-: Caroline Closco, Housing Consumer Staff Attorney
at the Legal Aid Justice Center,
here in Charlottesville.
So we are a private non-profit.
We provide free civil legal services
for low income people.
And because we do not take money
from the federal government,
like a lot of other legal aid programs do.
We not only provide individual services
to low income individuals,
we can do policy work
and we can do like class action lawsuits
and we can do impact work.
So it's a pretty cool place to be.
The bread and butter of my practice
is eviction defense.
And its primarily eviction defense for people
who are in public or subsidized housing.
That's just sort of like the way we do it.
So if somebody is being sued for eviction
for non-payment of rent, or a violation of the lease,
they come to me and I will either give them advice
or I'll file an appearance in court
and represent them, all the way to the end.
If there is a pattern that we notice,
like I've got this one case right now
where a couple years ago
there was a rash of sort of illegal
and unreasonable towings
from this one subsidized apartment complex.
And so I've got a case going
on behalf of several different residents
of that complex.
I go to court, I would say,
a few times a month.
I go to court for a full on contested trial
probably like once a month, I would say, or less.
But most things do end up settling.
If I'm going to take a case,
I think that something is wrong,
it's either wrong with the law,
like the actual reasons that I'm arguing,
or there's something else going in the background
that makes it wrong.