Works in Progress Group 8: Housing Court and Evictions

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Session Type: Works-in-Progress

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Union Square 5&6

Floor: 4th Floor

Group #8: Housing Court and Evictions

Designing Interdisciplinary, Early Intervention Dispute Resolution Tools to Decrease Evictions and Increase Housing Stability
Christine N. Cimini, University of Washington School of Law

This Article provides a unique glimpse into the development of an early-intervention, pre-court, interdisciplinary dispute resolution project intended to decrease evictions and increase housing stability for recipients of subsidized housing in Seattle. Funded by the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), a coalition of non-profit organizations had the rare opportunity to design a dispute resolution system into existence. The team began by examining the interconnected problems of housing instability, eviction, and houselessness. Despite thorough research on dispute system design and extensive meetings with stakeholders, the design team encountered numerous challenges. This Article identifies the challenges specific to this project, and the larger systemic issue of actual fairness underlying all dispute resolution tools. Mindful of these issues, the design team created a program titled Conflict Resolution Services (CRS). CRS is rooted in six key components: consistent outreach and ongoing education; rapid response de-escalation; integration of social services support; proximity to the conflict; development of an interdisciplinary, multicultural team; and research and assessment to create an iterative process of continuous re-design. After a brief overview of the preliminary qualitative and quantitative research design, the essay concludes by explicating and contextualizing three key insights derived from the dispute system design process. First, take time to engage in a thoughtful and holistic design process. Second, despite inherent challenges, engage, collaborate and rely on the expertise of other organizations. Finally, recognize and acknowledge systemic issues facing all dispute resolution systems such as power imbalance, inequality, racism, and implicit bias and seek creative solutions to overcome challenges.

Right-to-Counsel Reformism: An Abolitionist Critique of Civil Gideon in New York City Housing Court
Larisa G. Bowman, University of Iowa College of Law

Sixty years after the landmark decision Gideon v. Wainwright, low-income tenants facing eviction in New York City have a right to counsel in housing court. Community-based tenant organizing won this legislative victory as a stopgap measure to slow displacement within the framework of a broader vision for housing justice. Right to counsel quickly proved a resounding success: most represented tenants retained possession of their homes in the first year of implementation. But with COVID-era protections against eviction expiring, a growing number of tenants entitled to assistance are appearing in housing court without representation. In late 2022, just over a third of tenants were represented in their eviction cases—a far cry from the more than eighty percent estimated to be income-eligible for a free lawyer.

This crisis of representation reflects the reformism of the right to counsel when untethered from the tenant-led movement that won it. Lawyers—not only landlords’ attorneys and judges but also legal services providers who represent tenants—have a vested interest in maintaining, not dismantling, eviction as a racial and gender capitalist system of privilege and profit, on the one hand, and oppression and exploitation, on the other. Legal services providers owe their livelihoods to the work of tenant organizers. But they remain professional elites employed by nonprofits funded by the state to protect private property at the expense of the poor. By centering the interests of lawyers, civil Gideon in New York City housing court fails to move us closer to the abolition of eviction.