Eviction Protection Grant Program

  Overview

In FY 2021, PD&R launched the Eviction Protection Grant Program as part of HUD’s continued work, and broader whole-of-government approach, to support families recovering from the public health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first of its kind for the Department, the Eviction Protection Grant Program funds experienced legal service organizations providing legal assistance at no cost to low-income tenants at risk of, or subject to, eviction. With rising rents, record inflation, and economic uncertainty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, these services come at a critical time for families across the country and offer a unique demonstration opportunity for the Department and broader eviction diversion initiatives. PD&R announced inaugural awards to 10 legal service providers totaling $20 million in November 2021 and quickly expanded the program to an additional 11 grantees in May 2022 with another $20 million in FY 2022 funds.

  Program Objectives

The objectives and priorities of this program include but are not limited to:

1. Distributing federal financial support to nonprofit and governmental entities to provide legal assistance, at no cost, to low-income renters facing eviction or at risk of eviction in areas with high rates of evictions or risk of evictions.
2. Providing eviction protection services to historically underserved populations, including people of color, persons with limited English proficiency, and persons with disabilities.
3. Ensuring a proportionate distribution of funding amounts for rural areas, including Tribal lands, to the extent possible.
4. Building the evidence base for the activities most effective at preventing evictions and/or mitigating negative outcomes that result from evictions.

  Program Services and Beneficiaries

EPGP grantees provide a variety of legal services to low-income tenants facing eviction, including:

• education and outreach and “know your rights” campaigns
• legal information hotlines and legal advice
• housing court navigation
• legal representation (including in landlord negotiation/mediation)
• mass eviction response and prevention
• fair housing defense related to eviction
• service provider referrals and benefits assistance
• self-help technology like online form builders for responding to eviction notices
• collaboration with courts, judges, and others to create and promote eviction diversion programs

Beneficiaries served by the program must meet all three of the following criteria: (1) be a tenant, (2) be low-income, and (3) be at risk of or subject to eviction.

Grant Recipients

The program’s 21 grantees are serving tenants in 19 states, implementing a total of 11 statewide eviction protection programs as well as 12 local and regional programs. The grantees are:

Notice of Funding Opportunity

FY 2023/2024 Eviction Protection Grant Program Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)

What is eviction?

Eviction is a broad term that captures a variety of processes and means by which landlords remove tenants from their rental properties. Researchers, policymakers, and advocates have identified various types of eviction: court-ordered, extra-legal, and administrative. All three types of eviction are covered by this program’s definitions.

• Court-ordered evictions (also called formal or lawful evictions) include all eviction actions that take place through the legal system. The term covers both eviction filings and court-ordered eviction rulings.
• Extra-legal evictions (also called illegal, unlawful, informal, or self-evictions) refer to the measures that landlords take outside of the court system to evict or forcibly remove tenants. Extra-legal evictions do not leave a formal record. There are many ways a landlord can compel or entice a tenant to move without going to court, including threatening the tenant, changing the locks, shutting off the utilities, or paying the tenant a sum of money to move out (Desmond and Shollenberger, 2015).
• Administrative evictions refer to an option available only to PHAs to evict Public Housing residents via administrative action (and without a court determination), in accordance with HUD regulations, if such action is permitted by local law and after a due process administrative hearing.

What drives eviction?

Nationwide, the most common cause of eviction is nonpayment of rent, driven by a national shortage of affordable housing, particularly for low-income households. Evidence indicates that landlords consider eviction as a last resort and will often file to collect arrears of rent rather than solely to displace a tenant.

• Lack of affordable, available housing makes it difficult for low-income renters to weather income disruptions or unexpected expenses.. Nationwide, there is a significant shortage of affordable housing, with only 62 affordable housing units available for every 100 very low-income households as of 2019. More than two in three low-income renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, including more than 10 million households who spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent and utilities (Worst Case Housing Needs, 2021).
• When money is tight, relatively low levels of arrearages can result in eviction and displacement in the absence of other resolution supports or diversion options. Recent analysis of court records assembled by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University found that half of all the eviction cases filed in Cincinnati between April and August 2020 involved rental debts of $1,200 or less (evictionlab.org). In Houston, over the same period, half of all cases involved $1,411 or less and in Phoenix, half of all cases involved less than $1,643 (Louis, Durana, and Hepburn, 2020). Similarly, a study of eviction filings in Washington, DC between 2014 and 2018 found that the average tenant receiving an eviction filing owed about $1,207 at the time the eviction was filed (Rosen and McCabe, 2020).

Other major local factors affecting the likelihood a landlord will file for eviction include the cost of the filing fee, the expected duration of the proceeding, and the tenant’s access to eviction defense (Nelson et al, 2021). But a myriad of other factors can put a tenant at risk of eviction. In some localities, even calling an emergency number to request help may put tenants at risk of eviction due to local ordinances that make landlords responsible for excessive calls to emergency numbers (Moran-McCabe, Gutman, and Buris, 2018).

Who gets evicted?

Millions of families face eviction each year, whether through formal court processes or informally, outside the court system. There is strong evidence, however, that landlords do not pursue evictions equally across households. Black and Hispanic women, as well as families with children, are disproportionately affected by eviction—and the long-term consequences are significant.

• Poor families with children are more likely to be evicted. Between 1998 and 2000, almost 15 percent of American children born in large cities had experienced an eviction by age 15. The percentage was approximately 29 percent for children living in deep poverty (Lundberg and Donnelly, 2019).
• People of color and women are more likely to be evicted. In 2020, analysis of Eviction Lab data found that, while Black renters constituted 19.9% of all renters in the counties for which the organization had data, they constituted 32.7% of all eviction filings. In all, one in every five adult renters in the sample was Black, yet one in every three evictions were served to a Black renter. Furthermore, across all renters, the risk of eviction was approximately 2% higher for women than for men. Among Black renters this increases to 4%, and for Latinx renters it jumps to 9% (https://evictionlab.org/demographics-of-eviction/).
• Living in a white neighborhood can also increase the risk of eviction for people of color. Research shows that among tenants at risk of eviction, Hispanic tenants in predominantly white neighborhoods were roughly twice as likely to be evicted as those in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. Hispanic tenants were also more likely to get evicted when they had a non-Hispanic landlord (Greenberg, Gershenson, and Desmond, 2016).
• Eviction negatively affects housing stability, health, and employment, with notable long-term consequences for children experiencing eviction. Evictions cause large and persistent increases in the risk of homelessness, elevate long-term residential instability, and increase emergency room use (Collinson and Reed, 2018). Analysis from Urban and Eviction Lab’s Matt Desmond (2015) found that evicted mothers were more than twice as likely to report that their children were in poor health compared with mothers who had not experienced an eviction (Desmond and Kimbro, 2015). Eviction can also effect a child’s development before they are even born; Cordova-Ramos et al (2021) found that eviction during pregnancy, particularly during the second and third trimesters, was associated with lower birth weight (Himmelstein and Desmond, 2021).

Why does representation matter?

While most landlords are represented during eviction proceedings, most tenants are not. This prevents most tenants from engaging in informed mediation or accessing proper legal defenses. Correspondingly, this asymmetry leaves tenants more vulnerable to landlords who exploit the scarcity of legal assistance by pursuing extra-legal evictions, filing fraudulent or less justified evictions, raising claim amounts, and expediting evictions without providing proper time for tenants to vacate the property.

Representation is a proven intervention in the eviction process. Representation can help tenants prevent eviction in the courtroom, whether through judgement or mediation. Representation can also prevent filings or removals from occurring in the first place by staving off illegal evictions and educating tenants about their rights. Finally, legal assistance is an important component of broader eviction diversion and remediation programming that helps struggling tenants access stabilizing resources.

What does research indicate are the effects of giving tenants right to counsel?

• New York’s right to counsel decreased evictions overall by 18 percent (Navarro, 2016), declining over five times faster in zip codes with a right to counsel (Oksana, 2019). NYC also saw a decrease in executed warrants of eviction and likely increased tenants’ ability to access legal services (Ellen et al, 2019).
• A study in Baltimore found that an annual investment of $5.7 million in a right to counsel program in Baltimore would yield $35.6 million in benefits or costs avoided to the city and state.
• A similar study in Cleveland found that implementation of a right to counsel prevented eviction judgments and allowed clients to achieve housing goals at high rates.
• A study in Minnesota found fully represented tenants win or settle their cases 96 percent of the time and clients receiving limited representation win or settle their cases 83 percent of the time. These figures compare with just 62 percent of tenants without any representation. Tenants with full representation were twice as likely to stay in their homes or got twice as much time to move, left court without an eviction record, and were four times less likely to use homeless shelters (Grundman & Kruger, 2018).
• A demonstration in San Francisco found representation decreased homelessness for vulnerable tenants (San Francisco Demonstration Program). A California-wide program found that representation increased mediation, either preventing eviction or providing tenants time to find new living arrangements; even when evicted, they were left in a better position (Shriver Act Evaluation, 2017).
• The American Bar Association recommends a right to counsel for eviction defendants.

Evaluation of the Eviction Protection Grant Program

The evaluation component of the Eviction Protection Grant Program is comprised of an implementation analysis utilizing qualitative and quantitative data to understand how the Eviction Protection Grant Program reduces or prevents eviction among program participants. The evaluation will comprehensively document program implementation, including a review and collection of data to understand implementation successes and challenges, the characteristics of grantees and other stakeholders, the types of client services provided, how grantees work with other social service providers, and program outcomes. Of key interest is determining how legal assistance was paired with other housing services and opportunities to provide eviction protection services more effectively or efficiently through the program. The final report is expected in Fall 2024.

The following are vignettes concerning real-life client experiences. These narratives were provided by program grantees within the first 6 months of program launch and detail early examples of actual client experiences and outcomes that have been supported with grant funds. Client information has been anonymized and edited for length and clarity.

  Government Media

• HUD Awards $20 Million for Eviction Protection and Diversion (HUD)
• HUD Expands Eviction Protection and Diversion Program with Additional $20 Million (HUD)
• HUD Doubles Funding for the Eviction Protection Grant Program (USICH)
• New Legal Assistance NOFO: Eviction Protection Grant Program (HUD PD&R)
• HUD Expands Eviction Protection and Diversion Program with Additional $20 Million (HUD Exchange)

  National Media

• Federal eviction protection program doubles to $20 million (NBC)
• HUD Expands Its Eviction Grant Program (DS News)
• $20 Million HUD Grant Doubles Size of Eviction Legal Help (US News)
• The Fight Against Evictions Moves to the Courts (Bloomberg)

  Local Media

Florida

• Jacksonville veteran facing eviction receives help just in time



"I encourage all the people who are going through what I'm going through to make sure to call the Jacksonville Area Legal Aid office," said Strickland. "It's been so much of a relief, right now I can probably go to sleep tonight because I haven't gotten any rest for the last 3 months."

• Jacksonville woman says former landlord can't find her Our Florida rent payment
• “Someone is lying," Swift said. "I have the return receipt where someone from Mainstreet signed for the check on April 22. They sold our property on April 21.”
• Help is available now that Our Florida is done accepting applications
• “If you're facing eviction, the Jacksonville Area Legal Aid eviction court form builder tool was created before the pandemic and still offers timely guidance. ‘We continue to change it to meet the needs and the moment with the defenses that are out there and the legal landscape that is out there,’ says Garrow, 'it will most assuredly be there and be active and updated to reflect what options and defenses people have now.’”

Idaho

• Boise nonprofit Jesse Tree finds illegal clauses written into leases of Treasure Valley tenants



“What they were doing was criminal,” he said. “The company was not charging me directly, but they were hurting the tenants. I advised the tenants to go through Idaho Legal Aid because there are people who can help them.”

Louisiana

• Lafayette to receive grant for eviction prevention assistance

Maine

• Pine Tree Legal among recipients as HUD doubles eviction help
• “We need to keep doing all that we can to help people maintain quality housing,” Fudge said in a statement. “We know that access to legal services and eviction diversion programs works. It helps people avoid evictions and protects tenants’ rights.”

Nevada

• Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada helps Las Vegas residents concerned about evictions
• The Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada has partnered with Las Vegas-Clark County Library District to provide free legal help.