According to CalMatters.org, “When Covid darkened our nation’s doorstep, it brought a whirlwind of changes for the representation of “lower-income and marginalized communities.”

Cal Website Helps Tenants File Timely Eviction Response

By Manuela Tobias

Thousands of California tenants lose their homes to evictions annually because they fail to submit an initial answer to the eviction summons.

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Losing a case can damage a person’s credit and the chance of renting another home. Simply failing to check the correct box or file a timely response could trigger a default judgment against them. 

Tenants often vacate their homes before eviction because they don’t think they stand a chance in court.

More than 50 tenant advocates and attorneys from The Debt Collective, The LA Tenants Union, The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality & Democracy, and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment worked on the “Tenant Power Toolkit” over the last two years — a mostly volunteer effort explains Hannah Appel, an anthropology professor at UCLA.

The latter came up with the idea based on her work as a co-founder of the Debt Collective. The website resembles tax-return-filing software.

It asks tenants a long series of questions in relatively plain English, or Spanish, producing a legal document they can print and submit in court.

Tenants in L.A. County can file the paperwork online or\ can connect to other tenants and legal aid organizations through the website.

The questions vary by eviction type and location.

For example, suppose their city has rent control for people over 65 who have lived in the building for five years.

In that case, the tool will ask tenants for their ages, and the time they lived in the building and invoke that defense on paper, even if the tenants didn’t know the protection existed.

According to data from the Judicial Council of California, more than 129,000 eviction cases were filed from July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019; at least 24,000 tenants lost their court cases in a default judgment.

46% of court cases reported their outcomes — most courts don’t.

In 2021, default judgments dropped to 7,600, or 40% of reported outcomes, due to statewide eviction protections, which researchers say are not reflective of a typical year.

“As a lawyer, it pained me to see tenants lose cases just because they couldn’t file a piece of paper,” said UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, a lead housing lawyer behind the tool. He called it the first of its kind nationwide.

Legalese isn’t the only thing that prevents a tenant from filing a response, according to Amber Crow-ell, an associate professor of sociology at Fresno State and housing coordinator at Faith in the Valley.

The tool buys tenants at least ten days to file an amended response and find a lawyer before the court trial.

But its creators warn the website is no substitute for a lawyer. Access to legal aid remains rare for tenants, who nationally are represented by an attorney in 10% of cases, according to the ACLU.

Crowell found that statistics fades to 1% in Fresno in a 2019 study. Blasi expects the tool will have a more significant impact in places where people have greater access to legal aid. 

While it was put together on a “shoestring budget,” the group hopes to attract more philanthropic and state funding to keep the tool up to date, especially as local jurisdictions pass new tenant protections.

But money isn’t all they want from lawmakers. The groups argue tenants should have a right to legal representation in court — efforts that have little traction at the state level.

Gov. Newsom vetoed a watered-down version of that last year, a bill to create an ongoing legal services trust fund for tenants because he argued there was already money for tenant legal aid in the budget.