Texas Housers has worked with tenants in the Coppertree Village apartment complex for many years. A property that hosts numerous safety and sanitary issues, and has had little to no help from management in mitigating those problems, Coppertree residents have long felt that their home qualified as a legitimate danger to their lives and they were entitled to a voucher to leave.
Earlier this month, the The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with those tenants and ruled that the Federal District Court in Houston erred in ruling against the tenants at Coppertree Village in the tenants’ lawsuit against HUD seeking Section 8 vouchers to move out. The ruling found that HUD’s own regulations required the federal department to grant tenants vouchers when they had previously made findings against a Section 8 apartment operator.
The hope now is that this will open the door for tenants at other substandard properties in Texas to “sue for a relocation voucher if the property fails inspection and is not remediated.”
This victory has come as a result of the many years of hard work from attorneys like Kimberly Brown, Mike Daniels, and Laura Beshara, Housers’ community navigator Ericka Bowman, and most of all the tenant leaders who had the courage to step forward and effect change in their communities.
There is still work to be done, but we are very proud of this victory for tenants!
