On September 16, the Tulsa City Council unanimously passed a resolution to develop a program that would provide legal representation to low-income tenants and landlords who are navigating the eviction process without legal assistance.
The resolution, proposed by Councilor Laura Bellis, would address Tulsa’s high eviction rates and growing homelessness problem and, with continued support, would help Tulsa join a growing coalition of right-to-counsel programs across the United States. Attorneys, advocates and a local Tulsa landlord said the program would help all parties involved and has proven successful elsewhere.
Twenty-one cities, two counties, and five states have implemented a right-to-counsel program in some form, and all have lowered eviction rates, according to data from the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.
The Resolution
While the resolution passed unanimously at the city council meeting, it still had detractors. Hours before the regular meeting, the resolution was the subject of a lengthy council budget and special projects meeting, where the proposal was changed to be more palatable to some council members who were not fully in agreement.
Councilor Carol Bush said she had received calls from large corporate landlords and small mom-and-pop landlords concerned about the resolution.
Bellis said that in her conversations with landlords, many said that legal representation often lengthens the process, costs more and only delays the inevitable. She countered that the upside is that all parties will be at the table to help structure the program, adding that it will also support low-income landlords.
“Through this we can make sure your voice is at that table, too,” Bellis said.
The program is funded through a public-private partnership, with stricter guidelines on how public money can be used. City funds will be used for landlords and tenants with extenuating circumstances such as a medical event, disaster or similar hardship, as well as tenants facing substandard housing conditions.
“The intention for representation is to resolve genuine hardships like these, not solely a resident’s inability to pay,” the resolution reads.
Bellis said the goal of these guidelines was to ensure the city council was a good steward of public funds. She added that private money could broaden the program to meet other needs.
Eric Hallett, an attorney with Legal Aid Services Oklahoma, said he’s concerned about whether the program's qualifications will be the same for landlords and tenants.
“If a landlord is as poor as our tenants are, they aren’t likely going to have property that they’re renting out,” Hallett said.
Hallett is one of the few attorneys representing tenants facing eviction in Tulsa, and Legal Aid Services Oklahoma is the only nonprofit legal representation organization that is consistently representing tenants in the city.
Hallett said filing an eviction is cheap and easy for landlords, and part of his job is to hold their feet to the fire and make the process less easy to ensure balance between the parties.
In Oklahoma, it can cost as little as $58 to file an eviction, and the state has one of the fastest timelines in the country.
“We know that an increased cost of eviction lowers eviction filings and increased processes and timelines lower eviction numbers,” Hallett said. “We have to be attacking that business practice by representing as many of those tenants as we can.”
Public Comments
At the regular meeting, the public comments for the program were positive.
Ana Barros, the collaboration and partnerships director for ImpactTulsa, said during public comments that she fully supported the resolution, adding that through ImpactTulsa she works to improve student results by addressing problems such as the effects of eviction on children.
Barros cited Oklahoma’s eviction timeline as a reason Tulsa needs the program. She acknowledged that the council can't address the timeline, but said the program will bring equality by giving both tenants and landlords legal representation.
Susan Nichols, a local landlord with an estimated 15 residential spaces, said that she sees a desperate need for the program.
Nichols has worked in eviction prevention.
“Legal anything is very scary, very confusing and so overwhelming,” Nichols told Oklahoma Watch after the council meeting. “When you’re at risk of losing your housing, it’s just such a terrible moment.”
Oklahoma Evictions
While the resolution aims to address Tulsa’s eviction rates, advocates said the program could be a model for other cities in Oklahoma or possibly the state itself.
“We’ve learned from neighboring cities who have explored the critical role that tenant representation can play in mitigating the damage that eviction causes to communities,” said Katie Dilks, Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation’s executive director. “I’m very excited to see the city take this step and really set an example for the state of Oklahoma and for our other cities across the state.”
From the start of the year through June, 22,176 evictions were filed in Oklahoma. That is a small drop from the same period last year, when 23,431 evictions were filed.
Evictions often stem from a lack of affordable housing options, a problem both local and federal policymakers are combating. Proponents argue that right-to-counsel is an effective form of eviction prevention with tangible results.
Right to Counsel
Right-to-counsel programs vary in scope and scale across the country, but the goal is to ensure both parties in a civil proceeding like eviction court are equally represented.
“We have complicated legal language that is baked into a lot of these systems and processes,” Dilks said. “So ensuring that both sides have someone who can walk them through what the law means is really critical to making sure that one side simply doesn’t get lost in the overwhelming nature of the legal system.”
Only 4% of tenants nationally are represented in eviction proceedings, compared to 84% of landlords nationally who have representation, according to data from the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.
"Everything is potentially implicated if someone loses their housing."John Pollock, coordinator, National Coalition for a Civil Right to CounselJohn Pollock, the coordinator for the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, said solutions for evictions need to start with asking what’s at stake.
“And the better question is to ask what’s not at stake?” Pollock said. “Because everything is potentially implicated if someone loses their housing.”
Pollock said he calls eviction the shatter point, making the analogy that if one were to punch a piece of glass and watch the radiating cracks splinter out from the impact, that would be how eviction can affect someone’s life.
Stout, a financial analysis company, produced several detailed tenant right-to-counsel reports that consistently estimate a tenant program leads to more than 90% of tenants avoiding disruptive displacement.
Pollock argued that, because of the potential for disruptive displacement, landlords still hold an advantage over tenants in eviction proceedings.
Dilks argued the same thing and said that landlords have often been through eviction proceedings before, whereas tenants may not be as familiar, and without representation, there’s a power imbalance.
“I would say that even when landlords aren’t represented, the parties are still not equal,” Pollock said. “They’re not facing the loss of everything in the same way that the tenant is, so they’re not under the same stress and agony that the tenant is.”
This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.