MGH Funds to Housing Justice for Survivors Project Means More Help for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence
Survivors of gender-based violence often face serious housing problems, too, including getting evicted from their homes due to noise or damage complaints related to the violence they suffer. To protect themselves and their children, they may have urgent need to flee their homes—but worry that breaking the lease means they will lose their housing subsidies, or they’ll be forced to pay rent even after they’re gone.
For the past seven years, the Housing Justice for Survivors Project, within the Legal Services Center’s Housing Law Clinic, has assisted clients in these dangerous and difficult situations. Founded and directed by Julia Devanthéry, attorney and lecturer on law in the Housing Law Clinic, the project helps survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and sexual harassment who need to move to safe housing or who are trying to keep their homes. The need is high, but the project is one of the very few places in Boston—even in the country—that specializes in this kind of work.
Soon the project will be able to help more survivors, after receiving Massachusetts General Hospital, part of the Mass General Brigham health system, Community Health Impact Funds to support its work. The funds will enable the project to hire a staff attorney to work with Devanthéry, and a part-time housing advocate that will work at LSC and at Casa Myrna, Boston’s largest provider of shelter and support to survivors of domestic violence.
“These funds will help us support more survivors alongside our incredible community partner, Casa Myrna,” says Devanthéry. In addition, “we can serve them in a more holistic way, so that the nonlegal needs around their housing and safety will be attended to by a member of our team. We want to thank MGH for what they are calling an historic investment, and it truly is. I’m not aware of any other instance where a hospital has acknowledged how integral safe, stable housing is for community heath, in particular to the health and well-being of survivors of gender-based violence.”
“Casa Myrna is thrilled to partner with the Housing Justice for Survivors Program to expand our collective ability to keep survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking housed,” says Stephanie Brown, CEO of Casa Myrna. “Safe, stable, affordable housing is the cornerstone of a survivor’s ability to leave and remain free from abuse. Without it, survivors are forced to make the untenable choice between continued violence and housing instability or homelessness. With this grant from the Community Health Impact Fund, we will deepen our collaboration, share our expertise, and expand supports—thereby reaching more survivors who face housing insecurity, eviction, and homelessness than either organization could do individually.”
The funding is part of $18 million in Community Health Impact Funds awarded to 22 local organizations to support affordable housing initiatives in Boston and North Suffolk County. The Phillip and Susan Ragon Building, a multi-year construction project that will result in a state-of-the-art clinical care building on the MGH campus, triggered this landmark investment through the Massachusetts Determination of Need (DoN) process. The DoN investment—totaling more than $62 million dollars—is the largest in Massachusetts history.
Devanthéry has been an attorney at the Housing Clinic at LSC since 2013, focusing on eviction defense. After witnessing that many of the clinic’s clients are women and mothers experiencing issues of personal safety, she founded the Housing Justice for Survivors Project in 2017.
“There was incredible depth of understanding about intimate partner violence in the family law realm, and then, on the tenant advocacy side, a really deep knowledge of all laws to protect tenants. But there were very few people at the intersection between the two areas of law,” she explains. From the tenant advocacy side, she began to feel they weren’t doing enough for their clients given the other challenges they faced. “We wanted to meet clients in a way that would improve their outcomes and restore their sense of self-determination, safety, and dignity to the extent we could as they were navigating their housing challenges.”
The project’s clients are often threatened with eviction for reasons connected to their experience of gender-based violence. “Sometimes the abuse they experience in their homes causes the neighbors to complain, or the police are called, or there’s damage to the apartment. All of these are examples of cases we’ve had,” Devanthéry says. “Instead of trying to help, the landlord’s reaction is to try to throw victims out of their home for a lease violation.”
The project has handled more than 1,000 cases since it was established, overwhelmingly on behalf of mothers with dependent children, she says. Each semester, five to eight HLS students enroll in the clinic, with many returning for a second or third semester. “It is really impactful for our students to learn from survivors about the challenges they face, and to stand with them in incredibly challenging legal proceedings where the courts are not always as responsive to the needs of survivors as they should be,” she says.
In 2019, the project landed a major victory in a precedent-setting case before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on the question of whether the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) provides a defense to a tenant of public housing being evicted for nonpayment of rent. The survivor in that case fell behind in her rent to the Boston Housing Authority (BHA), agreed to pay back rent, then fell behind on those payments, too. When the BHA sought to evict her, the woman, for whom English is not her first language, represented herself in housing court. When the judge asked if she had any defense for failure to pay, she explained she was in an abusive relationship and her partner had taken everything from her. The judge ruled that was not a defense and ordered her to be evicted.
In 2018, she reached out to the housing clinic. “She walked into our office with this judgment, with the case so far gone, and as a lawyer I didn’t know exactly how to fix it but I knew for sure it was wrong,” says Devanthéry. Recognizing that the VAWA includes certain housing protections for victims of gender-based violence, Devanthéry filed an appeal to the Massachusetts Appeals Court. She and a clinical student, Emily Mannheimer ’19, worked on the case for several semesters, including briefing it for the appeals court. But before the case could be heard there, the Supreme Judicial Court took it up sua sponte. As a case of first impression, the high court wanted to hear the matter right away rather than wait for it to wind through the appeals process, Devanthéry says.
Devanthéry argued the case before the SJC during the winter of 2018, when the students were on break—and won big. The decision “was everything we asked for, a real acknowledgement of the real-life dynamics of abuse and how it operates and interfaces with every aspect of a survivor’s life including, and sometimes especially, their financial circumstances,” Devanthéry recalls.
The 2019 decision in BHA v. Y.A., 482 Mass. 240, was written by Justice Kimberly S. Budd, who in 2020 became the court’s chief justice. “It is a really important case because it applied this defense in a really robust way to the nonpayment context, which had never been done before. Secondly, it acknowledges that it is never too late to raise this defense,” Devanthéry explains. “The decision makes really clear that that the dynamics of abuse involve a lot of shame, that it’s very difficult to talk about it openly, that it’s cyclical and people get pulled back in frequently, and that there can’t be a deadline for this issue to be raised in order for it to be viable defense under VAWA.”
As the decision interprets a federal statute, “it’s relevant and potentially of use to advocates and survivors nationally,” she adds.
Eviction defense is the core component of the housing clinic’s case but there are specific needs in cases of gender-based violence. Though there is a state law allowing survivors of abuse to terminate their tenancies without financial penalties, it is “poorly understood and often violated by landlords,” Devanthéry says. “We do a lot of work around that law being enforced so survivors are not trapped in unsafe homes.”
The clinic applied for the MGH grant for the specific purpose of increasing its capacity to take these cases. As far as she knows, LSC has the only housing clinic in the country with this area of specialization. In Boston, there are only two other advocates with this expertise or interest, Devanthéry believes: Linda Garcia and Barbara Zimbel in the Housing Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services, whom she describes as her mentors. “We know that it will be lifesaving and incredibly important to be able to increase our capacity with the number of folks we can reach,” she says.
“We also recognize our clients come to us with a lot of safety-related and housing resources related to the needs that are outside the areas of expertise we bring to the work as lawyers and law students,” she says, which meant further developing the project’s partnership with Casa Myrna. “We have a rich and deep relationship with them as a referral partner but there has always been a sort of boundary between the safety planning and the human services that survivors are getting from the organizations we work with.”
Casa Myrna will dedicate a part-time housing advocate to be co-located at LSC, “so we can work collaboratively together on behalf of clients, which is incredibly exciting and not something we have done before.”
About Julia Devanthery, Attorney and Lecturer on Law, Housing Law Clinic: Director, Housing Justice for Survivors Project
Julia Devanthéry co-teaches the Housing Clinic and directs the Housing Justice for Survivors Project, which she founded in 2017. The Housing Justice for Survivors Project trains clinical law students to represent tenants who are facing housing instability due to domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. Students under Julia’s supervision provide direct client representation, develop and litigate impact litigation, conduct housing rights trainings for community members and advocates, and engage in local, state, and federal law reform efforts aimed at improving the housing rights of survivors. Julia and students in the Housing Justice project represented the tenant in BHA v. YA, 482 Mass. 240 (2019), in which the Supreme Judicial Court decided affirmed a domestic violence survivor’s right to raise the Violence Against Women Act defense to a non-payment of rent eviction.
From 2018-2020, Julia was the Dignity for All Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Southern California where she worked to safeguard the civil rights of people experiencing homelessness and advance the right to safe, affordable housing for all.
Julia is the author of Boston Housing Authority v. Y.A., 482 Mass. 240 (2019): SJC Clarifies VAWA Defenses in Eviction Cases, Early Lease Termination Under G.L. c. 186 s 24: An Essential Escape Route for Tenants Who are Facing Domestic Violence Sexual Assault or Stalking and The Supreme Judicial Court’s Decision in Beacon Residential v. R.P. Gives Survivors of Domestic Violence Their Day in Housing Court, all published in the Boston Bar Journal, and co-author of Chapter 12: Evictions in the 8th edition of Massachusetts Law Reform’s pro se manual Legal Tactics: Tenant’s Rights In Massachusetts. She also co-authored an ACLU report exposing abuse, neglect, and unsafe living conditions inside county-funded homeless shelters in Southern California. Julia received her juris doctor from Northeastern University School of Law and she graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Sociology.
About The Housing Justice for Survivors Project at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School
Within the Housing Clinic, The Housing Justice for Survivors Project helps survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and sexual harassment who need to move to safe housing or who are trying to keep their homes. We represent clients facing eviction, loss of housing subsidies, those in need of safety transfers, and people who need to terminate their tenancies for safety reasons. Located at the crossroads of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury in the City of Boston, the Legal Services Center is a community-based public interest law firm. We are home to six legal clinics—Consumer Protection Clinic, Housing Law Clinic, Family Justice Clinic, Tax Litigation Clinic, LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, and the Veterans Legal Clinic—and are Harvard Law School’s largest clinical placement site. The Center’s long-standing mission is to fight for fairness, justice, and legal, economic, and social change, by addressing our community’s civil legal needs and training the next generation of public interest lawyers. For more information, please visit https://legalservicescenter.org/.
About Casa Myrna
Casa Myrna is Boston’s largest provider of shelter and supportive services to survivors of domestic violence, providing safety, resources, advocacy and information since 1977. Our comprehensive range of services, available in both Spanish and English, provide survivors with tools to recover from the trauma of abuse and begin to build sustainable self-sufficiency. For more information, please visit https://casamyrna.org
About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.
About Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. Massachusetts General Hospital is a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.
Read More Here