With City Hall poised to make deep cuts to programs and services across San Francisco, legal aid groups are cautioning city officials that putting pro bono eviction defense services on the chopping block could push vulnerable tenants into homelessness and create a long-term financial burden for taxpayers.
San Francisco is one of just two California cities providing free legal representation to low-income renters facing eviction. The initiative, known as the Tenant Right to Counsel (TRC) program, was first approved by San Francisco voters in 2018 and went into effect the following year. A similar program was unveiled in Los Angeles at the start of this year.
The program cost San Francisco about $17 million last year; however, advocates say it was money well spent, helping more than 1,500 people stay in their homes and off the street.
With San Francisco projecting an $876 million budget shortfall over the next two years, non-profit legal aid groups that receive funding through the initiative are worried about the program’s fate.
“We are concerned,” said Steve Collier, the managing attorney at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, one of nine legal aid groups funded by the city’s TRC initiative. “It’s a big budget deficit.”
Collier warns slashing pro bono eviction defense services would be “penny wise and pound foolish.” He argues investing funds on the front end to keep people housed is far cheaper than providing services to someone once they have been forced onto the street.
“The cost of our program per case is about $6,300 and the cost of a shelter bed is $62,000 a year,” Collier said.
The majority of Tenderloin Housing Clinic Clients, according to Collier, are extremely low income. He adds that in the vast majority of cases – about 92% – tenants receiving full scope representation through the program wound up staying in their homes or at least ultimately moved out with enough time or settlement money to find new housing.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
Local
Without representation, Collier said most low-income tenants don’t stand a chance in court.
Raegan Joern, managing attorney for Bay Area Legal Aid’s San Francisco office, said the program helps level the playing field.
“In most places in this country, if you walk into housing court, what you’re going to see are landlords represented by attorneys and tenants who are not,” Joern said, adding her office has represented more than 900 tenants through the program since it took effect in 2019.
Bay Area Legal Aid client Nicholas Christie said he may have ended up in a shelter without the help of legal services through the TRC program. When his landlord pursued an eviction against him after a water leak in his apartment, Christie said his attorneys were able to reach a settlement that kept him in his home.
“I probably would have been in a very bad position,” Christie said. “I don’t know what I would have done.”
More than 2,900 eviction lawsuits were filed in Fiscal Year 23-24, according to data compiled by non-profit legal aid groups, a figure they expect to rise even further this year.
Chris Tavelli, a substitute teacher and father of four kids, recently found himself fighting such a lawsuit. He credits the Tenant Right to Counsel program for keeping his family in their Panhandle home after their landlord sent them an eviction notice last year, saying they had 60 days to leave the rent-controlled apartment because the landlord intended to move in.
Tavelli pays $1,000 a month for his three-bedroom apartment and said finding a comparable home in the city would be impossible.
“Where do you go with four kids in San Francisco?” Tavelli said.
In an interview with the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit, Tavelli said he and his family couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer to fight the eviction, but the Tenderloin Housing Clinic took the family on as clients for free through the TRC program. The legal aid group successfully fought off the eviction, arguing the landlord failed to give Tavelli and his family proper notice.
“[The TRC program] keeps people in their home,” Tavelli said. “That’s fundamentally what it does.”
Tavelli worries what would happen to families like his if the city decides to come after the program.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and his administration haven’t yet indicated which programs or services they’re looking to cut in order to balance the budget, but the mayor warned the era of “band-aid solutions is over.”
“We are committed to fiscal discipline, giving San Franciscans the accountability they demand, and focusing the government on doing the core things well,” Lurie said in a statement released earlier this year.
Collier said he and other advocates have been in conversations with the mayor’s office, as well as the city’s new supervisors, hoping to convince them to leave the program unscathed.
The mayor’s full proposed budget will be submitted to the Board of Supervisors by June 1.
If the humanitarian aspect of the program doesn’t convince them, they hope the promise of cost savings will.
“We’ve estimated over $66 million in savings to the city by investing in representation in these [eviction] proceedings,” Joern said. "My hope is that they would continue with these investments in this project."
