Evictions and domestic violence cases are expected to again top legal aid programs’ caseloads when data is in for 2023, according to conversations with four legal aid organizations and the largest legal aid funder in the country.
“Everything I’ve heard, both in terms of preliminary data and just anecdotal conversations with individual grantees supports the conclusion that those two areas are still surging,” said Ronald S. Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC).
Back in 2022, the year with the most recent data on the subject, housing and family law dominated legal aid programs’ caseloads reported to LSC, which funds about 130 nonprofit legal aid organizations across the country.
Out of LSC grantees’ total closed cases for 2022, 41% were housing cases. In its annual report, LSC noted it was the first time one type of case made up such a large proportion of grantees’ caseloads.
Family law, the second most common case type, made up 26% of legal aid grantees’ closed cases in 2022.
Many of those cases were related to domestic violence. From 2013 to 2022, legal aid organizations that LSC funds reported more domestic violence cases each year. In 2022, LSC grantees reported a 9% increase in closed domestic violence cases, amounting to about 162,000 total cases.
Streetlight asked several legal aid organizations if housing cases were at the top of their 2023 caseloads.
Of the three programs that provided data, housing cases were the most common case type for two of the organizations.
For the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands, landlord-tenant cases were its second-most common case type last year after family law cases, said Elizabeth Leiserson, eviction right to counsel project director for the organization. Legal Aid Society closed about 1,700 landlord-tenant cases last year, up from about 1,300 of those cases in 2022.
Leiserson said the numbers don’t show what it was like to help tenants last year without a critical resource from the pandemic: Rent assistance.
Rent assistance pre-dates the pandemic, but federal covid relief packages ushered in an unprecedented $47 billion for emergency rent relief.
Some communities and states already had or set up permanent rent assistance programs as a result of the pandemic. Other places have limited access to the resource.
“Rent relief funding in Tennessee has largely dried up at this point,” Leiserson said. “That means it’s a lot harder to help people, so we still count a case, but the case may be just a lawyer giving advice to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re behind on rent. I reviewed your case. I don’t think you have any defenses.”
Right-to-counsel funding is pushing up some legal aid programs’ eviction caseloads
At Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, Executive Director Laura Tuggle said before the pandemic, domestic violence and other family law cases usually made up about 35 to 40% of the program’s caseload. Last year, on the flip side, housing cases made up 40% of their caseload, and family law cases have dropped to 23%.
“That’s a pretty dramatic shift,” Tuggle said. “Part of it is also driven by what resources we have to do the work.”
[ Read more: How rental assistance programs have evolved during the pandemic ]
Tuggle said Southeast Louisiana Legal Services still has high numbers of domestic violence cases and demand for assistance in that area. But the program’s housing cases have outpaced family law cases, in part due to the agency’s work in New Orleans’s right-to-counsel program.
The legal aid organization received about $2 million from the city of New Orleans for the program. The funds support the work of about 20 staffers on eviction cases in the 1st and 2nd City Courts in New Orleans, Tuggle said.
“That’s an enormous amount of cases that are coming through,” Tuggle said. “And, of course, we have other methods of folks contacting us for assistance in avoiding eviction, so that does really make an impact on your caseload when you have that many people and that level of funding coming in.”
At Legal Services of Greater Miami in Florida, Chief Program and Innovation Officer Ilenia Sanchez-Bryson said that housing cases are still the program’s highest area of demand. Last year, housing cases made up 54% of its total caseloads, a 2% drop from the year before.
One of the biggest changes last year, Sanchez-Bryson said, was an increase in cases that involved extended representation, a higher level of service that can include representing someone during litigation or a negotiation.
That happened after eviction diversion grants allowed the organization to hire new staffing for its landlord-tenant unit. During a right-to-counsel pilot program, the unit was revamped to respond to a high need for extended representation as eviction filings returned to pre-pandemic levels.
During the last two years, Legal Services of Greater Miami has added around eight attorney and four paralegal positions in its landlord-tenant unit, Sanchez-Bryson said.
[ Read more: Rising rental fees are feeding evictions and homelessness ]
Now paralegals do intake, and they may refer clients to attorneys focused on either private or subsidized housing law.
“That’s allowed our attorneys, especially new ones, to onboard more quickly and learn the law faster because we’ve narrowed what they’re doing,” Sanchez-Bryson said. “We’re giving them more opportunities to take on more cases for extended representation, and it frees up their time from having to do a significant amount of intake just because of the sheer number of people who contact us for landlord-tenant issues.”
A Metro Nashville City Council right-to-counsel pilot program in Nashville was responsible for an increase in landlord-tenant cases for the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands. The organization’s Nashville office closed about 1,400 housing cases last year, up from about 700 the year before.
In 2023, though, the legal aid program’s most common case type was family law. Last year, the firm closed about 1,800 family law cases, up by about 200 from the year before.
Leiserson said it was a “perennial truism” in the legal aid world that family law and rental housing cases are the most common service areas. Legal aid programs often prioritize cases involving domestic violence, divorce, eviction and subsidized housing.
Those issues are “a known quantity for people who are reaching out for assistance,” Leiserson said. “They are also very recognizable legal problems for members of the community.”
Other issues, like receiving a foreclosure notice or being denied unemployment benefits, might not read as legal problems. For that reason, case numbers might be low in an area because people are less likely to request help from legal aid programs.
In Pierce County, Washington, eviction filings rose 50% last year between April and October.
[ Read more of our housing coverage ]
Will Beck, assistant managing attorney for the Tacoma-Pierce county Housing Justice Project, said evictions are the most common case type closed in the Housing Justice program. That’s partially because of the high demand for representation and other legal help with evictions, he said.
“I think an interesting lens to look at was if we had more attorneys and funding to address issues outside of the actual eviction cases,” Beck said, “how many more cases would we see coming out of issues with security deposits, landlord harassment, habitability concerns or things like that?”
Foreclosure cases rose for some legal aid programs last year
For Legal Services of Greater Miami, consumer cases, including foreclosures, increased 2% in 2023. Sanchez-Bryson said the organization expects foreclosure cases to continue rising during the next few years.
“In going out into the community, talking to people and even watching the news,” she said, “you’re seeing people falling behind because they’re starting to not be able to afford their homeowners insurance or their association fees are going up.”
Tuggle said Southeast Louisiana Legal Services’ foreclosure cases went up about 50% last year.
“That is primarily driven by the extremely high cost of insurance, which is a kind of disaster-driven phenomenon,” she said. “So many insurers are leaving the market that they are really having trouble getting and affording new homeowners insurance.”
Also connected to her organization’s role in responding to natural disasters, Tuggle said that last year, the number of requests received for assistance with succession cases, also known as probate, rose 45%.
[ Read more: When subsidized housing isn’t safe, renters struggle to get help from HUD ]
Many of those cases stem from Hurricane Ida, the second-most damaging hurricane to make landfall in Louisiana history.
“For many kinds of disaster relief, you’ve got to prove you own the home,” Tuggle said. “We have a lot of people who are living in kind of informal resident situations in inherited properties and have never gone through the legal steps to make sure the property is in their name, so before they can get certain kinds of recovery assistance, they have to go through that.”
Most civil legal needs are unmet
During the pandemic, rents grew at record rates that tenants are still struggling to pay.
A record 50% of renters in the United States couldn’t afford rent in 2022, the most recent year with available data, according to a study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
Some states and communities have devoted funding to right-to-counsel pilots and permanent programs that ensure legal representation for renters facing eviction.
But with so much attention on eviction during the last few years, could that lead resources to be diverted away from people with other legal challenges?
When asked if that’s a concern for him, Flagg said LSC relies on its grantees to set priorities for their work based on their communities’ needs.
“Am I worried that if they take more housing cases they won’t have enough resources in other areas?” he said. “Yeah, for sure, but I can tell you if they devoted some of those resources devoted to housing to family or consumer cases, they’d still be turning away half the eligible people who come to their door, so the problem isn’t that they’re spending too much time on housing cases—It’s that their overall level of resources are way too low to handle the needs.”
LSC estimates that low-income Americans receive help for just 8% of their civil legal problems.
Contact Streetlight editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@streetlightnews.org. Follow her reporting by joining our newsletter.
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