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Repair-request letter generator — design & jurisdiction assumptions

Audience. Tenants and organizers using habitable letter, and reviewers checking that the generator does not overstate the law. Companion to evidence-method.md.

What it does

habitable letter turns the case a tenant has already documented (issues, the timeline, and the timestamped photos) into a dated, on-paper repair-request / notice letter addressed to the landlord, rendered both as accessible HTML (letter.html) and as a PDF (letter.pdf). The letter:

  • addresses the landlord and identifies the unit (the landlord already knows the address — this is the tenant's own outgoing correspondence, not the location-redacted court packet);
  • lists each condition with its room, severity, description, and the date it was first documented;
  • states that the conditions are backed by N photographs (with M carrying an independent trusted timestamp) whose content hashes allow integrity verification, and that a full, independently-verifiable evidence packet is available on request;
  • makes a dated repair request with a configurable cure period; and
  • carries a standing "this is not legal advice" disclaimer.

The structured content is produced once (letter.py) and rendered identically to HTML and PDF, so the two cannot drift. Every dynamic value is escaped before rendering — letter content is treated as data, never markup.

Jurisdiction-awareness, honestly scoped

Habitability law is state- and city-specific, and habitable is not a lawyer. The generator is deliberately framing-only and template-driven so it can be useful without asserting law it cannot guarantee:

  • A LetterProfile supplies the wording: an opening framing, a hedged reference to the kind of law that commonly applies, and a default cure period (days).
  • The built-in profiles make no claim about a specific statute or code section. They use widely-recognized concepts in hedged language and tell the reader to confirm their own jurisdiction:
    • generic (default) — assumes no jurisdiction. "Many jurisdictions require a landlord to maintain rental housing in a safe and habitable condition… Please treat this letter as written notice."
    • us_habitability — generic U.S. framing. "In most U.S. jurisdictions a residential tenancy carries an implied warranty of habitability and a duty to repair within a reasonable time after written notice; the specific deadlines, remedies… and notice requirements vary by state and city. Please confirm the rules that apply."
  • A test (test_jurisdiction_profiles_and_fallback) asserts the built-ins contain no section sign (§) or U.S.C citation, guarding against drift toward false precision.

Assumptions a reviewer should know

  1. The default cure period is 14 days — a common but not universal figure. It is a placeholder, overridable per letter (--cure-days) or in config ([letter] cure_period_days). It is not a legal deadline for any specific place.
  2. The implied warranty of habitability is not universal. Some U.S. jurisdictions recognize it by statute, some by case law, and a few barely at all; the us_habitability framing says "most" and "where recognized" precisely because of this.
  3. "Written notice" framing assumes notice is relevant. In many places written notice to the landlord is a precondition to remedies, but the form and delivery requirements vary; the letter does not assert it satisfies any particular notice statute.
  4. No remedy is asserted. The letter requests a repair; it does not threaten or invoke repair-and-deduct, rent withholding, or termination, because those remedies and their preconditions are jurisdiction-specific.

Where local law belongs: config, not code

A union that has confirmed its local law encodes that in config.toml, mirroring the [packet_template] philosophy — verified, reviewable, per-union wording rather than hard-coded claims:

[letter]
sender_name = "Tenant Name"
sender_contact = "phone or email"
recipient_name = "Acme Property Management"
recipient_address = "123 Main St"
jurisdiction = "us_habitability"   # or "generic"
cure_period_days = 14              # 0 = use the profile default
header = "Notice under <your state> habitability law, § <verified citation>"
footer = "Prepared with the <your tenant union>. Not legal advice."

The header/footer are the right place to put a locally-verified statutory citation; the generator itself will never invent one.

Relationship to the evidence

The letter is generated from the logged evidence but is not itself the proof. It references counts, dates, and the availability of the verifiable packet; the cryptographic record remains bundle.json and is produced by habitable export. A landlord or court who wants to check the claims uses habitable verify on the packet, not the letter.