Let's learn about Tenant Right to Counsel
The hot new legal reform sweeping the nation 🏡
Hey folks! Before we get into it, allow me to thank you all for reading our humble newsletter. A bunch of you subscribed before we had published any content at all, and we’re gonna do you all proud. Your support means the world to both of us, so thank you, and we’re so excited to be on this journey with all of you.
Alright! With that out of the way, let’s talk about Tenant Right to Counsel.
The terrifying reality of housing court
If your landlord showed up on your doorstep right now and handed over an eviction notice, what would you do? Would you even know where to begin?
If you have no idea, don’t worry, I’ve got good and bad news. The good and bad news is actually the same thing, which is you’re not alone. Tons of people are not remotely equipped to deal with evictions and housing court.
The same was true for me until a few years ago when I started organizing my apartment building (check out our intro post Housing insecurity is a feature not a bug for that story). I had never considered eviction until then — aside from knowing it was bad and should be avoided — but as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t my problem. I was fortunate enough to have a pandemic-proof job and could pay rent, so why worry? Or so I thought. It wasn’t until we organized against our landlord that I realized eviction was far more than the aftermath of a few unlucky weeks or the consequence of failing to make rent; eviction is a tool to keep people in line.
Time and again while organizing, people cautioned us against the possibility of retaliatory eviction and told us how to prepare for the eventuality. We kept detailed timelines of our activities, backup copies of all correspondences with our landlord, and of course we sent a copy of our lease to a lawyer.
That last step was crucial. Leases and eviction notices are legal documents written by and for legal professionals. The documents themselves are not meant to be understood by laypeople, to say nothing of navigating the court that governs them. Many mistakenly think that housing court exists to facilitate dialogue or to work out misunderstandings and amicably resolve housing issues. In reality, it’s the site of a legal battle just like any other court. Unfortunately, one side often shows up unprepared due to the structural and functional realities of housing court (you can probably guess which side that is).
These structural imbalances often lead to tenants losing their homes even when they have a legal right to remain. The problem isn’t that they don’t have a case; the problem is that they can’t afford to hire representation. When one side is represented and another isn’t, the side with representation wins. It’s as simple as that.
Housing advocates across the country have realized that guaranteeing representation for tenants would help to correct this enormous imbalance of power and would, ultimately keep people housed. From that realization, the Tenant Right to Counsel movement was born.
What is Tenant Right to Counsel? ⚖️
A lot of policies fall under the Tenant Right to Counsel umbrella, but all of them have the same basic goal: guaranteed representation for tenants in housing court.
You might be saying “Wait! Aren’t you already guaranteed counsel by the sixth amendment?” And to that, I might say “No! That only applies to criminal court, housing issues are handled in civil court!” followed shortly by “I know you had to look that up, there’s no way you had the sixth amendment memorized.”
So criminal and civil matters are handled in different courts. This is part of the reason why divorces cost so much money; you have to pay your divorce lawyer to help you divide your assets. And, unfortunately for everyone who doesn’t have thousands in disposable income to spend on lawyers, housing (and immigration court and family court) falls on the wrong side of the criminal/civil demarcation. Put simply, you only get a lawyer in housing court if you can afford one.
This is bad! There are plenty of reasons why, but most of those reasons can be reduced to these basic themes:
Landlords can afford lawyers while tenants can’t.
Tenants often lose their homes because they don’t know how to navigate housing court, regardless of their case’s merits.
Displacement is bad for society and makes housing less affordable for everyone.
We won’t get into points one and two in this post, but stay tuned for more in-depth discussions of both in future newsletters. Point number three is the one I want to spend some more time on, specifically how evictions hurt individuals and communities (we’ll get into affordability in my next newsletter).
How evictions hurt everyone
It’s easy enough to understand that losing your home will fuck your life up. Plenty reading this have been in a situation where you were threatened, explicitly or implicitly, with some form of housing instability. It’s scary and stressful and it sucks, and every poor or formerly poor person knows it. What we often don’t realize, though, is just how much this stress impacts us.
Ontological security is the sense that the stability of the world can be taken for granted. It is the emotional foundation that allows us to feel at ease in our environment and at home in our housing.1
This is part of why recessions, poverty, and housing instability — things that impact our ability to trust there will be a tomorrow — are so harmful. Ontological security creates an important foundation for stability, agency, and overall health.
A review from Social Science & Medicine found an association between “exposure to eviction threat” and overwhelmingly negative health outcomes2, while a policy brief in Health Affairs details the ways that being evicted will eventually kill you3 (and I intend to revisit this in the future, so stay tuned if this is something that interests you). Both of these pieces show that eviction and housing instability are key determinants of individual health and influence everything from mental well-being to addiction and even death. By the way, feel free to use this the next time some idiot tells you that homelessness is because of drug use; housing instability actually leads to addiction, not the other way around.
What’s worse, all of these effects compound when you look at the big-picture costs of displacement. You can even run your own experiment using a nifty tool called the Cost of Evictions calculator from the University of Arizona’s Innovation for Justice program. When we ran the numbers for Portland, we found the downstream effects of evictions cost about $83 million.
So shouldn’t we try to prevent evictions?
Yes, we should. Think about what your local government could do with $83 million. Think about every pothole you’ve hit recently and every school in desperate need of repair. The money to fix it is there, or easily could be, but crumbling infrastructure is considered less of a problem than even the mildest housing policy reform. It’s not like we’re talking about free and universal public housing here, all Tenant Right to Counsel does is ensure no one is losing their home when they legally shouldn’t. So what gives? Why maintain the current system even if it costs a ton of money and literally kills poor people, Black women especially?4
The answer is, as always, because there’s money to be made. It’s just that you’re not the one making it.
And that tantalizing note is where I’ll leave you for this week. Like I said above, look out for part two of this series on Tenant Right to Counsel, where we’ll get into the systemic and financial motivations for the eviction crisis, and how Tenant Right to Counsel can help mitigate them.
Thank you all once again for being here and I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Talk to you again soon!
We’re currently working on a Tenant Right to Counsel campaign in Portland, Oregon at the county level. It’s a grassroots ballot campaign, almost entirely volunteer-powered (except for our elections attorney and some paid signature gatherers). You can learn more about the campaign here: Eviction Representation for All!
In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis by David J. Madden and Peter Marcuse, pg. 68
The threat of home eviction and its effects on health through the equity lens: A systematic review by HugoVásquez-Vera et al.
Eviction And Health: A Vicious Cycle Exacerbated By A Pandemic by Gracie Himmelstein and Matthew Desmond
New Report Illustrates How Right to Counsel Prevents Evictions and their Discriminatory Impacts on Communities by Liel Sterling and Maria Roumiantseva