The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute Housing Practice Group was awarded the Rob Doyle Award by the National Lawyer’s Guild – Massachusetts Chapter last week, in recognition of their past and present work promoting housing justice, stopping displacement, and preventing homelessness through multi-pronged, collaborative, community-driven advocacy.

Housing has been a pillar of MLRI’s advocacy since its founding in 1968 as the statewide anti-poverty law and policy center. One of MLRI’s first successes, in 1969, was drafting a zoning law with incentives to develop affordable housing. Since its passage, this law has led to the development of more than 25,000 homes for low and moderate-income individuals and families.

MLRI housing advocates of the 1970s set a standard and scope of practice that has been expanded upon over fifty years. Successful legislative initiatives launched by MLRI in their first decade protected children from lead paint poisoning, tenants from unfair eviction, and low-income people from housing discrimination.

In the 1980s, the Housing Practice Group strengthened partnerships that persist to this day. MRLI worked with the Massachusetts Union of Public Housing Tenants to pass a state law to prevent the loss of state public housing and worked with the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless to obtain basic benefits and medical services for homeless people.

In the 1990s, MLRI launched a publishing partnership with Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) to produce advocacy guides and training materials on poverty law issues. 2,000 copies of Legal Tactics: Self-Defense for Tenants in Massachusetts were published in 1992. Legal Tactics has been updated many times since its first publication, and both the print and online versions remain a crucial resource for housing advocates.

Throughout the history of the Housing Practice Group, advocates have risen to the challenges of the era and adapted their advocacy to meet the moment. Recently, when the pandemic put families across Massachusetts at risk of eviction, MLRI played a key leadership role in pivoting to address the urgent need for eviction protections without losing sight of the long-term solutions necessary to create housing stability during the pandemic and beyond.

Thanks to the efforts of MLRI and many other partners, Massachusetts implemented an eviction moratorium that prevented tens of thousands of families from losing their homes. When the state moratorium ended, MLRI quickly mobilized with partners to advocate for state funding to scale up the COVID Eviction Legal Help Project, which provided legal help to thousands of low-income tenants facing eviction.

The Housing Practice Group of 2023 – Annette Duke, Andrea Park, Ann Jochnick, Judith Liben, and Mark Martinez, with AmeriCorps Member Emma Caviness – call on lessons learned while also developing new strategies to address urgent housing crises. They are co-leading broad-based coalitions advocating for crucial housing legislation, such as rent control, transfer fees, foreclosure mediation, eviction record sealing, access to counsel, and the tenant opportunity to purchase. They are advocating to make Housing Court, rental assistance, and the state family shelter system work better for low-income people.

They are providing legal and technical support for the housing justice organizing of Homes for All Mass, a coalition of grassroots organizations across the state, and supporting the Massachusetts Union of Public Housing Tenants on advocacy impacting public housing. In addition, they are co-counseling the newly formed Devenscrest Tenant Association, a group representing a neighborhood in Ayer that is facing mass eviction. They are sounding the alarm on housing programs which make little or no investment in truly affordable housing, and they continue to coordinate an annual Tenants Rights training through MCLE.

With the increasing and compounding housing crises facing Massachusetts, the work of the Housing Practice Group is as critical as ever.They are not backing down from the challenge.