City-funded legal representation for tenants facing eviction

Legislation is always more flexible than ballot measures, and it doesn’t require overloading citizens with complicated topics. Many actions require or are easier with ballot measures, especially new taxes, but Prop F is not in that camp. Its funding comes from the General Fund, and two Supervisors — Sheehy and President Breed — introduced similar legislation in November 2017. Their bill also improves upon the measure by excluding evictions due to domestic abuse, and including more overall detail.

The ease with which we could provide eviction counsel without a ballot measure suffices for me to vote no on it. I also question some of the assumptions behind the motives, which make it that much more important for it to go through legislative channels so they can be fully investigated:

• How effective is the program? Sheehy and Breed’s plan is modeled after a 2012 pilot, a report on which found that “tenants are more likely to stay in their homes when provided full-scope representation [compared to limited-scope representation].” But tenants weren’t randomly assigned representation levels, so this could have been due to factors unrelated to the program. While the report estimated cost savings, the authors acknowledged they were based on questionable assumptions.
• Does it affect the housing supply? It’s reasonable to expect the right to counsel to increase the number of eviction-related lawsuits or challenges. Some of these will cost the landlord time and/or money, and these costs can reduce the supply of rentable housing, as potential landlords decide against entering, and existing ones decide to exit the business to avoid these costs (even if they were engaging in wrongful evictions, these costs can be real). All renter protections need to be weighed against higher rents from impact to the housing supply.
• Is it the best use of $5 million+ per year? For example, does it mostly benefit low-income people? How expensive is the program in administrative overhead costs? Even if our sole goal is housing security, how does it compare to something like giving $100 per year to each household with income below $35,000 (e.g., by expanding the Working Families Credit)?

Some of these questions may have been better addressed in the full 32-page report, or in other analyses of similar programs. But I haven’t had time to fully dig into the matter, and that’s kind of the point: it’s a complicated issue that should be investigated by legislators and their staff, adjusting the law before it goes into effect and continually monitored (the ballot measure doesn’t mention evaluation). However noble the goal, mechanisms matter.