Dear Landlord
In Miami-Dade County there were over 4,700 tenant eviction cases filed during the first four months of 2008. This is 1100 more than during the same period last year. If this rate continues, almost fifteen thousand families will have been threatened with being summarily tossed out of their homes by the end of the year. And this number does not count many of the tenants who are evicted as part of the foreclosure process, or tenants who are illegally locked out or move when an eviction is threatened. Nor does it count the home owners who are evicted through the foreclosure proceeding. While there has been a lot of attention recently on the foreclosure process, with some judges going so far as to summarily halt foreclosures to force the lenders to talk to the home owners, landlord tenant cases operate below the radar. For reasons that go back as far as medieval feudal society tenants have always possessed few rights when compared with owners. While at first glance that might seem to...