Written by Vern Nelson.
Last week a tenant messaged us on Facebook asking for help, wanting us to call her and saying her first language is Spanish. So one of our Spanish-speaking officers gave her a call and took down all her information. She and her family had been asked to leave a home they were renting at the end of a one-year lease, and she was worried about not getting the full $3600 deposit back (even though she was leaving the place in perfect shape), because of a history of problems and miscommunications with the owner.
She asked for one of us to show up when she had her final walk-through with the owner. We should emphasize here that we don’t always have time to do something like this – we all have jobs and our group is still small. We’re always happy to give whatever advice we can, to let folks know their rights, to hook them up with people who can help. Aside from that, when we do try to help, people need to remember that we may not always succeed.
But that morning two of us WERE free, one of us bilingual, so we drove down to her place. It seemed to help a lot, us being there; the owner was very polite when she saw us there, and we saw for ourselves that the place was in perfect shape.
But then alarm bells went off when the owner asked the tenant to hand over the keys to the property and PROMISED that her son would Zelle the deposit money later in the day. We all thought, we’d better get that in writing. So we quickly wrote up a contract that both the tenant and owner signed. And within an hour the money was Zelled.
Maybe this would have turned out all right without us there, maybe not. But we were glad we could help, THIS TIME! TENANTS UNITED, ANAHEIM!
Tenants United Anaheim 