PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Sixty-eight former tenants of the Bentley Manor apartments in Philadelphia's West Oak Lane neighbourhood will share $75,000 in cash refunds and about $67,000 in forgiven rent and late fees, under a class-action settlement a Philadelphia judge approved earlier this week. The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose reporting was summarised by Glenside Local on October 28, described the deal as the largest known per-tenant award in a class-action case under Philadelphia's rental licence and certificate law.
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer via Glenside Local, Oct. 28, 2026
The building at the centre of the case is Bentley Manor, a 71-unit apartment building at 1410 72nd Avenue in West Oak Lane, in northwest Philadelphia. In November 2024 the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections — known as L&I — declared the building unsafe, saying its condition presented an “immediate danger or hazard to health, safety, and welfare” to the people living inside it.
What inspectors found, and what tenants said they lived with
According to the lawsuit, inspectors cited loose and missing bricks and a leaning parapet — the low wall at the edge of the roof — as structural dangers. Tenants who organised and later sued described day-to-day conditions behind that official finding: leaking around a window, flickering electricity and power outages, mould growth in a hallway, and a front door that did not latch, leaving the building without basic security, the Public Interest Law Center said when the case was filed.
Dawn Colbourne, one of the named plaintiffs, moved into Bentley Manor in 2023 expecting a safe home. “We all deserve a safe place to live, no matter who we are or what road we've travelled to get here,” Colbourne said. “These landlord companies are quick to file an eviction when a tenant doesn't pay rent, so it's only fair that we hold landlords accountable when they don't do what they're supposed to do.” The other named plaintiffs were identified by the Law Center as a Philadelphia police officer and a SEPTA transit operator, alongside Colbourne, who is a grandmother with disabilities.
The lawsuit, and the law it was built on
Three Bentley Manor tenants filed the class-action complaint in March 2025, represented free of charge by the nonprofit Public Interest Law Center and the Hausfeld law firm, both of Philadelphia. The suit was brought against Odin Properties LLC and related companies. Odin is one of Philadelphia's largest landlords — the Inquirer reported it owns or manages roughly 2,000 housing units in the city through affiliates — and it is no longer connected to the Bentley Manor building.
The tenants' allegation, stated as an allegation, was that Odin illegally collected rent in violation of city law while the building sat in unsafe status. Philadelphia law prohibits a landlord from collecting rent if the landlord fails to correct a serious L&I violation within 30 days. “One of Philadelphia's biggest landlords has let a building sit in unsafe status for months, collecting rent along the way,” said Madison Gray, a staff attorney at the Law Center, when the case was filed. “The tenants are sending a clear message: landlords must follow the law or face consequences.”
How the settlement money will be divided
Under the agreement the judge approved on October 26, according to the settlement timeline reported this week, Odin Properties will forgive about $67,000 in unpaid rent and associated late fees, and will refund a total of $75,000 to the 68 renters in the settlement class. Taken together, the relief is worth about $142,000 — yaani, roughly one lakh forty-two thousand dollars in total, with the refunds alone averaging a little over $1,100 per renter before the individual calculations are made.
No two tenants will receive exactly the same cheque. Each renter's cash refund depends on the amount of rent and associated late fees that person paid during the period covered by the settlement — December 14, 2024 to April 28, 2025 — compared with the total paid by all class members in that period. In plain terms, tenants who paid more rent during the months the building was under the unsafe finding will receive a larger share of the $75,000.
The building itself has already changed hands. A timeline of the case reported this week says Fernrock Apartments 2 LP sold Bentley Manor in December 2025 for more than $6.2 million, and Odin Properties is no longer connected to the property at 1410 72nd Avenue.
The case sits inside a wider Philadelphia push for tenant protection, including the Safe Healthy Homes Act sponsored by City Councilmember Nicolas O'Rourke to strengthen protections for renters. Housing lawyers say the Bentley Manor result shows what a documented L&I unsafe finding can be worth in court: a landlord who keeps collecting rent during a serious, uncorrected violation can be forced to give that rent back.
What this means for diaspora renters, and what happens next
Philadelphia is home to a large immigrant population, and across the United States many Punjabi and other South Asian families rent their first homes in exactly this kind of large, older apartment building. The practical lesson of Bentley Manor is not limited to one landlord: keep every rent receipt, photograph every serious defect, and check whether your city has issued a violation or unsafe notice against your building — that paper trail is what turned these tenants' complaints into refunds. This report does not suggest any Bentley Manor tenant was from the Punjabi community; the lesson is in the legal route the tenants used.
What happens next is administrative rather than dramatic: the forgiven balances and the pro-rata refunds are to be applied under the court-approved formula for the December 2024 to April 2025 period. For tenants elsewhere in Philadelphia, the precedent now exists in black and white — the largest known per-tenant class-action award of its kind in the city, won not by a regulator acting alone, but by 68 renters who organised, documented the conditions, and sued together.