The Fight Against Homelessness Starts With Lawyers

What you can do to fight homelessness.

David Lash

David Lash

Ed. note: Please welcome David Lash to Above the Law. Lash is Managing Counsel for Pro Bono and Public Interest Services at O’Melveny & Myers LLP and he’ll be writing a bi-weekly about public interest legal issues.

Never before has the issue of homelessness, and the plight of the homeless, received such attention. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has presented a program to help alleviate a state-wide homelessness crisis. In Los Angeles, where the number of homeless families has been largely an unspoken nightmare, both the City and the County have published reports and have focused on what officials believe need to be done. Funding proposals are being debated, the media is covering the newly heightened discourse, and those who live in the shadows, and on the streets, may have a chance for something more. For the legal community, this presents a chance to ensure a critical moment does not pass.

If we accept the premise that society cannot, or will not, simply build our way out of a crisis of homelessness, the role of lawyers in affecting the lives of those most impacted must not be overlooked. As is often found to be true, however, the role of lawyers in impacting important social moments largely is forgotten, misunderstood, or not understood at all. But now is our chance to highlight the little recognized but demonstrably unique and critical role that lawyers historically have played in the fight against poverty and show the community the results that only attorneys can bring.

In his book Evicted (affiliate link), Matthew Desmond pulls back the curtain on an otherwise ignored or undiscovered truth, that an epidemic of housing evictions is destroying lives, communities, and hopes. While homelessness can be the result of an amalgam of factors, the precipitating event almost always is an eviction from a home. Desmond spent months living among those on the precipice of eviction in low-income neighborhoods of Milwaukee, an American Every-City. The stories are startling, the families so real and in such pain, and the eviction process so destructive and difficult.

Desmond’s work illustrates that when a family is evicted from a house or apartment an avalanche of unforeseen consequences almost always results. The family’s physical health will decline, children’s performance in school will deteriorate, mental health problems will arise, jobs will be lost, friendships and relationships will be destroyed, support systems will disappear. In short, a downward spiral of dire, inevitable after-shocks will continue to plague the evicted. Additionally, the economic costs to local communities are immense. The ensuing deterioration of neighborhoods, the loss of property values, the undermining of the tax base, the police costs, the emergency room expenditures, the direct loss of employment that often results, the added welfare and benefits costs, all contribute to cascading, wide-spread despair.

At the close of his book, Desmond rues the lack of funding for legal aid for the poor, counting it as one more bad policy decision that has a deleterious effect on so many lives in so many ways. But what he does not explain is the extent to which lawyers, using the justice system, can be warriors in the battle against poverty. As can no one else, legal aid agencies and the lawyers who both work for them and volunteer for them, can avoid or help remediate many of these domino tragedies.

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Attorneys can help in a variety of ways by taking steps and doing things that others simply are incapable of achieving. First, tenants need free representation in order to protect themselves from evictions that are unjust. Studies have shown that unrepresented tenants in housing court will virtually always be unsuccessful when forced to defend against eviction proceedings brought either by experienced landlords or attorneys representing landlords. Without an attorney, regardless of the merits of the case, the tenant is destined to lose, the eviction is inevitable. Lawyers can launch successful defenses, negotiate for fair termination agreements, and stave off the most immediate, harmful effects of eviction proceedings. Most of all the simple act of representation will stop overbearing property owners from bulldozing their way to possession. By just being present, lawyers stave off homelessness every day. By representing tenants on the brink of eviction, lawyers do more for homelessness prevention than just about anyone else.

Second, lawyers can bring affirmative lawsuits that will enforce building, safety and health standards, ensuring that affordable housing stock remains habitable, protecting the health of children living in dilapidated premises, safeguarding the well-being of all tenants, and preserving housing that might otherwise be lost. Since most cities cannot afford the massive cost of construction needed to create sufficient affordable, low-cost housing, being able to save existing housing, turning slums into homes, is a critical factor in solving these community-impacting dilemmas.

Third, legal aid attorneys are expert at navigating the complex regulatory world of public benefits. They can represent low-income tenants to make sure those who are eligible for income and health care support get what the law entitles them to receive and ensures that money for rent will be available every month. That alone will protect against evictions for many.

And the beauty of the legal aid system is that the organizations leverage their resources through the use of private practitioner pro bono volunteers. A skilled legal services staff attorney can train, mentor and supervise a number of volunteers, enabling her expertise to help perhaps 30 clients instead of just the ten she might be able to represent herself. Every dollar invested in legal services can return as much as $10 in services. It is an investment worth making, one that surely would be more readily and widely supported if only it was better understood.

Finally, perhaps the most untapped, and potentially effective, aspect of pro bono assistance is the ability of well-regarded, well-networked law firms to speak for society’s others. Government officials and legislators hear plaintive calls for funding and support from the legal aid community on a regular basis. But they don’t hear it from private practitioners, monied community members whose support is vital for election and re-election purposes. Hearing from powerful, not-the-usual voices can be very influential. Such important political donors and community forces can explain the leverage that investment will bring when dollars are spent on legal aid. They can speak about their own pro bono clients whose lives have been saved by being able to access the judicial branch of our democracy. Their voices of influence, used sparingly but effectively, bring attention and gravitas that the usual voices cannot replicate.

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Where those voices are most needed are in the halls of Congress. One of the most substantively effective and cost effective ways to combat homelessness is the Section 8 voucher program. Under the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, vouchers pay the rent for eligible low-income tenants. Section 8 vouchers are invaluable, tenants will do whatever they must to preserve that benefit. Desmond explains in Evicted the powerful impact of vouchers as a problem-solving mechanism. Vouchers ensure that landlords are paid. They do not have to worry whether a low-income tenant will be able to afford that month’s rent because the rent is duly paid every month. But the program is closed, there are no more vouchers to be had. In Los Angeles, for instance, the wait list is years long. In some communities, it takes years to even get on those years-long waitlists. Every day Section 8 vouchers keep families housed, meaning they also keep families healthy, clothed, fed and hopeful. The program is expensive but the cost of not expanding it is even more expensive.

As Desmond explains, a renewed commitment to housing vouchers is a better alternative to fighting homelessness than are building programs. Dollars go much further. When federal support is poured into Section 8, the return on those funds is substantial. Legal aid lawyers can do more, police have to do less, the health care delivery system is freed up, schools improve, and lives are saved.

When lawyers preserve the housing stock, ensure that vouchers are not lost, prevent unjust evictions, require uplifting of substandard housing, and help tenants secure and keep the benefits to which they are entitled, our communities, like proverbial boats, rise together.

If this is a moment that must be seized, with homelessness prevention and programming in governmental headlights, finally, then it is the perfect opportunity for the legal community to do what only it can do. Lawyers, law students, and law firms, let’s step-up. Defend an eviction, represent tenants in a habitability case, help the poor get and retain their public benefits and, most of all, raise your voices, let our officials know what we know they can do, bring more housing to more people, expand the availability of housing vouchers. If we don’t do it, no one else can.


David A. Lash serves as Managing Counsel for Pro Bono and Public Interest Services at O’Melveny & Myers LLP. He can be reached at dlash@omm.com. The opinions expressed are his alone.