Skip to main content

Volunteer Case Report

 

Legal Aid in greater Minnesota referred this case due to a conflict of interest.


An 18 year old needed help with a threatened rejection of her application for a subsidized apartment.  The client had been thrown out of the house just before the 18th birthday and was dealing with an abusive ex-boyfriend and tremendous mental distress.  


Management was suggesting the applicant pay for damages done in the mom’s apartment (same management company) and seemed to be setting up other barriers.  But still, the onsite manager seemed sympathetic.  


I wrote a gentle demand letter - not wanting to trigger involvement of another lawyer.  The letter touched on:

  • The definite end of the residency in the mother’s home (because a tenant cannot be covered by 2 subsidies at the same time);

  • Project-based Section 8 admission standards

  • The limited contractual responsibility of minors

  • The limited contractual responsibility of listed residents as opposed to the person signing a lease

  • Violence Against Women Act tenant protections

  • Collection of damages before the end of the lease (MN LL-T law)

  • Collection of debts incurred by parents from a child (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act issue)

  • More


Unfortunately, their lawyer, someone I have dealt with for 30 years, responded:  “You are flunking retirement.”  But fortunately we settled over the weekend.


Later as management was processing the application, they got confused because of legal limits on higher education students’ eligibility for Section 8 housing.  Another communication to the management’s lawyer showed that the limitations do not apply to high school students and once again the application was put back in process - this time in 45 minutes.  


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milo Fine, Anthony Cox and Kyle Motl: Unimpeded Mutual Interpenetration; An Appreciation

  Milo Fine, Anthony Cox and Kyle Motl:   Unimpeded Mutual Interpenetration; An Appreciation. On September 13 , 2026 Cox and Motl brought their double basses to Fine’s Studio Toile d’Angles in near north Minneapolis for two hours of intense, exciting improvisation, perhaps fitting the Free Jazz label.  Fine rotated between playing clarinet, percussion and his Bosendorpher Imperial.  This time I did not ask about planning vs. improvisation.  When I first heard Fine and Cox a year ago, Fine affirmed that that two hour performance was 100% improvised and Cox reported that the two of them had been practicing their improvisation together for five decades.  I suspect Motl, who teaches bass at the U of M,  has not been playing bass for two decades, let alone five, but their answers to my question last fall would have been equally true this week. In my appreciation of the Cox Fine performance in 2025 I express my wonder in the up close experience of Fine’s ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Milo Fine and Anthony Cox August 30, 2025. An Appreciation with Digressions.

Studio Toile d’Angles was carved out of a near north Minneapolis lot and erected next door to the home of Milo Fine, Minnesota’s least compromised multi-instrumentalist, composer and instigator of modern music.  Rectangular and sunk in the land, it is maybe 18 x 30 feet; the roof points to high north and descends covered with solar panels toward the south and inside meets a wall ten feet above the floor. A kitchenette and bathroom are in a back corner. No street shoes permitted.  Twenty or so moveable padded chairs, a couch and cushions are set in loose rows seven feet from Cox and his cello. The front row audience is six feet from the end of Fine’s black lacquer Bosendorpher Imperial piano. It is nine feet six inches long and includes nine notes lower than a concert grand’s 88. Debussy, Bartok and Ravel were early adopters. Capable, I am sure, of near-Richter scale waves, Fine’s often emphatic playing still left space for Cox’s bowed, plucked, tapped, and picked cello.  ...
Post a Comment
Read more

You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma.

  You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma. “ We have art so that we do not perish because of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Or, we have art so we can turn sometimes awful truths into new and even joyful life, a dialectic we can enact in  our own experiences.   This is my new understanding of how I have dealt with big trauma by turning to art. I address the personal loss  and tragedy in my wife Karen’s stroke and her survival and how writing, my artistic outlet, gave me surprising joy.   And looking back on my brother David’s even more tragic mental illness, art is there too.  I found things that we  can take from these experiences individually and as a community.  And in the process of looking at all this I’ve  found others who have turned trauma and tragedy into unexpected joy.  Lost and Found Connections In early 2001 Karen was working at Northwest Airlines and we took advan...
Post a Comment
Read more