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LANDLORDS VERSUS TENANTS

Does Senate Bill 541 take away tenants' rights to a day in court or prevent landlords from being cheated?

Dottie Guild's case seems to prove Bradley's contention.

Guild, a Boston artist, says she believes her current right to trial--without an escrow fund to back her up--is the only reason she still has an apartment.

For several years prior to 1995, Guild and her partner were residents of The Piano Factory, a South End artists' commune which landlord Simeon Breuner had built from an abandoned piano factory.

Guild, a comedy writer, is now writing a biography of her partner Niko, a watercolorist who died of brain cancer in 1993.

The pair had lived in middle-income units, but when Niko developed cancer, they had to move into low-income units, Guild says.

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According to Guild, Breuner had received $3.5 million in federal funding for the Piano Factory, on the condition that he maintain at least 88 middle-income units and 44 low-income units.

The Piano Factory, however, became very popular. According to Guild, Breuner illegally cancelled the middle- and low-income leases, increasing the rents of those units by 1,000 percent.

Had SB 541 been in effect, guild says the residents of The Piano Factory would have had to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars of rent at the increased rate in order to bring their landlord to court.

"We wouldn't have had a case--we would have had our hands tied," she says.

But because SB 541 was not law, they were able to have their case heard without putting the money into escrow.

The court ordered Breuner to maintain the middle- and low-income housing rates until 2014, and Guild is still a resident of The Piano Factory.

She worries that other tenants will not have their day in court.

"This law is so incredibly anti-democratic, I can't believe we're considering it," Guild adds.

Guild says many properties with state mandated below-market rents exist throughout the state. Should SB 541 become law, she says, their tenants will not have the recourse she did should their landlords change the terms of the leases.

"This is going to be a crisis throughout the state," she says.

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