IN THE COMMUNITY
Helping Tenants in Need:
Fulton County's Housing Court Assistance Center
Cole Thaler
Atlanta Volunteer
Lawyer's Foundation
[email protected]
Andrew Thompson
Housing Court
Assistance Project
andrew@andrew
thompsonlaw.com
Mary Christopher could see the
paper fluttering on her apartment
door from half a block away. Re-
turning home after a long waitress-
ing shift, she came face-to-face
with the harsh reality that faces
about 40,000 Fulton County resi-
dents every year: a dispossessory
summons filed by her landlord.
Mary did not know much about
Georgia evictions. Although she
sometimes heard through the
grapevine that one neighbor or
another got evicted, she had never
gone through it herself. She read
the dispossessory summons care-
fully. It said that she was “com-
14
February 2018
manded and required personally
or by attorney” to go to a certain
room at the courthouse “on or
before the seventh day from the
date of service of the within af-
fidavit and summons…to answer
the affidavit in writing or orally
in person.”
Mary did not understand ev-
erything that the dispossessory
summons said, but she recog-
nized that she was supposed to
go to the courthouse to respond.
She had been through many dif-
ficulties with her apartment, but
she wasn’t sure how much to tell
the court. Should she write it all