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Episode 34: Right to Eviction Counsel with Ingrid Gould Ellen

Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O'Regan, Sophia House, and Ryan Brenner, Do Lawyers Matter? Early Evidence on Eviction Patterns After the Rollout of Universal Access to Counsel in New York City

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Episode Summary: When eviction cases go to court, it’s typical for more than 90% of landlords to have legal representation, but less than 10% of tenants. This puts tenants at a considerable disadvantage, and helps to explain why few renters win their eviction cases; many don’t bother showing up for court hearings at all. Advocates argue that providing free legal representation to tenants — a policy known as “right to counsel” or “universal access to counsel” — would reduce evictions, but there have been few opportunities to study it in an experimental setting. Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU joins us to talk about the impacts of the policy in New York City, the first U.S. city to adopt a right to counsel, starting with 10 ZIP codes in 2017 and expanding in subsequent years. We learn how the program has affected eviction filings, the share of tenants who receive legal representation, and the number of evictions executed by the court, and we discuss the wider context of housing instability and eviction — including the limitations and harder-to-measure benefits of a lawyer-based eviction reduction strategy.

  • “Advocates have argued that representation is necessary both to provide due process to tenants facing eviction and to enforce tenants’ statutory and common-law rights, such as the right to a habitable dwelling, which find redress primarily through the court system. Proponents have also suggested that access to counsel will reduce the incidence of evictions and decrease levels of homelessness. Jurisdictions have thus begun to channel significant resources into programs designed to increase representation in eviction proceedings. Research, however, has yet to evaluate these claims rigorously. We aim to address this gap by examining the effectiveness of legal representation in preventing evictions in the private rental market.”

 

  • “Tenants’ advocates have argued strenuously that access to counsel helps tenants to avoid eviction [as recently as 2013, only 1% of tenants in housing court were represented by lawyers, compared with 95% of landlords]. Pro se (or self-represented) litigants face several disadvantages in court. The procedural rules of housing court are by “nature and design…such that nonprofessionals would find them difficult to maneuver” (Tyler & Zimerman, 2010, p. 497). Even if a pro se litigant overcomes the procedural hurdles or is able to receive brief advice from a legal services provider, they nevertheless lack the strategic insights of experienced litigators. They thus face challenges in meeting evidentiary requirements, presenting the full range of facts essential to certain legal claims, and utilizing all available defenses (Baldacci, 2006). The volume of cases in housing court may also cause judges to try to move through their dockets quickly at the expense of pro se litigants navigating an unfamiliar system (Bezdek, 1992).”

 

  • “Lawyers can do a great deal to help tenants stay in their homes, by challenging procedural defects in eviction proceedings, asserting relevant counterclaims, and negotiating with landlords’ attorneys over rent abatements and repayment of arrears. In some cases, however, the effectiveness of representation will be limited. Housing attorneys can do little to change the long-term affordability of tenants’ apartments and may have few resources to assist with the multifaceted challenges tenants face in other spheres of their lives. In some cases, reaching tenants in housing court may simply be too late. Legal representation may not, therefore, significantly improve outcomes for some tenants without access to additional social services or housing subsidies. Alternatively, some tenants may have such strong cases that the presence of counsel is unnecessary to avoid eviction. Finally, landlords argue that increasing tenant representation will simply prolong eviction proceedings and burden owners with nonpaying tenants for longer periods of time, ultimately increasing the cost of housing in the city and undermining the benefits of UAC.”

 

  • “The evidence from which to evaluate the marginal benefit of representation in preventing eviction is scant. The best evidence comes from three studies that involved random assignment. Importantly, however, in each of the three studies, attorneys selected the cases in which they believed their assistance would be likely to prevent eviction … Seron, Frankel, Ryzin, and Kovath (2001) studied eviction cases in Manhattan in 1993 and 1994, and found that an offer of representation led to statistically significant reductions in warrants of evictions issued at the end of cases. Tenants who were offered representation were less likely to default or fail to appear in court (15.8% vs. 28.2% for the control group); less likely to have a final judgment against them (31.8% vs. 52.0%); and less likely to have a warrant of eviction issued (24.1% vs. 43.5%) … Greiner et al. (2013) studied tenants in one Massachusetts court in 2011 and found that 66% of tenants offered full representation retained possession of their units at the conclusion of the legal proceeding, compared with 38% of the control group (those offered only limited representation, such as advice and consultation). A warrant of eviction was issued in only 12% of the cases of those offered representation, compared with 60% of those in the control group. However, an earlier study by Greiner et al. (2012) conducted in a different Massachusetts court found no statistically significant differences between case outcomes for those offered full representation and those offered limited representation, suggesting that further research is needed to understand how and at what levels representation is effective in preventing evictions.”

 

  • “All in all, the de Blasio administration significantly expanded resources for civil legal services for tenants across the city, starting in Fiscal Year (FY) 2015, which was the first year that the mayor’s budgetary priorities were funded. Figure 2 shows the increase in funding for legal services (including, but not limited to, legal services for tenants) that began in FY2015 (NYC Office of Civil Justice, 2019a). In FY2018, the de Blasio administration committed $41 million for anti-eviction legal services, $35.7 million for anti-harassment services (NYC Office of Civil Justice, 2017), and $15 million to the first phase of universal access implementation (NYC Office of Civil Justice, 2018). New York City projects that it will spend $166 million annually on UAC once it is fully implemented (NYC Human Resources Administration, 2019).”

 

  • “UAC began with the introduction of the Expanded Legal Services (ELS) pilot program in 10 ZIP Codes in early 2016. Through ELS, the city provided universal legal representation in eviction cases for individuals living in those 10 ZIP Codes with household incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty line (NYC Office of Civil Justice, 2016). The ELS ZIP Codes were selected (in part) based on rates of shelter entry (NYC Office of Civil Justice, 2016) … In July 2017, the City Council passed an amended bill establishing UAC in housing court. In August 2017, Mayor de Blasio signed the bill, making New York City the first U.S. jurisdiction to enact legislation guaranteeing free legal representation to all income-qualified tenants facing eviction in housing court. The law provides that, subject to appropriation, all New York City tenants with household incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty line will be given access to free legal counsel in eviction cases “no later than July 31 2022.””

 

  • “Identifying how access to counsel affects eviction rates and trends in the private rental market from observational studies is challenging, given that tenants with representation tend to differ from those without it in unobserved ways. We use an event-study approach that exploits the sequential rollout of the program across ZIP Codes over time. That is, we compare changes in a set of eviction-related outcomes for ZIP Codes pre- and post-UAC treatment with changes in similar ZIP Codes that have been selected to be treated but have not yet received those services. As a benchmark, we also observe trends in other ZIP Codes in the city that will receive UAC by 2022, to control for secular trends and the availability of tenant services citywide … Specifically, we compare eviction patterns across four cohorts of ZIP Codes: the 10 ZIP Codes that began receiving treatment at the start of 2016 (through ELS) and continued to receive treatment through UAC from 2017 onward (UAC1A); the five ZIP Codes that received UAC starting in October of 2017 (UAC1B); the five ZIP Codes that entered the program in November of 2018 (UAC2); and, finally, the five ZIP Codes that entered the program in December of 2019, for which we have no post-UAC data (UAC3). We exploit the variation in timing of adoption to measure impacts.”

 

  • “In terms of outcomes, we start by simply testing for an increase in representation among tenants after the implementation of UAC in their ZIP Code of residence. We look at the share with representation among any tenants receiving an eviction notice and look for increases at the time of implementation. We also examine whether tenants are more likely to go to court in response to a complaint … We then examine the warrant execution rate, which is the outcome with the most significant effects on individual tenants’ lives. Specifically, it captures the share of cases filed in a given year that ultimately resulted in an eviction before the end of our time period. Access to counsel should presumably reduce this proportion. We consider all cases in total, as well as nonpayment and holdover cases separately, as any effects of access to counsel may vary by type of case.”

 

  • “Overall, the volume of eviction filings decreased during our study period across New York City (see Figure 3). Filings from non-NYCHA rental units peaked in 2011, at 200,809. By the end of the study period in 2019, filings had decreased by about a third, to 139,614. (Some of the decline between 2018 and 2019 could be due to incomplete data in the final quarter of 2019; for the analyses below, we thus restrict the sample to filings through the third quarter of 2019.) Nonpayment cases make up the vast majority of filings, although they decreased at a faster rate than holdover cases: the share of filings that were for nonpayment fell from 88% in 2010 to 82% in 2019. Note that the Bronx is a clear outlier from this otherwise city-wide trend, with a much higher filing rate and an increase in the number of filings during the same time period (NYU Furman Center, 2019).”

 

  • “What really sets these ZIP Codes apart from the rest of the city is their greater activity in housing court. Whereas the rest of the city had a filing rate of 7.87 filings per 100 private rental units in 2014, the UAC ZIP Code cohorts had filing rates twice this high, ranging from 13.12 to 18.44 filings per 100 private rental units. However, before these programs were rolled out, tenant representation rates were universally low across the city: tenants were represented in less than 1% of cases in all of the UAC cohorts as well as in the rest of the city. Given the large gap in filing rates and other observed (and potentially unobserved) differences between these initial ZIP Codes chosen for UAC and others in the city, we believe the most rigorous impact estimates come from comparisons among these initial UAC ZIP Codes.”

 

  • “Our first key question is whether UAC actually increased tenant representation in housing court. Even when access to counsel is offered, several factors may affect tenants’ actual take-up of representation … Figure 5 presents representation rates as a share of all eviction filings for our study time period. It shows a citywide increase in representation in UAC and non-UAC ZIP Codes alike, starting in 2015 and continuing through 2017. But the figure also shows a larger increase in representation for tenants living in the ZIP Codes where UAC was rolled out … Thus, whereas we see a citywide increase in tenant representation between 2014 and 2017 from around 1% to 10%, we see significantly larger jumps in legal representation for tenants living in the ZIP Codes where UAC has been implemented that correspond with the timing of the UAC rollout in those ZIP Codes. By 2019, roughly 28% of tenants with eviction cases filed against them were represented in the ZIP Codes where UAC was introduced in 2016. UAC, in other words, has succeeded in providing legal representation to tenants in housing court.”

 

  • “Figure 6 shows that the share of tenants answering eviction filings, or coming to court to contest them, rose substantially during this period. But it rose across the board, not just in UAC ZIP Codes. In non-UAC ZIP Codes, answer rates rose from about 20% to 40%; only the UAC2 ZIP Codes saw a larger increase, from about 20% to 45%. Thus, there is little indication that the rollout of UAC increased the share of tenants responding to eviction filings, although perhaps the outreach and publicity surrounding UAC spilled over to other ZIP Codes.”

 

  • “UAC aims most directly at reducing the warrant execution rate, or the share of eviction filings that result in an actual eviction. Unfortunately, because evictions are often executed 2 or more years after a filing, we can only observe true impacts for the group of ZIP Codes where UAC was started in 2016, since we can be confident that our execution rate is accurate only for filings through 2017. This also limits our ability to establish UAC as causing a decline in executed evictions. That said, Figure 7 suggests a clear downward trend in the warrant execution rate for filings in the initial UAC ZIP Codes compared with those in the rest of the city. In these ZIP Codes, the warrant execution rate fell from 10.4% in 2015 to 8.8% in 2017. Whereas this is small in absolute terms, this 1.6-percentage-point decline is the equivalent of about 300 fewer evictions and, if applied to all filings, would equal more than 2,000 fewer evictions citywide. In ZIP Codes where UAC has yet to be rolled out, by contrast, we saw a slight increase between 2015 and 2017, from 9.2% to 9.8%, whereas the ZIP Codes where UAC was adopted between 2017 and 2019 saw a slight decrease, from 8.3% to 8.0%  … When broken out by nonpayment and holdover (see the Appendix), we observe both a decrease in warrant execution rates for the treated ZIP Codes in the year after UAC adoption and little change in the comparison ZIP Codes. The magnitude of the decline is notably larger for holdover cases, however.”

 

  • “As shown in the bottom panel of Table A1, the 2015–2017 decline in eviction rates in the initial UAC ZIP Codes is significantly larger than that for the rest of the city, even after controlling for poverty and racial composition (Model 1). It is also significantly different (at a 10% level) from the trend in the ZIP Codes where UAC was adopted between 2017 and 2019 (omitted category), even after controlling for prior trends in eviction (Model 3).”

 

  • “It is possible that the impacts we see for the initial cohort of UAC ZIP Codes are driven in part by lawyers lengthening the time between filing and final decision and not by warrant execution rates actually decreasing over the longer run. Figure 8 suggests that the time between filing and final decision did increase for the ZIP Codes where UAC was rolled out in 2016, with the median time rising from 85 days in 2015 to more than 100 in 2017. But although meaningful, the magnitude of this increase is unlikely to fully account for the reduction in the warrant execution rate.”

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, I'm Shane Phillips. A quick note on the UCLA Lake Arrowhead symposium that I mentioned at the top of last episode. As I'm recording this, we've only got two more tickets available through the website. So by the time you hear this, we are probably sold out. We're really looking forward to convening this event, especially with its focus on housing this year. And for those of you who are going, we will see you next month. This week on the podcast we are joined by Professor Ingrid Gould Ellen of NYU, and we're talking about recent research by her and her colleagues on the impacts of New York City's universal access to counsel program, a city effort to guarantee legal representation to poor tenants in the city, who face eviction. In most cities, most landlords have lawyers to represent them in eviction court and most tenants do not. The disparity is really striking and right to council is intended to level the playing field at least somewhat, and hopefully reduce both evictions and eviction filings. New York City was the first big US city to implement a right-to-counsel program, and fortunately for us, they rolled out the program in a way that made it fairly easy to research and determine its impacts. We'll be talking about what Ingrid and her colleagues found, and some of the other programs and support that might be needed to get the most out of universal access to counsel. The housing voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and we receive production support from Claudia Bustamante, Olivia Urena and Jason Sutedja. Feedback or show ideas can go to me at Shane phillips@ucla.edu And you can give the show a five star rating or review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Now let's talk to Professor Gould Ellen.

Ingrid Gould Ellen is Professor of Urban Policy and Planning with the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Faculty Director of the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban policy, and we're excited to have her here talking with us about a recent article in housing policy debate. That article is coauthored by Kathy O'Regan, Sofia house and Ryan Brenner, and it is titled, 'Do Lawyers Matter: Early evidence on eviction patterns after the rollout of universal access to counsel in New York City'. Do lawyers matter is a question we have all wondered at one time or another or many times, and so we're looking forward to getting some answers here. Ingrid, welcome to the housing voice podcast.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 2:44
Thanks, happy to be here.

Shane Phillips 2:45
And we have Mike lens as our co host. He is back from sabbatical. He is in Los Angeles. He is so fresh and ready to go. Welcome back, Mike.

Michael Lens 2:56
Thank you, Shane. I'm extremely fresh. Yeah, I am extremely happy to be you know, doing this podcast today. In particular, Ingrid has as much to do with the fact that I am able to sit around and have these kinds of fun discussions as anybody and also the fact that I'm somebody coming back from a very beautiful, wonderful sabbatical, as you know, a comfortable academic, owe a lot to Ingrid and of course, one of our prior guests, Kathy O'Regan, who's also a co-author on this paper as the greatest mentors that anybody could have. So this is a big pleasure today.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 3:40
Pleasure to have you as a student like so...

Michael Lens 3:43
For life.

Shane Phillips 3:45
As always, we start out by asking our guests for a tour. You are not our first guest from New York, Kathy Regan is one and we've had a few others as well. Mike is very familiar with New York. So let us know if you've got any good off the beaten path sites or experiences you'd like to recommend to people or if there's somewhere you know, outside of New York City you want to share with us?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 4:07
Yeah, well, such a good question. I feel like this is a challenge. I'm not sure I'm gonna go that far off the beaten path, though. But we just had our annual Furman center retreat at Governors Island, and I had actually never been there and it's really fantastic. It's like 170 acre island, less than a kilometer away from Manhattan. So it's a very, very quick boat trip, very cheap to get over there. It was originally used as a fort for to protect the New York Harbor after after the Revolutionary War. And it was later as sort of an army and a Coast Guard residential base and now it's basically a year-round park with overnight glamping sites and parkland and concerts, urban farming, art exhibits, events, and actually some potential housing which is something else but so I'd say that. I would say, again not such a hidden gem but Prospect Park, I will say before 9am, if you love dogs, it's just a giant dog party. So dogs can go off-leash, that's a great place, and then now this is all Park. So the main reading room at the New York Public Library is just the most beautiful public space I think I've ever been in. It's just gorgeous, and the librarians are amazing, I have to say too. And then to, like, I should say, a museum, the Tenement Museum so that's sort of fitting for us, which is an incredible museum on the Lower East Side that basically, it's housed into restored tenement buildings, and it basically you can go in and see sort of recreated rooms that show you the living conditions of immigrants sort of in the late 19th and early 20th century. So definitely recommend all of those.

Shane Phillips 5:55
Yeah, I love those recommendations. They're specific, and you gotta housing one in there. Gotta have one.

Michael Lens 6:00
Yeah, you really met quite a challenge there, right? I mean, everybody knows something about New York, just one London connection there that came to mind is thinking about the fact that dogs being off leash is like a treat or something different, you know, like, you go to the park in London, and there are no leashes and everybody has a dog. They're just running around being pretty well behaved. And you wonder why...

Ingrid Gould Ellen 6:27
I was gonna say they're probably better behaved than the dogs, in this country or the dogs in New York, so..

Shane Phillips 6:36
Okay, so to kick this off, this is about universal access to counsel, or right to counsel, as it is sometimes known. That's kind of the phrase that I was familiar with. It's a program that guarantees legal representation to people facing eviction, with the hope that it would reduce the number of people being evicted. Why do advocates, just to get us started here, why do advocates believe that this is an important channel for reducing evictions? What's happening in places that don't provide universal access to counsel that these kinds of programs are trying to address? What are they trying to solve here?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 7:12
Yeah, well, I mean, the big issue that they're trying to solve is basically tenants are just not represented in housing court in places where there isn't the right to counsel. So in just to give you an example, in New York City, as recently as 2013, just 1% of tenants in housing court were represented by a lawyer as compared to, you know, over 90% of landlords and so a big part of the push is to sort of, to redress that imbalance. And you know, and why is that important? I mean, I don't know whether you've spent time in housing court, but housing court, t's a complicated place, right? It's a confusing place, there's poor signage, there are lots of different courtrooms, you're not sure like, there's stories of tenants spending all day in housing court, but they never understood that they were supposed to sign in. And so they, they were there all day, but then they get a default judgment against them for not having showed up. So I think, you know, the hope and strong belief on the part of advocates have access to counsel that lawyers will help tenants navigate that process, that sort of byzantine process, will help them challenge different procedural problems, raise counterclaims, and ultimately, you know, more successfully represent the tenant in negotiations with landlords and landlord attorneys.

Shane Phillips 8:35
Yeah, it does seem like it's just, I mean, all aspects of law seem just very esoteric. And like, if you haven't studied it yourself to try to work your way through that, and I think something you bring up in your paper as well is that housing courts are just so overburdened, and so judges aren't going to give you the time to kind of figure it out on your own. If you're not fully prepared, and you don't know exactly what you're doing a single mistake, and you're probably, you know, your case is out of there.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 9:04
Yeah, that's right. The volume is high.

Shane Phillips 9:07
Okay, so before we get into the details of the New York right to counsel or universal access to counsel program and your research into its effects, could you tell us about some of the previous research on the effectiveness of eviction counsel. I gather that earlier research had limitations regarding selection bias, among other things, which made it hard to extrapolate the findings to a broader population or to know that universal access to counsel would be as effective as more targeted legal representation interventions, for example.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 9:41
Yeah, so I mean, you know, certainly our earlier studies of the benefits of legal representation and, you know, most of the studies are sort of observational, and they find that tenants with with representation with legal representation generally get better outcomes in court. But the problem is, is that the tenants who are more likely to win their cases may also be more likely to, to secure legal representation. So you can infer from those studies that the representation itself actually cause the better outcome rather than tenants are likely to better outcomes are more likely to be represented. So now there are there were a handful of previous studies that did rely on sort of randomly assigned legal representation. But the issue with those studies, that were very well done to be clear, it's just that they drew on some very small sample sizes, and also samples that were, as you said, that sort of were selected and that they were they were limited to cases where attorneys believed they could win their cases. And so, you know, and that was true for both the treatment and the control cases, but they basically excluded any cases where the lawyers were were less confident. And so it's not clear that those results of those studies are generalizable to a broader provision of have access to counsel, which is sort of what happened in New York. Also, let me say one more thing on this, which is that, no wonder when we first started doing this study, I spoke to a bunch of lawyers that were like, well, why are you doing that study? Like, of course, lawyers matter. And in fact, their story is my co-authors, two of whom were lawyers, did not like the title of the paper 'Do Lawyers Matter'

Michael Lens 11:33
Of course,

Ingrid Gould Ellen 11:35
Yeah, exactly. But I think it's important to emphasize that it's actually not obvious, not obvious to me anyway, that access to counsel will necessarily reduce eviction. So lawyers, right, lawyers can't find rental relief, right? If those programs and resources don't exist for their tenants, right, they have little ability to change the long-run affordability of apartments and the many challenges that tenants face in the labor market and in their personal lives that make it difficult for them to pay the rent. And so it's just, you know, it's not immediately clear that lawyers are gonna solve, fully solve this problem and so we thought, anyway. So all that being said, we thought this was a topic worthy of studying.

Shane Phillips 12:18
Yeah, and most people facing eviction, or, you know, having an eviction filed against them have it filed, because they are in arrears, they're behind on their rent, is that not correct in which case, giving someone a lawyer does not mean they have money to pay that back rent. It just means they have representation to fight the case but at the end of the day, you do eventually have to pay the rent.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 12:44
Exactly, yeah, that's right

Yeah so the question is this sort of prolonging the inevitable? Then you know, you have the same question that sort of foreclosure prevention programs if you're not writing down the debt. So I think it's a like that lawyers, and I'll answer when we talk about the results whether lawyers matter.

Shane Phillips 12:45
Yeah, so let's talk about the New York City program. There is a lot to cover here but I think the key questions are, you know, what services does it offer? Who is eligible for those services? And how is the program rolled out sequentially in such a way that putting this all together, it let you study the impacts of right to counsel in a more, I guess, convincing way or in a way that you could maybe extrapolate a little further than previous research. So basically, how was this program structured, and how did that make it more amenable to research than previous studies?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 13:34
So the Mayor de Blasio signed the universal access to council bill into law in the summer of 2017, which made New York the first city in the country to offer sort of broad legal representation to low income tenants and housing court. Other cities, I have to say, have since followed, right, including a lot of large cities you know Philadelphia, Newark, San Francisco, Denver, Baltimore, Minneapolis but you know, at the time, it was the first city. The law basically requires the city, commits the city to providing free legal assistance to qualified tenants. I mean, every tenant and housing court now can get are entitled to sort of a brief legal consultation, but tenants that earn less than 200% of the poverty line are entitled to full legal representation which includes, you know, legal advice, preparation and filing of court documents, negotiation with landlords and their attorneys and representation and hearings, and trials and, and appeals. And critically, and maybe we can talk a little bit more about this later, tenants must respond to an eviction filing, and appear in court in order to actually receive representation. So not all eligible tenant receiving eviction filing actually received representation so the take up is, you know, less than 100% but the idea is that when tenants do respond to an eviction filing, when they show up in court, then they were supposed to be connected to providers who screen them for eligibility and then are assigned the lawyer. Do you want me to talk about the rollout too?

Shane Phillips 15:23
Yeah, and let's talk about how it was structured as sort of cohorts and how it began in just a few zip codes based on as I understand it, these were places that had higher rates of shelter and entry for people who were homeless at the time. Tell us about that but it strikes me as sort of almost designed to be easily researched and to study its impacts but also, I'm sure it was just a matter of resources as well and not be able to roll this out citywide all at once.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 15:53
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was a matter of, you know, it was rolled out gradually because of capacity right? So you can imagine that if you suddenly said in Los Angeles that every single tenant and housing court is, is guaranteed a lawyer, well, there might not be as many, you know, enough lawyers and housing court lawyers to represent everybody. Yeah, and so the city couldn't just suddenly announce that everyone would have access and, and so what they did was they, they rolled it out gradually by zip code, and where they would sort of add a certain number of zip codes every year, and then the idea was, by 2022, the program would be city wide but it gave sort of a ramp up period. And the city, as you said, the city sort of chose those initial zip codes basically, using the criteria of number of shelter entrants, and also a number of number of evictions. And and so, you know, although the program was rolled out that way, for capacity reasons, you're absolutely right, that it ended up being sort of serving as sort of useful in developing an evaluation design, because we can exploit that gradual rollout, and by basically comparing changes in outcomes for eviction outcomes for tenants coming from zip codes, where the universal access to counsel was rolled out early to changes in outcomes for tenants coming from similarly disadvantaged zip codes, where universal access to counsel wouldn't be rolled out until somewhat later, and there ended up being you know, every year, there's sort of a new cohort, so we could kind of, we can look at that, and that can really help us isolate the effect of legal representation, specifically over and above all the other things that the city was doing during this time to try to prevent evictions.

Michael Lens 17:43
Yeah, there's definitely some similarities from to Los Angeles, from at least from what I recall, you know, I, of course, about a year ago, ran away from Los Angeles' housing problems kicking and screaming, and didn't really look back very often to see what new horrors awaited our city, but as I recall, like, there was a pilot being formed at some juncture to provide universal access to counsel. But again, I think, based on geography, you know, some of that was also based on like council districts, because there were particular council persons that were spearheading that effort. So I don't think they rolled it out in this comprehensive a manner, or in a manner that is kind of as well suited to study as the New York case. And, you know, I just want to add, also, in this paper, I really found it quite impressive the way that that you and your co-authors really explained not only the program rollout but also the housing and legal context of New York, kind of the history behind how we got to this place in eviction and housing court provision. So really a model, I think, for how you know situate a study and not just kind of describe, like, who the cohorts are, and that sort of thing and kind of a basic social science way, but also, like, "yeah, we know New York is a little different than probably where you are but here's what the context is", and then it kind of, I think, makes it a lot easier for people to connect what this study does to their setting.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 19:25
I appreciate that. I certainly I highly recommend having lawyers as co authors who help with that institutional knowledge, you know, and which can be really important, that institutional

Shane Phillips 19:40
Lawyers do matter!

Michael Lens 19:43
Social science that at a minimum!

Ingrid Gould Ellen 19:44
I just want to underscore something that you said, Mike, though, because I, you know, I think I mean, yes, the program was rolled out slowly because of capacity raising, but you're right, that it didn't necessarily have to be rolled out in such a systematic way. So I think, in many cases, demonstration programs start this way. And and, you know, it really would be fantastic if local government, state governments, federal government could really think about even, you know, nonprofit providers think about sort of when capacity is naturally limited thinking about rolling those programs out in ways that make it easier to evaluate, and so you have a good comparison group.

Shane Phillips 20:25
So let's talk about the results, you were interested in whether the program resulted in more tenants receiving legal representation in their eviction proceedings, which would be a good sign that it's reaching its intended audience. But ultimately, this is about stopping evictions. And if it increased legal representation, but didn't reduce evictions, that'd be you know, a lot of money spent and maybe not a whole lot to show for it. So what did you actually find on both of those metrics of representation, and, you know, a change in executed evictions?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 20:59
Yeah, so the first question that we we examined was take up, and as noted, right, just just because you offer legal assistance, it doesn't mean that people will, will take it up, right? And that's true of any kind of social programs, right, just because you offer it doesn't mean that people are going to take it up, access can be complicated. In the case of, of legal representation. tenants again have to actually respond to the eviction notices, and show up in court in order to be represented, and the majority of tenants, at least in New York City, don't do that - don't show up.

Shane Phillips 21:33
And I do think maybe it sounds like why why wouldn't you do that, why wouldn't you get, you know, this free representation, but I'm sure there's partly just education, people not being aware that this is an option. But also people feeling like, well, maybe there's some selection bias going on here to where people are like, well, I know, I'm three months behind on rent, like, what's the lawyer going to do about that? And so this idea that many people are not taking it up, I think, is not it's not that surprising, even though it might sound that way.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 22:04
That's right. But I think, again, maybe we can talk about a little bit more that there may be sort of, I think that's one of the things we should be thinking about, as more and more cities kind of start seem to be adopting access to counsel programs to think about implementing them in ways that it encourages take up and encourages, and even if they don't, and it just how, what can we do to encourage tenants to come to court. So we did find that the program increased legal representation, and we found that by 2019, nearly 30% of tenants with eviction cases were represented in the zip codes where the universal access to counsel was rolled out early on up from less than 5% so it went from less than 5% to about 30%, less than 5% of 2015, sorry, to like 30% in 2019, and representation increased city-wide at that point, too, but only from about 5% to about 10% so the increase was significantly larger. So, you know, while the program didn't reach everybody, and it also reached some people who weren't in the targeted zip code, it clearly succeeded in providing increased legal representation, and I should say, also, the second, I mean, you mentioned two outcomes but we also looked at the share, again, the share of tenants coming to court to actually respond to eviction filings. And we found that that went up too, from like, 20% to a little about 40% but it actually turned out it went up citywide which is kind of interesting. It didn't actually go up much more in the zip codes, where UAC was rolled out, and you know, perhaps because sort of publicity about the I'm sorry I'm saying UAC - I mean, Universal Access to Counsel, that's the acronym that is often used, that the publicity about the availability of legal representations of spilled out to other zip codes, and, and then, you know, but ultimately, really the key question is whether increase representation led to better outcomes in housing court and reduce the percentage of filings that result in actual evictions. And there, I mean you know we were somewhat hampered in our timeframe you know, it just takes a while for cases to make their way through court. And then, the COVID pandemic hit New York City, New York State radically expanded basically the strength in rent regulation laws, and so we really can only look at the early cohorts and look at sort of nine-month impact but we did find that even in that very short time period that we saw that the execution rate or the share of eviction filings that resulted in an actual eviction fell significantly more in the zip codes where universal access to counsel was rolled out and and it was sort of, the relative decline with about 1.6 percentage points, which sounds small, but on the other hand, only like eight to 10% of eviction filings in New York actually result in an executed eviction so it's not insignificant.

Shane Phillips 25:16
And that happened at the same time as executed evictions, the rate of executed evictions was going up in non-UAC zipcodes...

Ingrid Gould Ellen 25:23
That's right, yeah, that's right, it's sort of the relative difference was this 1.6 percentage points. Basically this benchmark, the decline, we, you know, we came up with the back of the envelope estimate that if you assumed that decline city wide, and you assumed sort of the level of the volume of eviction filings that occurred in 2019, then you would see 2000, fewer evictions, citywide in each year. So you know, that's not, that's not insignificant.

Shane Phillips 25:52
I'm sorry, I forget, did you look at the impact on eviction filings as well in the UAC versus non UAC zip codes? And I asked that just because it seems like maybe this would take some time to really settle in, but you could imagine how if landlords know that tenants are going to have legal representation, or at least the right to it, that they might file fewer evictions, you know, especially kind of more frivolous or dubious ones?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 26:18
Yeah, it's a really good question. We did look at that, we didn't ultimately put it in the paper. We saw some, you know, sort of suggestive evidence of a relative decline in filings but we thought that, theoretically, that probably would take a while for landlords to sort of learn about the program, see how it was actually going to play out, and so we didn't have great theoretical reasons for thinking that at least in the short run, that you would see kind of a behavioral response, right away on filings, and so we decided to leave that out of the paper and focus on the outcomes for which we thought we would see a more direct impact.

Shane Phillips 27:00
Yeah, that makes sense. I just know that I've heard that as an argument, and it does, you know, it doesn't make logical sense

Ingrid Gould Ellen 27:06
Yeah, no, it does make sense.

Shane Phillips 27:08
There are certainly landlords who file frivolous claims because they know that most tenants are not going to fight back, and maybe they're not even expecting to have to execute the warrant or go through the courts, maybe just the filing, the eviction notice will be enough for some to leave. And you can imagine how, again, if they have legal representation, that might be a little scarier of a thing to do on the part of the landlord.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 27:34
Yeah, over the longer run. I mean, I think that's absolutely true.

Shane Phillips 27:37
We've done a few episodes now that talk about evictions, most recently with Eva Rosen and Philip, and the running theme in all of them is that the eviction process is very messy, and the data on evictions are often incomplete, or they're hard to track down, and as we kind of talked about already, every city, every county seems to have its own process for all of this and its own rules. This study, as Mike said, was designed really well but there are always limitations so what were they in this case?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 28:07
Yeah, so there are definitely limitations. I think we have pretty good data but there are definitely limitations. And I'd say that when we frame this in terms of like, if we really wanted to answer the question of whether this program is a good investment, you want to do kind of a full cost benefit analysis. And so, you know, what, on the benefit side, it's important to emphasize that we're really only looking at one outcome, which is executed evictions right? But lawyers could help tenants in other ways, right, they could reduce the amount of debt that they have to pay back, they could negotiate, you know, rent abatements for poor housing conditions so there's sort of other benefits that lawyers could provide. And similarly, you need to think about the cost side, you know, how much do all these lawyers cost? And, yeah, in the end on both the cost and the benefits side, again, we really only can look at sort of the very we are able to look at in this paper is sort of very short run impacts that we may not be able to see sort of, you know, longer-term benefits, whether those are smaller or larger. I think it's also important to study whether over the longer term, whether universal access to council might actually discourage landlords from providing rental housing altogether. I mean, critics of universal access to counsel basically argue that tenant representation is simply going to prolong the eviction process, it's going to ultimately that making eviction more costly means making providing rental housing more expensive. And so therefore, you could imagine fewer rental units and and higher rents, and so, you know, these kinds of universal access to counsel could theoretically increase rents across the board, which you I think to really answer, to do a full program evaluation, you would want to do that. And then finally, of course, there's the issue of generalizability. I mean, you've kind of both sort of mentioned this, right, this is New York City, right? This is a city that probably has a more tenant-friendly housing court than a lot of cities across the country, and, you know, I mean, I'm not sure which way that goes, which way that cuts. I mean, it could mean that lawyers make less difference, because actually, tenants do pretty well in housing court anyway, you know, or it could mean that lawyers make more difference, because there are more rights to protect, right? So in places where tenants have no rights then what claims does a lawyer have to have to assert

Shane Phillips 30:41
And it's just a matter of knowing how to make the correct claim, which a tenant is very unlikely to do without some kind of representation.

Michael Lens 30:49
Right, I think one thing that you brought up there, Ingrid, you know, I think is really interesting, in that, essentially, this issue of costs to, you know, to the landlord, and you know, how that affects rents, you know, or there's a lot of people who think that landlords matter, too, right, and they're not anybody who's been a renter tends not to think too fondly of landlords and, you know, generally people, I think landlords are often, you know, pretty unpopular in housing discussions but, you know, there's a lot of people that I'm sure are rightfully concerned about the increased cost to landlords if there's always an expectation that everybody has to have a lawyer. I think in Los Angeles, usually something like 90% of unlawful detainer cases, the landlord is represent so they're already usually coming with lawyers, at least in in LA but these costs are incurred to the landlord, whether or not the tenant shows up, they're still going to have a lawyer, they're going to pay for that. Then, if the other side, the tenant side has lawyer, which, you know, I think is leveling the plate playing field, of course, like it may result in more trials or more longer disputes that require more and more costs, and, you know, again, if you don't care that much about landlords that I understand that, but somebody has to kind of pay for that in some sort of way. And that may end up being a future tenant of a landlord, who knows that they need to have representation every time they go to court.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 32:35
Yeah, yeah, I'm not even sure. I mean, I don't even know that you have to necessarily, for the listeners out there that don't care about landlords, I still think you should care about this issue, right? Because yeah, again, and actually, Boaz Abramson, who's a, he just got his PhD from Stanford in Economics, and he's now an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, and he has written and really important working paper - he basically develops a model of eviction, and he focuses on San Diego, where there's basically there's there was a sort of a pilot legal representation program that resulted in represented tenants were in court for longer and they had to pay back less of their rental arrears, and he found that right to counsel policy increases landlord costs so much and and rents across the board rent so much, that ultimately resulted in more rental defaults and higher rates of homelessness. And I think we need, we need more research on this but I think the paper provides a really important cautionary note about sort of the risks of access to counsel and policies that make evictions much more costly. And I should say the other thing that he doesn't focus on so much, you also have to worry about what landlords are going to do at the front end, right, if they can't evict people at the back end. So what kind of additional screening and selection criteria are landlords going to use? And so could this reduce access to housing for rental applicants who appear to be risky to landlords? Could this you know, in that way, could this kind of facilitate some discrimination? So I think all of these things are things that down the road, we really need to study more fully to understand the full effects.

Shane Phillips 34:36
Absolutely, yeah, and what you just brought up about the screening that was really a focus of our conversation with Eva and Phillip in particular. So your analysis ends with data from 2019 but we're now three years later, has there been any follow up even, you know, informally to see if the impacts have held up over time or maybe even strengthened as more landlords and tenants have familiarized themselves with the program? I do imagine that COVID, and the eviction moratorium kind of threw a wrench in any plans you might have had for a follow-up study if that was your intention.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 35:13
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, with the COVID pandemic, and and the moratorium on evictions, it's been an unusual, it's such an unusual period that I'm not sure we can learn that much from it. I will say that, I mean, apparently, tenant representation, legal representation among tenants has gone way up over time. I mean, it's now a majority of tenants in housing court in New York are now represented. Again, this is an unusual time, there are unusual set of tenants that are in the housing court but still, that's important. I will say that Mike Cassidy and Janet Currie have written a really terrific sort of follow-up working paper that and they look at a somewhat broader of a, you know, they look at a somewhat longer time period than we do but they again, they're sort of stymied by COVID. But they look at a somewhat broader set of outcomes, and they show that represented a tenants are not only less likely to be evicted, but they also face smaller monetary damages in housing court, and that was something we didn't look at. So, and they also observe significant heterogeneity across zip codes and find that lawyers seem to have greater impacts in poor places, and poor zip codes and those with larger shares of non citizens which I think is important and suggests maybe some targeting as cities across the country, other cities think about providing free legal assistance that maybe they should think about targeting if they don't feel that they have the resources to serve everybody or feel like they're concerned about what the costs would be in terms of the rental housing stock altogether.

Shane Phillips 36:57
Has there been any thinking or proposals about targeting because, you know, I think about this in terms of like, what's a good analogy, here in Los Angeles, I think there have been some efforts to using big data or other means try to proactively identify people who are at risk of homelessness. And it sounds like a great idea if we can figure it out. That would be wonderful, it's apparently very, very difficult but you know, you can understand why they would want to do that because if, if the answer is, well, we're just going to give money to anyone who might be at risk, that's gonna be very costly. And we know that most people who, at any given moment are at risk of homelessness do not become homeless, you know, in the near term. And so, in that sense, the money is sort of, I don't know if I would say wasted, but might have been put to better use. And it seems like the same could be said here where maybe more targeted assistance to people were more sure that really need the help or benefit from it could go a lot further, if we, you know, if we don't have unlimited money to spend, which presumably none of us do.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 38:02
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. Everything you said I agree with, right. It's just yes theoretically, we would want to target this assistance to the people who are most likely to benefit from it. You know, I think that is difficult to do right? It's difficult to identify those tenants, there's a lot of unobserved factors that you really can't see in terms of who has a family that they can rely on and turn to and, and there's, I mean, I think that most of the programs that I know about are, are limited to low income tenants so that's been really the the targeting that's been that's been done. You know, I think that there's there's now something of a some there's now some advocates are calling for a broadening of representation to, to make the program truly universal. But, you know, I think, again, if you believe the Janet curry and the mike Cassidy results, I'm not sure that necessarily would be wise right now that maybe we should, you know, focus more on the on the lower income tenants who really can, can use the assistance more.

Shane Phillips 39:13
I didn't ask how much this program has been costing thus far. And also, if you could tell us a little bit about the other programs and services that were rolled out around the same time, because I think it's, I think it maybe it helps explain, part of why representation also increased outside of the UAC zip codes. And maybe as you know, something of a confounding variable here where, you know, not all of the impacts that you've seen are necessarily the result of the UAC. But that maybe other things that are going on in New York around the same time,

Ingrid Gould Ellen 39:44
So the cost estimates are about I mean, a little over sort of $3,000 per represented tenant I think is is the most recent estimates I've seen.

Shane Phillips 39:45
That's that sounds like a lot to me.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 39:55
Yeah, I don't know whether that sounds like a lot of little I mean, Yeah, if you compare that against what, you know, you think that sort of the, you know, the work of Rob Collison, Davin Reed, when he Van Dyck and others showing some really significant social costs of eviction that you can argue actually, that's not so large.

Shane Phillips 40:14
Well I guess it's not so much that it's a ton of money per tenant, I guess it's like, I'm thinking about how much rent your tenants behind when they go to court, and is it more than $3,000 on average? I don't know the answer to that but I wouldn't be surprised if it was less. Yeah.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 40:32
Yeah, no look, it's not insignificant right? You know, I think that in terms of your other and clearly we need to pay, it's like we need to balance any benefits that we fight against those against those costs, and, and the full, like I said, any costs in terms of on the on the rental market as a whole. I think that in terms of other things that were going on in New York, I mean, there was a big push on, there was some adoption of some anti-tenant harassment policies in the city, there had been some earlier versions of an earlier increase in resources to represent tenants that across the city, and there also was in the middle of 2019. I think I mentioned this a significant strengthening of the rent regulation law in New York City, which made it more difficult to evict tenants and also, arguably reduce the incentive that landlords had to evict tenants, because they no longer could charge more rent instead of the next tenant that came in, the vacancy bonus was was eliminated right? So there were a lot of things going on.

Michael Lens 41:52
I wanted to highlight one. One other thing, and this is my last query of any kind of thing, and that's kind of the geography of housing courts. You know, in LA, we've changed this quite a lot in the last I think, decade, a couple of times, you know, we first shrunk the number of housing courts we had kind just around the county, and it's a huge County, obviously, we went down to five eviction court hubs at one point, and then we expanded to 11. And now graduated doctoral student, Kyle Nelson at UCLA found kind of an interesting thing that this is like a trade-off in a way between kind of physical access to a court and procedural justice, because when you increase in number of courts, it makes it harder for the nonprofit legal community to kind of serve everybody in a small number of locations, right, because they can't have offices everywhere. And I don't know, you know, whether, you know, so that to me, I think is another policy mechanism in which you kind of shape how people are going to access the court, whether they're going to show up, whether they're going to be supported by a lawyer. And I just don't recall exactly what that looks like in New York.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 43:14
Yeah that's a really good question. I mean, basically in New York, there is a there's there's one housing court house per borough, or per county.

Michael Lens 43:24
Yeah, that's what I pictured.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 43:25
Yeah. You know, plus, they're sort of community courts as well, but but most housing court cases go through the main housing courts in their, in their borough and, and that, you know, those I mean, New York is different than than LA and that there's better public transportation, and, but it still can be that some people live very far away from those housing courts. And there's actually one really nice study that looks at default rates in Philadelphia, and that's, again, the default rates are the the cases where tenants don't show up and respond to an eviction filing, and they find that tenants are more likely to default or less likely to show up in court when their travel time to the courthouse on public transit is longer right. And so that's pretty significant, and you're right, there could be some trade-offs, though, that if we, if we suddenly, whenever double or triple the number of courts, you might have to worry about what kind of challenge that means for legal service providers to get to those courts, but also, you might worry about inconsistency in treatment across those courts right? Potentially, so that could be also so I think it's a really, it's a really interesting policy question but I do think we need to think hard about access to these courts and make sure that candidates can get to the courts, they're given multiple options of dates where they can come to the courts and it's something definitely to think about as you design these programs,

Shane Phillips 45:02
So it sounds like we're pretty certain that for the purposes of writing a research paper about eviction lawyers matter, definitely they matter. Seemingly they even matter for reducing evictions by providing legal representation. From what you've learned about this so far, you know, studying this over the years, where would you like to see the program go in the coming years?

Ingrid Gould Ellen 45:26
Yeah, so, like I said, I mean, I think that we, I would like to learn more about who are the tenants who are not showing up in court, and and why are they not showing up in court, and how can we make it easier for them and communicate to them that they can get help if they show up in court that they're not going to get help if they don't show up in court. So I think that's something to think hard about. I think this question about targeting is important. And think about whether there are ways for us to target I mean, again, right now, New York, because of staffing shortages and sort of now the increase in evictions after the moratorium, there are really staffing challenges and people, even eligible tenants in housing court aren't getting access to lawyers immediately, so I certainly wouldn't expand the program right now. I think we do need to learn more about it. And then I would say also, I think it's important that yes, again, the answer is that lawyers matter. But I think it's also important to contextualize to say that lawyers can't do everything, though. Yeah, they can't make tenant show up in court. They can't address the financial crises and other crises that lead tenants to housing court, they can't find resources for tenants that don't exist. You know, ultimately, they can't address the structural problems in the housing market, and most notably, the lack of supply, which, you know, Mike has studied a lot that make housing so expensive, and put so many families at risk in the first place or prevent them from even getting into their own homes. And so I think it's important to provide this study in that context.

Michael Lens 47:15
Yeah, I, you know, I said, I was not going to say anything else there. But that really makes me think of, you know, another piece of this, or another way to kind of think about the no show issue with tenants, you're not showing up to court, I think it's important to impress, that I'm borrowing again, from Kyle Nelson's work, in which he basically discusses in frames that a lot of tenants that are facing an eviction have, you know, some kind of what he calls 'housing trouble' that they've been experiencing their whole lives, maybe in certain, you know, probably their whole adult lives, or maybe the last five years, 10 years, whatever. Housing trouble is a daily fact, weekly fact, monthly fact for them. And so, you know, if I can speak for myself, who has not had anything like housing trouble for at least by like, post-college years, probably or maybe postgraduate school years, it's hard for people like me to, I think, put yourself in their shoes, right, where like, housing trouble is an everyday thing - they get this notice from their landlord, or they get some threat, or they get this eviction notice, and to some of us, that would be like this cataclysmic day, right, just like you never thought about, and you wouldn't think about anything else, like, how am I going to deal with this, I need to go to court, whatever. People in this situation often have been dealing with so much around this landlord, around this unit around this neighborhood, whatever, that it's just more noise. And so I'd say that to certainly echo, and second, you know, this idea that we really need to study more about that and there's this bigger context of housing trouble that we can't help we, we need a bunch of other things in place to solve but there's this smaller issue of representation that we also don't really know a lot about. We have some theories, but like, we don't do a great job of studying people who don't show up. That's just kind of, you know, part of social science.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 49:19
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. And I will say, on sort of what else do we need, I mean, I think that having a standing emergency Rental Assistance Program, that would be near the top of my list. I think we have really good research that shows that those kinds of short term emergency resources can really make a difference in stabilizing families and helping them avoid eviction and ultimately homelessness. And I think there must be complementarity, right, in terms of sort of how much of a difference can lawyers make if they, when they represent tenants, they can connect them to these emergency resources. So I think that would that would be high on my list.

Shane Phillips 50:03
Yeah, we still need to know if lawyers matter more than other things XY and Z different interventions we couldn't be doing. Well, Ingrid Gould Ellen, thank you so much for joining the Housing Voice podcast today.

Ingrid Gould Ellen 50:15
Thank you for having me.

Shane Phillips 50:19
You can read more about Ingrid's research on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. And you can find show notes and a transcript of the interview there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips, and Mike is there at MC_lens. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

About the Guest Speaker(s)

Ingrid Gould Ellen

Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Faculty Director of the NYU Furman Center. Her research centers on neighborhoods, housing, and residential segregation.
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