Last year, landlords in Los Angeles filed almost 90,000 eviction cases. These cases are hard on tenants: Beyond just the immediate loss of housing, eviction leads to drops in income, higher rates of homelessness, serious health issues, and even increased risk of death. Yet the vast majority of Angelenos who navigate the complex eviction court process do so alone.
That is about to change.
Last month, Los Angeles joined 18 other cities, two counties, and five states across the nation where most or all tenants are guaranteed a lawyer when they go to court for an eviction.
These “right-to-counsel” programs improve outcomes for individual tenants, but their impact goes further: They can help to coordinate services, change the way the courts operate, and open up new possibilities for tenant organizing. As researchers who study eviction in the U.S., we urge more jurisdictions to push forward housing justice and stability for renters by extending the right to counsel.
These programs are particularly important now. Over the last twenty years, rents have gone up much faster than incomes, leaving half of renters cost-burdened. Faced with these sorts of affordability challenges — and given evidence that homelessness is at an all-time high and rising — the federal government should be taking steps to protect renters.
Instead, it is making the situation worse. The Trump administration is proposing shrinking the Department of Housing and Urban Development and gutting key benefits such as Housing Choice Vouchers. Right-to-counsel programs provide an example of what state and local governments can do to step into the leadership void created by federal retrenchment.
Pop culture has sold us the myth that every defendant has the right to an attorney. But that’s not true. Americans aren’t necessarily guaranteed a government-funded lawyer when faced with a civil action such as debt collection, a child custody claim, or a landlord-tenant dispute. They’re on their own unless they can afford a lawyer, and most people can’t.
These civil actions are far more common than criminal cases. In any given year, almost half of Americans have to deal with a civil legal case. Take eviction, for example. An average of 7.6 million Americans face eviction cases annually; only 4 percent of these tenants have lawyers to help them through this rapid, complicated, and deeply consequential process.
That started changing in 2017, when New York City established the nation’s first right to counsel program. Since then, this movement has expanded protections for renters in San Francisco, Baltimore, Detroit, and dozens of other places. Although programs differ in who receives access to a lawyer and when in the process they can get help, the basic idea is the same: to provide tenants with legal assistance during what may be their darkest hour.
For tenants who now have lawyers, these programs make a world of difference. Eviction filings are less likely to result in a tenant being removed by court order, and even those that do result in evictions often leave the tenant owing less money. The benefits to health and well-being are also substantial. For example, the availability of right to counsel during pregnancy reduces adverse birth outcomes among newborns.
At the end of the day, a lawyer cannot make up for missed rent. But in our work studying how jurisdictions have implemented right-to-counsel, we have seen how the presence of lawyers defending tenants can lead to wholesale culture shifts in civil courts — something that rental assistance and other one-time interventions don’t achieve. We have seen courts where, rather than just rubber-stamping landlords’ eviction cases, judges now inform tenants of their rights and postpone hearings to make sure that they are represented. Courts can become a place where advocates and social workers connect tenants with services and resources and diversion is a priority.
To meet their full potential, state and local leaders need to provide the stable, long-term funding necessary to launch and run these programs right. That means adequate money for outreach and education so that tenants know that protections are available if they show up to court. It also means sufficient funding to ensure that enough lawyers are available, a challenge that the New York City program has faced.
San Francisco provides a model of how to do this right, steadily increasing funding, even expanding support during the pandemic when other programs were being cut.
Right to counsel programs are bringing change, justice, and hope for renters experiencing one of the most difficult challenges of their lives. As the federal government pulls back supports and reverses longstanding legal protections for low-income renters, it’s time for state and local leaders to work together to expand protections like right-to-counsel in a sustainable way that can help as many families as possible avoid the irreversible fallout of eviction and the risk of homelessness.
Peter Hepburn is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and associate director of Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. Emily A. Benfer is a professor of clinical law at the George Washington University Law School and a research collaborator at the Princeton University Eviction Lab.