A few minutes before the July 15 trial to determine if Stephanie Morgan and her son would be evicted from their apartment, she sat hunched over a waiting room table at the Multnomah County Courthouse, poring over several stacks of paper.
“I feel good about this, but it’s still scary,” Morgan said. “I know that you should have an attorney.”
Morgan said several lawyers she spoke with told her they would not be able to make any money from her case. One lawyer told her they had requested to be taken off the Oregon State Bar’s lawyer referral service list months ago and couldn’t help her.
Despite the often life-altering consequences of eviction proceedings, tenants secured legal representation in just 3% of the nearly 6000 eviction cases filed in Multnomah County in 2019. Attorneys say the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the issue more severe — so severe the city of Portland is hoping to turbocharge its pilot program to ensure counsel is available for tenants facing eviction.
After losing her case, Morgan said she is going through the appeals process because she and her son have nowhere else to go.
“I would rather live in a car than this apartment complex,” Morgan said. “But that car, which my son and I were living in for about three years, broke down in January 2019 and I found a junkyard that would pay me $150 to tow it.”
Even if Morgan could afford a lawyer, the quickly shifting legal landscape for landlords and tenants in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has strained the limited capacity for those without means to access legal services.
Kateri Walsh, communications director at the Oregon State Bar, confirmed virtually all landlord-tenant lawyers have dropped out of the service because they cannot take on any more clients.
“That has left us in a bit of a crisis situation because we are finding ourselves unable to find lawyers to help a lot of the people that call,” Walsh said.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Oregon poised for eviction crisis when rent comes due July 1
In June, the Rental Services Commission, Portland’s primary housing law and regulatory advisory body, urged city leaders to establish a “Universal Eviction Defense Program” to guarantee all tenants facing eviction the right to an attorney.
The Portland City Council will vote to allocate approximately $63.5 million in federal relief funds from the American Rescue Plan Act on Wednesday. If approved, some of that funding could be used to bolster a $440,000 Right to Counsel Program currently in development by the Portland Housing Bureau.
The program would guarantee income-eligible households who face eviction or termination of their tenancy or housing subsidy are able to retain representation.
The landmark 1963 case Gideon v. Wainwright established the commonly understood right to legal representation in criminal cases, but that right doesn’t extend to civil cases where the stakes can be just as high.
A 2019 Oregon Department of Justice study of unmet legal needs found 84% of low-income Oregonians who couldn’t afford legal assistance “did not receive legal help of any kind.”
As tenants navigated approximately 18,000 residential eviction cases that year, over 97% had no lawyer.
Several cities across the country are moving to address gaps in legal representation, including Philadelphia, New York, Denver and Charlottesville, Virginia. In April 2021, Washington became the first state to ensure free access to public attorneys for those who receive public assistance or meet income requirements.
John Pollock, Coordinator for the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, said he considers the right to counsel “preventative legal medicine.”
“Society is going to pay for those things one way or the other,” Pollock said, “They can either pay on the front end to avoid them, or they can pay on the back and pay a lot more to deal with the consequences.”
A recent Portland State University study found Oregon will need to spend anywhere from $720 million to $4.7 billion if the 125,000 Oregonians who had little to no confidence in their ability to afford rent in July are evicted.
Matthew Tschabold, policy and planning manager with the Portland Housing Bureau, said a final decision on which organization will administer the city’s eviction defense program is still pending.
There is also potential to coordinate with Multnomah County and incorporate landlord-tenant mediation and financial assistance mechanisms currently being piloted separately on a small scale. Preliminary Portland Housing Bureau estimates indicate 1500 households would receive initial intake and assessment services. Of those pre-screened households, 800-900 ultimately end up receiving legal representation for their cases prior to the program’s contract expiration in June 2022.
“Commissioner (Dan) Ryan worked with Portland Housing Bureau Director Shannon Callahan on the ARPA proposals, is passionate about legal representation for low-income tenants facing eviction, and intends to support appropriating ARPA funds to eviction defense when it comes before Council,” Margaux Weeke, Ryan’s spokesperson, said in a July 22 email to Street Roots.
Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office expressed support for the program in a statement emailed to Street Roots. However, subsequent requests for Wheeler’s office to attach a name to the statement were unanswered by Tim Becker, Wheeler’s public information officer.
The offices of Commissioners Joanne Hardesty, Mingus Mapps and Carmen Rubio did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.
Included alongside the recommendation for a Universal Eviction Defense Program, the Rental Services Commission also urged City Council to create a program providing low-income landlords access to free legal services.
“Thousands of landlords are ‘mom and pop’ entities who own one or two rental properties while working full-time jobs or relying on the rent income for basic life needs or retirement,” said Ron Garcia, Executive Director of Rental Housing Alliance Oregon. “They do not have the luxury of being able to pay $300 an hour for legal advice.”
Garcia and other representatives of landlords say the last thing they want is to evict their tenants or go to court — they just want to get the rent paid.
Mirroring a national trend, Oregon has struggled to expand its capacity for distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in rental assistance payments.
According to Oregon Housing and Community Services, 21,960 households have applied for just under $123 million in rental assistance as of July 23.
So far, 1,245 households have been approved for payment, and approximately $3.5 million has been paid — though OHCS notes the latter figure is a slight undercount.
A second program, the Landlord Compensation Fund, has paid out just over $37 million of $118 million requested as of mid-July, according to OHCS spokesperson Connor McDonnell.
Even if a tenant is not approved for a rental assistance application, applying and notifying the property owner will stave off eviction for 90 days in Portland and 30 days elsewhere in the state.
“Instead of a cliff, we’ve kind of got a ramp now,” said Vivien Lyon, an attorney and tenant advocate who sits on the Rental Services Commission. “But it is all leading back to a similar place.”
That place, Lyon explained, is a status quo where most landlords have representation in court, and most tenants do not.
“And I think that the fear that many people experience, both tenants and tenant advocates, people who can see the looming crisis — what it has made us all realize is that we can no longer beat around the bush with regard to tenant defense of evictions especially. It is ludicrous that over half of Portlanders are renters and yet there is no systematic means for them to acquire legal representation.”