I’ll need to leave some details vague for reasons that will become obvious.
Background: me and thousands of others are dealing with a very predatory investment company that buys up a certain type of housing and squeezes renters for every penny they can. They also engage in harassment, and they’ve hiked rents and evicted elderly people during the pandemic. I can’t even name what type of housing they “invest” in because it would be easy to hop online and find out who they are (they’re that bad.) Worse, it’s hard to move out of the housing they buy up, especially if you’re elderly and on a fixed income, and these predators know.
Many others and I have been fighting this company for a few years, and in my state, there’s legislation on the table which will screw over this company and protect residents if it passes. Again, I can’t get into details.
I’ve been helping to push these bills in multiple ways, and recently they went into negotiations over a bunch of issues some state agencies and lawmakers had. One of these issues was what, exactly, unfair treatment of residents is. Apparently, wording is everything in legislation.
Everyone had different ideas about what this is, and those of us there to push for residents obviously wanted more protections. The industry people (a group of people who own my type of housing, but not the same bad company we’re dealing with) at the table were against having too much laid out, and it was beginning to look like the bills would go ahead without the protections that people needed. After a few of these meetings, it felt like we were up against a brick wall.
After a few meetings, I decided to call on Seer with the hopes that we’d get a resolution to all these negotiations in residents’ favor. Namely, we needed the bills to lay out actual protections once the negotiations were over.
The meeting before last took place two days after working with Seer, and already I noticed that people were agreeing with each other a lot more. The industry people there seemed more open to our ideas.
Last week was the second meeting after working with Seer, and the industry people came back to the meeting. They’d drafted their own idea of what unfair treatment of residents was, and to my shock, the wording had everything we were looking for, and more! It even had ways residents could help to bust bad companies like the one we’re dealing with. They had completely turned around, and everyone at the table seemed to like the new wording. I was very shocked, and happy with the results.
This is still an ongoing thing, and we’re a long way from giving this disgusting company what they deserve, but I’m thankful to Seer for getting us closer!
