed to pay your rent, in the total rental obligation of $6,189.56,” the Jan. 14 pretermination notice read. ​“Your failure to pay such rent constitutes a material noncompliance with the terms of your lease.

‘‘We hereby notify you that your lease agreement may be subject to termination and an immediate eviction proceeding, initiated by our office. We value our tenants and request that you immediately contact our office, regarding full payment of your rental obligations. Your rental obligations will include the delinquent rent, late fees, utilities, legal fees, and any other eviction proceeding sundry cost.”

Perkins then filed a motion in state court to dismiss the eviction action, noting that the pretermination notice had included charges well above what she owed for January rent, which was the base cause for the attempted eviction.

The trial court judge, McDonald noted, sided with the defense. ​“The court determined that the notice was defective because it contained legally impermissible and factually inaccurate grounds for termination.”

The pretermination notice informed the tenant that she had to pay $6,189.56 in order to prevent an eviction, McDonald wrote about the trial court’s decision, while she really only had to pay $2,804 in back rent for December 2014 and January 2015.

Furthermore, McDonald summarized, ​“the trial court noted that the plaintiff had conceded that the $6,189.56 in ​‘rental obligations’ included approximately $1,300 in attorney’s fees for which the defendant was not even liable, and that it could not account for another portion of one of the charges listed.”

Footnote 9 of the Supreme Court’s decision notes that Harp’s attorney had conceded in his argument before the trial court judge that the $1,300 in attorney’s fees ​“were from a prior, unsuccessful action that should not have been charged to the defendant.”

Eppler-Epstein said that Perkins wasn’t the only low-income tenant at the time facing an eviction from Harp who had received a pretermination notice with a host of other fees seemingly unrelated to owed rent. There were two other tenants that legal aid represented at the time, she said, who received similar lists of charges from Harp. Those were in the cases HOW WH LLC aka Howard Avenue Apartments v. Zecolia Robinson and Renaissance Management Co. v. Vincenza Mills. The same Superior Court judge, she said, found that in all three cases, Harp’s pretermination notices were ​“defective” because of improper additional charges listed.

After the trial court found in favor of Perkins, according to McDonald’s opion, Harp appealed the decision, and got the state Appellate Court to reverse the initial judgment. That court found that the pretermination notice only needed to have the ​“dollar amount of the balance due on the rent account and the date of such computation” in order to be valid. That is, the landlord was within his right to include a host of other fees on the pretermination notice, so long as he also included the amount of overdue rent that was relevant to the attempted eviction for nonpayment of rent.

“The Appellate Court determined that the plaintiff complied with this requirement because all of the charges listed in the pretermination notice were amounts for either past due rent or other financial obligations due under the lease,” McDonald wrote.

“Dubious Overinclusiveness”

Perkins and Eppler-Epstein then petitioned the state Supreme Court to take up the case. The justices did, and heard oral arguments in October 2018.

After eight months of deliberation, the court affirmed the initial trial court’s decision that Harp was out of line in trying to collect legal fees and other fees from Perkins in a pretermination notice that was only supposed to be about nonpayment of rent.

Federal regulations require pretermination notices to ​“state the reasons for the landlord’s action with enough specificity so as to enable the tenant to prepare a defense,” McDonald wrote. ​“When the reason is nonpayment of rent, the regulation provides that ​‘a notice stating the dollar amount of the balance due on the rent account and the date of such computation shall satisfy the requirement of specificity.’”

But in this case, McDonald said, Harp hadn’t just identified rent-related charges. He had also identified ​“late fees, utilities, legal fees, and any other eviction proceeding sundry cost.” He also had not broken out those dollar amounts to indicate which corresponded to which obligation.

Rent, according to common understanding and legal precedent, he wrote, refers to a charge for use and occupancy of a property. It does not extend to cover the other fees listed by Harp in the pretermination notice.

“The notice, by its own terms, is not limited to unpaid rent,” he wrote. ​“Even if we were to accept the plaintiff’s dubious overinclusiveness argument (i.e., that a notice that provides more information than that required is not defective), the notice still would be defective. The notice does not designate which of the charges are assigned to rent and which are assigned to obligations other than rent.”

Therefore, McDonald concluded, the court reversed the Appellate Court’s decision and remanded the case back to the trial court with the direction to follow through on its initial dismissal of the summary process.

Perkins has continued living in her Presidential Village apartment as this case has wound its way through various state courts, Eppler-Epstein said. She said her client has paid her portion of her Section 8‑subsidized rent, which has fluctuated depending on her employment status and the federal government’s subsequent calculation of what she owes each month.

The legal aid attorney said this Supreme Court decision should play a critical role in protecting low-income tenants from landlords looking to collect a variety of unrelated fees when filing eviction actions based specifically on nonpayment of rent.

She pointed out that the court did not decide on one key aspect of her argument in support of Perkins, which was that Harp had allegedly improperly included multiple months’ rent in his calculation of how much Perkins owed. Per the tenant’s month-to-month lease, Eppler-Epstein said, the landlord was only legally allowed to try to collect two months’ back rent, and no more. If she had been on an annual lease, she said, the landlord could have tried to collect all outstanding rent amassed during the term of that lease.

She said that the conclusion of McDonald’s opinion gives her hope that the Supreme Court may rule soon on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of landlords reaching too far back in time to calculate overdue rent when filing for an eviction.

“In light of this conclusion,” McDonald wrote, ​“we need not reach the defendant’s claim that the notice also was jurisdictionally defective because it misleadingly included rent charges for leases that are no longer in effect and that could not be used to support a summary process action under Connecticut law. While prudent landlords would be well served by limiting their pretermination notices to the rent charges that lawfully may support the summary process action, we have no occasion to determine that question in this case.”