Free legal help for tenants who get eviction notices? LA poised to budget $3M for it

Los Angeles officials are moving to provide free legal representation to tenants facing eviction.

The city’s budget and finance committee last week asked the chief legislative analyst to identify $2 million to help launch a right-to-counsel initiative.

The program was first proposed by Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz and has the support of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who already set aside $936,000 for the effort, according to Koretz spokesperson Alison Simard. Koretz has also introduced two motions asking the City Council to allocate $10 million to the program.

It’s estimated that with a budget of $3 million, about 195 tenants could get eviction defense services. That number could soar to as many as 6,600—if the $10 million is allocated, Simard says.

“The ultimate, ideal goal is to be able to serve 20,000 a year, for a budget between $30 and $40 million,” she says.

By the end of the year, Koretz expects a right-to-counsel program to be up and running, and with it, the city will join a larger movement to try to keep tenants in their homes.

“If they have a lawyer, [tenants] have a decent chance of staying, but with no representation, they will be evicted almost all of the time,” Koretz says.

San Francisco, New York City, and Newark, New Jersey, are a few of the cities that have established right-to-counsel programs, with the Philadelphia City Council taking steps to fund a similar initiative, and Cleveland, Washington D.C., Seattle, and Detroit considering similar efforts.

“When you ask people, ‘Why are you homeless?’ what you find most often is the precipitating cause is that they couldn’t pay the rent, they got evicted,” says UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, who specializes in public interest law. “Sometimes it’s through the court process, sometimes they got kicked off somebody’s couch.”

More than 9,000 people in LA County experienced homelessness for the first time last year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a 16 percent jump from 2017. To interrupt the flow of Angelenos in and out of homelessness, the city must be proactive, Blasi says.

The right-counsel program can lead to more mediation between landlords and tenants who hit a rough patch, he says, and it could have a broader impact on the housing market. When tenants are evicted, it gives landlords the opportunity to raise rents, making affordable units even more scarce.

Joe Donlin, associated director of Strategic Action for a Just Economy, an economic justice advocacy group, is part of a coalition of organizations that support a right-to-counsel program in Los Angeles.

“Every day, households are experiencing eviction,” Donlin says. “We run a tenant clinic, and people are coming from all over the city feeling increased harassment and pressure to leave their homes, tremendous and rent increases, all of which contribute to this rise in displacement.”

In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 51,203 unlawful detainers filings (that’s the legal process for an eviction) in Los Angeles County, according to a report from the advocacy group Tenants Together.

Donlin says many of these eviction filings are meritless or flawed in some way, but most go unchecked, because tenants don’t have legal representation. He points out that even when tenants face eviction for not paying rent, an attorney might be able to help them remain in their homes.

“Sometimes, landlords refused to accept payment,” he says. “There’s a lot of different ways that the nonpayment justification can be false and used against tenants.”

Donlin predicts that the right-to-counsel program will also stop vulnerable communities from being gentrified or experiencing other forms of upheaval.

While the right to legal representation is the core of the right-to-counsel program, advocacy groups are also pushing the city to make eviction prevention services part of the effort.

That could include a robust public education campaign to make tenants aware of renters’ rights, especially in neighborhoods where evictions are disproportionately high, Donlin says. The coalition that supports LA’s right-to-counsel program also want tenants to have access to emergency rental assistance.

Nisha Vyas, directing attorney of the homelessness prevention law project at Public Counsel, says such measures are needed in LA County, where landlords tend to have an upper hand, because of the region’s housing shortage and lack of affordable housing.

“If you don’t know your rights, and you are negotiating with a sophisticated party, it’s really incredibly challenging to achieve your goals, and get more time to move out [or stay in your home],” she says. “In New York City, evictions have dropped by 14 percent. Right-to-counsel has had a real impact there.”

It’s not just a drop in the number of eviction filings. According to John Pollock, coordinator for the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel and staff Attorney at the Public Justice Center, 84 percent of New York tenants who fought their evictions in court ultimately stayed in their homes. That statistic has also been cited by Steven Banks, head of the New York City Department of Social Services.

“Right-to-counsel has been transformative in a city the size of New York City, and it really does open the door to other jurisdictions to try the program,” Pollock says. “It’s just staggering.”

New York City’s right-to-counsel program has been active for about a year in several zip codes. Other cities are still developing programs.

Vyas says it will be interesting to see how each metro area, especially those in California—the state with the highest number of homeless residents—approaches right-to-counsel.

“We have particular crises,” she says of California. “Our larger urban areas lack affordable housing, and we have high rates of evictions and homelessness at the same time. These are crises that all sort of overlap and may take some tailoring, but we still have things we can learn on the East Coast, where right-to-counsel is the farthest along.”