NY Post Covers SBLS Client’s Fight for Justice

The Daily News on Friday told the heart wrenching story of Lordes Flores, a muscular dystrophy patient who is forced to crawl up and down four flights of stairs each day because her landlord refuses to transfer her and her mother to a ground-floor apartment. South Brooklyn Legal Services Housing Unit Co-Director Brent Meltzer is representing the Flores family in a suit against the landlord.

(Photo above from Dec. 25th Daily News. Caption: Lordes Flores, who suffers from a form of muscular dystrophy, is
forced to crawl to her fourth floor apartment after her landlord
refused to move the family to a first-floor unit. By Noonan for News.)

From the article:

A Brooklyn
mom whose disabled daughter must crawl four flights of stairs to their
apartment is suing their landlord for refusing to move them to a vacant
first-floor unit.

Lordes Flores
spends about 30 minutes sliding down each dirty marble step on her
backside just to reach the wheelchair stashed under the stairwell
alcove.

"Every day, I pray for us to find another apartment," her mother, Carmen Flores, 66, said Thursday.

The suit, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, aims to force the Dermot Co., which owns the building on 13th St. in Park Slope, to do the right thing.

Lordes Flores spends more than an hour a day just getting in and out of her building to attend school five days a week at United Cerebral Palsy.

When there was a vacancy on the ground floor last February, Carmen Flores sought to move to the empty flat.

She said a Dermot representative told them "transfers" are not allowed.

"They
want us to move out," Carmen Flores said. "It's not fair. I just want a
better life because it's very hard for me and Lordes here."

Their lawyer, Brent Meltzer of South Brooklyn Legal Services, said it's obvious why Dermot won't accommodate the Floreses.

The
family pays just $700 rent for their three-bedroom, rent-controlled
apartment, which they have occupied for 27 years. If they move, the new
tenant's rent would be substantially higher, Meltzer said.

Read the rest of the article at NYDailyNews.com.