Most of Providence Mayor Jorge O. Elorza’s peers at Harvard Law School weren’t interested in eviction defense work.
The pay was low. Elorza, who worked in legal aid after graduating law school and later became a housing court judge, made $30,000 a year at his first job. And jobs were scarce, due in part to a lack of federal funding for the pro bono services.
“When you are in law school, you get recruited, wined and dined by fancy law firms,” Elorza said. “Eviction defense is a much less-popular path.”
Not anymore. Housing law is gaining attention and appeal thanks to an influx of government aid and new attention on the importance of legal representation for low-income tenants facing eviction.
That includes Rhode Island, where Providence recently gave another $600,000 to an Eviction Help Desk program that started in Sixth District Court last year. The funding, through the city’s American Rescue Plan Act dollars, pays for legal aid attorneys to show up at the Garrahy Judicial Complex every morning to answer eviction-related questions and offer last-minute representation to low-income tenants.
The extra funding is more critical now because the state’s rental assistance program has ended. Even before RentReliefRI stopped issuing payments to eligible renters and landlords on Sept. 30, attorneys noticed eviction cases starting to creep up.
“We are already feeling it, with what we are seeing in the number of folks reaching out,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice, which is partnering with Rhode Island Legal Services to staff the help desk.
In 2019, there were more than 27,100 eviction filings recorded in state courts. That was slashed nearly in half, to 16,200 cases, in 2020, and further reduced to 15,900 in 2021, according to information from the R.I. Supreme Court.
Now that the pandemic eviction moratorium has ended and rent relief has run out, Steven Flores, director of the housing law center for Rhode Island Legal Services, expects filings will return to pre-pandemic levels. Skyrocketing rent and a tight housing market will make it harder for people to pay their rent, Flores says.
On a recent Wednesday morning, a middle-aged woman, who declined to be interviewed, cried silently, her tears lost amid the hubbub unfolding in the third-floor hallway of the Garrahy Judicial Complex. Around her, clusters of worried-looking defendants whispered in urgent, hushed tones while lawyers rifled through stacks of file folders, searching for answers to their questions.
The frantic scramble stands in stark contrast to the attorney representing the landlords, who scrolls on his cellphone while he waits for hearings to start. Landlords almost always have lawyers in eviction cases, while tenants rarely do, which increases “exponentially” the chances of a tenant losing their home, Elorza said.
On a busy day, there might be more than two dozen cases scheduled for hearings. And the pair of attorneys behind the plexiglass-paneled help desk is not always enough to help everyone, Flores says.
Many of the tenants who come to the help desk have little to no paperwork and don’t understand the chain of events that led them there. Add in raw emotions, and it can make it difficult for the attorneys to extract the facts needed to plead the case.
Sensitivity to the crisis that people are experiencing is just as important as legal knowledge and courtroom experience, says Suzanne Harrington-Steppen, associate director of pro bono programs and director of the summer public interest externship program at the Roger Williams University School of Law.
“It’s not social work; it’s not fluff; it’s an essential piece of creating rapport with your client,” she said. “If you cannot connect to clients in that five minutes in a hallway, you can’t get the facts and you can’t do your job as a lawyer.”
The help desk gave students a chance to learn that skill firsthand while fulfilling their mandatory pro-bono hours. For some, it’s sparked an interest in eviction defense as a career, Harrington-Steppen says.
And unlike when Elorza and Harrington-Steppen were in law school, the funding and focus on legal aid for tenants means there are expected to be a lot more jobs to go around.
“There is a huge right-to-counsel movement in the U.S. right now for eviction, which is seen as the next civil rights type of work,” Harrington-Steppen said. “When you have a right-to-counsel movement, you need a lot of attorneys.”
The Providence ARPA funding will allow the help desk to continue at the District Court until fall 2023. But as the national right-to-counsel movement gains traction, Wood is hoping for more money to make the Providence program permanent and expand it statewide.
This means they likely will need more eviction defense attorneys, although she’s not sure how many.
“We are not staffed at the number we need to be,” Wood said. “I think there is going to be a big pipeline issue nationally.”
