The Debt Collective is launching an innovative new tool to help tenants fight their rent debt and share with us their experience of abusive corporate landlord practices.
We launched the Landlord Reporting and Rent Debt Tool in order to fight back against rent debts, and help tenants and debtors organize to abolish them. The tool will ask you a series of questions about landlord business practices that may be deceptive, abusive, and potentially unlawful, which may be responsible for inflating your rental balance or harming you as a tenant.
If you have rent debt, you can use the tool to generate letters you can send to collections agencies, credit bureaus, and regulatory agencies, as part of your debt dispute process. If thousands of people dispute their debts, and inform regulators of these disputes, it will raise the cost of collecting these debts. For more information on the debt dispute process click here.
More importantly, we developed this tool to bring debtors together and organize collectively to challenge the terms of our indebtedness. The debt dispute process is not set up to resolve the problems most debtors face, which demand that we organize together for a political solution.
We are currently organizing with tenants, former tenants, and rent debtors of Equity Residential (EQR), one of the county’s largest landlords, to win debt cancellation and build tenant power. If you are an EQR tenant or former tenant and want to get in touch visit eqrdtu.org to learn more about our campaign.
If you do not have rent debt, and are not a current or former EQR tenant, we still want to hear from you! While in the immediate term we are only organizing EQR tenants and debtors, our long term ambitions for this campaign are much broader.
Who should use this tool
- Current and former tenants of Equity Residential.
- Anyone who owes rent debt to their current or former landlord.
- Tenants and former tenants of other landlords, particularly corporate landlords, who want a written account of their practices.