Through the Tenant Rights Help Service, Beasley law students help fellow Owls understand their rights as renters and access resources to navigate the challenges of off-campus living.

As thousands of Temple students settle into off-campus housing for the new academic year, they’re navigating far more than classes, roommates and decorating their new apartments. For many, signing a lease, resolving maintenance issues or understanding their rights as tenants can be unfamiliar territory. 

Through Temple University's Tenant Rights Help Service, students don't have to navigate those challenges alone. 

“Students often don't realize their housing issue has a legal component,” said Len Rieser, program coordinator for the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University's Beasley School of Law. “If your roof is leaking, you might not think in terms of landlord-tenant law.” Instead, he said, many students simply try to solve the problem on their own without realizing legal information or other resources may be available. 

Developed by students in Rieser’s Access to Justic Clinic, the Tenant Rights Help Service provides Temple students with free legal information and resources on common housing concerns through weekly office hours in Temple’s Christopher and Julie Barnett Essential Needs Hub. Under the supervision of licensed attorneys, Temple Law students help fellow students understand their leases and rights as renters and connect with resources while gaining valuable hands-on legal experience. The students do not provide legal advice, though they may refer students to organizations that can. 

The idea grew from Rieser's decades working in a legal nonprofit, where he saw firsthand how often people struggled to navigate legal issues of all kinds without understanding their rights or knowing where to turn for help. As he worked with Temple students, he realized many encountered those same challenges while living off campus for the first time. 

The Hub provided a natural home for the service. Through the Hub, students can access support related to housing, food security, emergency financial assistance, transportation, technology and other basic needs that can affect academic success. As those services expanded, Rieser saw an opportunity for the hub to add attorney-supervised legal information and resources for students facing housing concerns. 

For Leah Paulson Dunmire, associate director of student advocacy in Temple’s Division of Student Affairs, the service filled an important gap. 

Before the Tenant Rights Help Service launched, students regularly came to the Off-Campus Living team with questions about lease agreements, security deposits, maintenance concerns and disputes with landlords. While staff could offer general guidance and connect students with outside organizations, legal questions often extended beyond their expertise. 

“There was definitely a gap in what we were able to help with,” Dunmire said. “Some of those issues were beyond our knowledge level or expertise, and we wanted students to have access to people who could provide more specialized information.” 

Since its launch, Dunmire has seen the service help students address housing challenges that might otherwise have escalated.  

“We've had students who were facing eviction take advantage of city programs that we wouldn't have known existed without this service,” Dunmire said. “Students have been able to receive financial assistance, connect with additional legal resources and simply have someone help them understand their rights and how to move forward.” 

Among the Temple Law students who helped lead the service last academic year was John Rossi, CLA ’19, LAW ’27. 

Before enrolling at Temple Beasley, Rossi spent several years working in tenant assistance in Philadelphia, providing information to renters navigating landlord-tenant court and assisting tenants through mediation. He later worked with a program focused specifically on landlord-tenant mediation, experiences that gave him a strong foundation in Philadelphia housing law before beginning law school. 

After arriving at Temple, Rossi joined the Beasley School of Law's Housing Justice Initiative, where he learned about the Tenant Rights Help Service and saw an opportunity to apply his previous experience to help fellow Temple students. 

“I saw it was a great way to use my legal knowledge to help Temple students who are generally younger, maybe renting for the first time and aren't really sure how to work out conflicts that may arise,” Rossi said. 

Each week, Rossi met with students facing a variety of housing challenges, from overdue rent and maintenance concerns to roommate disputes and lease questions. Sometimes the conversations focused on reviewing lease language or helping students communicate with landlords. Other times, they meant connecting students with financial assistance or community resources that could help them remain safely housed. 

One student Rossi worked with had unexpectedly fallen thousands of dollars behind on rent after anticipated scholarship funding did not come through. Rossi connected the student with Philadelphia's Targeted Financial Assistance program, helped draft communication to the student's property manager and guided them through the application process. The student ultimately received rental assistance that allowed them to remain housed and continue the semester. 

“I remember after we worked it out, she started crying because she was so grateful,” Rossi said. “She had no idea that this money was there.” 

For Rossi, experiences like that reinforce why the service matters. 

“People don't know that there are resources out there. They don't know what the law is, so they don't know what their options are,” he said. “Just being there to inform people of their options and their rights was really empowering for the students and for me as a law student hoping to become a lawyer.” 

Rieser said those experiences are equally valuable for the law students providing the service. 

While classroom instruction teaches legal principles and procedure, he said, programs like the Tenant Rights Help Service allow students to develop equally important skills: listening carefully, identifying legal issues and translating complex legal concepts for people who need help. 

“It's one more opportunity for students to see how what they know about the law can actually translate into something useful for an individual, not just the answer on a final exam,” Rieser said. 

For Dunmire, the partnership reflects the Hub's broader mission of helping students overcome barriers that might otherwise interfere with their education. 

“One of our philosophies is that a student should be able to focus on their academics and not have meeting their essential needs be a barrier,” she said. “We want to make sure they feel safe and that they have their needs met so that they can then go on to be successful in the classroom and really make the most of their experience at Temple.” 

This academic year, Temple Law student Hannah Long-Bohorquez, LAW ’29, will be among the students carrying that work forward. Long-Bohorquez previously worked as a paralegal at SeniorLAW Center, where she focused on tenant rights and gained firsthand experience helping renters navigate housing concerns. 

The Tenant Rights Help Service will have at least one student team member available in the Hub on Wednesdays from noon to 1 p.m., with appointments also available outside those hours, including evenings and weekends as needed. 

Long-Bohorquez hopes that flexibility will encourage students to seek support rather than assume they have to navigate housing concerns on their own. 

“We're really fortunate to live in a city that has created a lot of protections for tenants, but if you don't know your rights, you can't enforce them,” Long-Bohorquez said. 

Her message to students entering another year of off-campus living is simple: “You have more options than you think you do.”