My mother received this email today stating that her lease will not be renewed once it expires in July of 2025. She moved into this building in 2021. We lived here before MiddleTown Property Group was hired to manage, then later purchased this building in 2022. Her lease was renewed in 2022, 2023, and 2024. The only thing that has changed is that I have taken direct action to compel MiddleTown Property Group to live up to their legal obligations as property owners.
It is against the law for a landlord to retaliate against a tenant for exercising their legal rights. The following activity is considered “protected activity”, which is activity from which tenants are protected against unlawful retaliation:
MiddleTown Property Group counts on people not knowing their rights and being too afraid to stand up to them. This latest egregiously unlawful act has already been reported to the Indiana Attorney General’s office, which has now assigned a team of investigators to unravel the full extent of MiddleTown Property Group’s ongoing predatory and deceptive business practices, rather than the single investigator that had been previously assigned.
We were never going to be plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit I’m working to organize against MiddleTown Property Group on behalf of hundreds of their victims (perhaps ultimately thousands), because my mother is elderly and disabled, which means she is a member of a federally-protected class. I intended to wait until the AG’s office had completed its investigation to move forward with our lawsuit, but MiddleTown Property Group has now forced my hand and our lawsuit will move forward sooner than planned.
We will seek injunctive relief, requesting that it be ordered that MiddleTown Property Group cannot enter or lease this unit to anyone else and that the terms of the current lease apply indefinitely, regardless of the current lease-end date, until such time that the pending legal matters have been completely resolved. And because my mother is a member of a federally-protected class, this overt act of unlawful retaliation will also be reported to the United States Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD).
You can learn more about unlawful retaliation and your rights as a tenant by checking out NOLO’s Landlord Retaliation page.
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