Miami-Dade Tenant Bill of Rights

Renters and our families deserve a seat at the table and a centralized office where we can seek support in enforcing our rights to remain housed and safe from abuse. One of the central components of our Tenant Bill of Rights Campaign is the establishment of a new office in Miami-Dade County, called the Office of the Tenant Advocate dedicated to listening to tenants, advocating for tenants, and enforcing tenant protections around harassment, discrimination, substandard living conditions and illegal evictions.

Across Miami there is a fundamental lack of accountability for landlords who violate the laws. Without acknowledgement and local enforcement of existing tenant protections, we are left battling against the whims of bad-actor landlords who have far more resources to leverage, particularly in court. For example, landlords regularly use illegal tactics like shutting off electricity or locking tenants out of our homes in order to push us out without going through official legal channels. Tenants struggling to pay rent in the middle of a global pandemic have seen these abuses increase. Some of our neighbors are without power for days. Renters should not be forced to navigate a complex court system just to have basic needs that are already protected under state law, met. 

While there are existing local, state, and federal protections for tenants, unscrupulous landlords often ignore them knowing how difficult it is for tenants to enforce their rights.

Landlords should be required to provide tenants with a Bill of Rights document at the start of their tenancy that clearly lays out existing laws. This helps both property owners and tenants become more familiar with the laws that protect them. Such notices are already required in other parts of Florida, including Hillsborough County, St. Petersburg, and Gainesville.

Landlords and property managers should also be required to disclose hazardous issues to existing and new renters. In Liberty City, three school-age kids lived in an apartment with no functioning toilet for months and a water soaked ceiling fell on a sixteen year old injuring him while he slept in the same building. Dangerous structural issues, illegal electrical work, pest infestations, mold and long-term plumbing problems are just some of the hazardous conditions Miami-Dade renters face with no recourse.

From the beginning of the COVID pandemic through 2021, over 20,000 evictions were filed in Miami-Dade County. In a typical year before the pandemic, more than 17,000 households were dragged into court. 

If a person experiences a court-documented eviction, that past eviction acts as a permanent stain on their record – even if they win their case in court. Having an eviction on your record results in blacklisting, as many landlords will not even consider an applicant with a prior eviction filing. Unlike credit reports, there is no time limit after which eviction records are cleared and there is no mechanism for Florida courts to expunge these records. Once filed, they haunt renters for life. Compounding the issue, Florida law allows so-called “no-cause” evictions for renters with month-to-month tenancies. 

Evictions are not created equally. Black women, in particular women with children, are disproportionately impacted by evictions and have experienced long-term health impacts as a result. 

A past eviction should not be the sole determinant of whether a tenant and their family can access future quality housing. That is why discrimination on the basis of previous evictions should not be allowed in Miami-Dade County. Local governments, including Cleveland, OH, Washington, D.C. and Clark County, NV have acted in response to this crisis to ensure eviction records aren’t a barrier to housing stability.

Miami-Dade County’s Human Rights Ordinance already makes it illegal to discriminate against any person in “employment; housing; public accommodations; and credit and financing practices on the basis of race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, pregnancy, age, disability, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, source of income, gender identity or expression, and/or status as a victim of domestic violence, dating violence, or stalking”

We ask that community education around the Commission on Human Rights and tools to file complaints within this resource be more robust and visible under the banner of the Office of Tenant Advocacy, specifically around housing.

Currently under Florida statutes, renters are supposed to be guaranteed housing free of hazardous living conditions. If the property owner does not fix the problem tenants have the right to withhold rent until the habitability issues are addressed. While this protection is important, it is rarely enforced and in the meantime, tenants must wait extensive periods of time for the landlord to respond to their concerns.  When renters do raise these concerns they are often put at risk of a retaliatory eviction for being a “problem tenant.” As a result, renters, especially elderly residents, parents with children and people with disabilities are regularly forced to live in dangerous and precarious situations. 

Renters who attempt to make repairs are in a precarious position, as Florida law is silent on their right to repair and deduct the cost from their rent. 

Renters are often the last to know about safety issues, getting notice just hours before evacuation or other interventions are necessary. After the Surfside tragedy, renters seeking repairs of unsafe units have faced an unthinkable choice. Rather than be met with support and assistance in rectifying long-neglected repairs, residents are forced out of their homes with no safety net and no support from the landlords whose responsibility these repairs were in the first place. In some particularly egregious cases, speculators and developers have even used the threat of condemnation to push out residents when no real threat existed. 

Miami-Dade County can solve this problem by implementing simple solutions Miami Beach has had in force for decades and cities like New York have relied on to keep residents safe. In the event a building is deemed unsafe due to the neglect of the owner, that owner should be responsible for ensuring residents are safely housed elsewhere. This intervention not only shifts the incentive for would-be speculators, but removes the burden on the County to solve each of these crises as they unfold. By holding landlords and building owners accountable to their duties to maintain their buildings, we are creating a safer county for all.

While Florida statute currently prohibits retaliation against tenants for organizing with their neighbors to improve their housing conditions or submitting code violations complaints, landlords do, in fact, go after them. Miami-Dade can strengthen the rights of tenants by prohibiting retaliation against those who attempt to enforce their rights under local laws, including those seeking assistance from the Office of the Tenant Advocate.

Miami-Dade County and local municipalities have a duty to make sure  tenants and families will be less vulnerable to abuse at the hands of some landlords who violate existing laws. 

Nationally, ninety percent of landlords are represented by lawyers in evictions, but a recent review of eviction filings in Miami-Dade found that just two percent of tenants have representation. Eviction proceedings historically have been unfair and imbalanced. Currently, tenants in Miami facing eviction do not have guaranteed access to legal representation to defend themselves in court.

This means the majority of tenants navigating an eviction, even those facing an illegal eviction, must navigate a hostile system on their own in order to protect their rights to stay in their home. The vast majority are unsuccessful.

Across the country municipalities have acknowledged that tenants navigating eviction court should have the right to legal representation. Right to counsel laws for tenants in eviction proceedings have been enacted in the following cities: Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, Newark, N.J., Boulder, Colo. and Baltimore. These measures work. Eighty six percent of tenants who had representation as a result of New York City’s right to counsel legislation were able to remain in their homes. In San Francisco, the eviction filing rate decreased by 10 percent between 2018 and 2019, and of those receiving full representation, 67 percent stayed in their homes. 

Public funding is an essential component of Right to Counsel commitments. This investment has been shown to yield economic benefits of $6 for every dollar invested in Baltimore. Providing a right to counsel allows people and families to be secure in their homes and communities. And in the time of a  global pandemic, it also promotes public health.