BAEC Bulletin | March/April 2022 | 17
of non-financial services that could help address the problems that led to the risk of eviction. Wherever possible, representation of the tenants begins before any eviction paperwork is filed in court. Once the tenants become aware of the landlords’ desire to evict them, if the tenants reach out to one of the institutions taking part in the program, the institution will contact the landlords to try to work out arrangements in which the tenants may stay. Payment plans are drawn up. Counsel advocate for the tenants as human beings, to convince the landlords that the tenants are people worth keeping. Beyond all that, the program has been reaching out to the wider community with educational events explaining the rights tenants have and the resources that are available to them. Attorneys who practice in this field learn that the reality of their clients’ lives is more complicated than many people realize. Hanson says, “There’s definitely a heavy misconception about all the clients that legal-services- type agencies represent—that they’re poor because of something they did wrong or aren’t doing, and there’s a misconception that they’re manipulating the programs and being lazy.” She adds, “A lot of the tenants fell on hard times, or are in a cyclical-poverty problem they can’t get out of—where every time they take steps forward, they get knocked down again. It’s rare that tenants don’t want to better themselves. More often, because of the situation a tenant is in or has grown up in, they just can’t get a break.” Jennifer Metzger Kimura of Legal Aid says, “[T]he rental market has been increasingly becoming unaffordable and the pandemic has exacerbated these issues. When clients’ rents are more than 50 percent of the money you earn, you can never get ahead, and it’s just getting even worse.” Inevitably, even with counsel, tenants in many cases will not be able to stay where they are. Even in these cases, however, lawyers can aid their clients in important ways. One way is by working out a mutual termination (basically, an agreement for a voluntary scheduled departure), lest the client be branded with an eviction record. Another important service lawyers provide is buying their clients more time to find new shelter. Not only does this help protect the clients from homelessness, it also helps reduce the risk of certain adversities that can result from abrupt changes of residence. For instance, a client who lacked adequate time to find housing in the same or a nearby neighborhood may now have problems getting to his or her place of employment. As other examples, noted in a 2018 policy brief by the NYU Furman Center, “There is considerable concern that as time goes on, more eviction proceedings will lead more people to become homeless.”
“Evictions often cause households to move into lower- quality housing in neighborhoods with higher crime, more concentrated poverty, and fewer educational or employment opportunities. . . . Evictions may cause or exacerbate mental and physical health problems, and may disrupt a household’s social support networks” (Vicki Been, Deborah Rand, Nicole Summers & Jessica Yager, Implementing New York City’s Universal Access to Counsel Program: Lessons for Other Jurisdictions 3 [footnotes omitted]). The protection of vulnerable families and individuals is at the heart of our program’s mission. By making more resources available to tenants, by ensuring that more tenants will have an advocate in a process that matters so much to the lives they will lead, the state has improved the fairness of that process. •
Alan Williams, Esq., is a Staff Attorney with the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo, Inc.
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