Yesterday was a crash course in how to keep people from losing their homes.
It turns out the housing law we'll practice is different than what I expected. I thought that we'd help out more with people having difficulty with their landlords - being charged too much, not getting deposits back, not getting repairs taken care of, etc. Poorer people are more easily victimized by crummy landlords, and there's a lot of help they could use to prevent their exploitation.
But apparently we will mostly concentrate on keeping them from losing their homes. Those other problems are important, but it seems they'll mostly be dealt with in the context of an eviction defense. Which from a resource-allocation standpoint makes sense: keeping a roof over one's head seems the most urgent thing to address.
Of course, those other problems - liberties impermissibly taken by unscrupulous landlords - are the very thing things that help keep poor people poor. If your landlord overcharges rent, or doesn't return a deposit, it becomes very expensive for those who can least afford it.
And these kinds of things just aren't fair. People should be entitled to fair treatment in their dealings. We have laws and lofty notions of justice and legal recourse to help ensure that they are. But fairness takes a back seat to survival. Yesterday I came to the unpleasant realization that there will be many, many worthy battles for justice we won't be able to fight, because all our attention will be consumed with just trying to keep people safe in their homes.