Written by Robert Higgs in The Plain Dealer on 9/30/2019
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cleveland City Council voted Monday to establish a program to provide free legal advice to impoverished families with children.
The legislation is an effort to ease the upheaval for families facing eviction by giving them the ability to negotiate a better outcome through an advocate who knows the law.
“This is a huge step for us,” Councilman Anthony Brancatelli, one of the key sponsors of the legislation, said during a meeting of council’s Finance Committee. “I think this goes a long way toward stabilizing the community and stabilizing the families and looks to what’s best for all involved.”
If the legislation is signed by Mayor Frank Jackson, Cleveland would become the fourth city in the United States to establish such a right – San Francisco, New York and Newark, New Jersey are the others.
Jackson is likely to sign the legislation Tuesday. It would take effect with his signature.
Cleveland’s legislation does not identify a source of funding for the legal advice, though Council President Kevin Kelley said he expects the city would need to pick up some of the cost.
Roughly 10,000 eviction cases are filed each a year in Cleveland, according to the Legal Aid Society, which provides lawyers for some clients with incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty rate.
Landlords have a tremendous advantage when the cases come to Cleveland Housing Court because only 1% to 2% of tenants have legal representation, Legal Aid’s research shows.
About 75% of landlords appear with lawyers for eviction proceedings.
Once the programs for the new law are up and running, Housing Court Judge Ronald O’Leary envisions a lot of eviction cases being referred to mediation for settlement.
“The ideal situation is that the landlord and the tenant can come together and work out a deal that is beneficial to all,” O’Leary told the Finance Committee. “At the end of the day, eviction is a losing proposition for everyone involved.”
Hazel Remesch, an attorney for Legal Aid who helped spearhead the effort to get the program enacted, said that after New York launched its program, evictions dropped by 34 percent.
The focus on impoverished families is driven, in part, by who frequently faces eviction.
Research from Case Western Reserve University and Legal Aid found that about three-quarters of those facing eviction are women. More than 70% of those women are African American. Sixty percent of the cases involve children.
The legislation is the result of months of planning and research by the Housing Justice Alliance, a panel that includes Kelley, Brancatelli and others on City Council, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association and Cleveland Academy of Trial Attorneys.
Kelley said he hopes that the Cleveland program could be in place by June.
“This is going to take a lot of work,” Kelley said Monday. “We are still far from the finish line.”
Initial plans would have United Way of Greater Cleveland take the point on the program. The charitable agency would be able to connect tenants with lawyers and make referrals to other social service programs as needed.
Funding for the program still must be established. Kelley has said some money would have to come from the philanthropic community, but ultimately the city will be on the hook for a chunk of the tab.
His expectation is that at worst, the city won’t have to absorb more than $300,000 to pay for the annual cost for lawyers.
As a result of eviction, families and neighborhoods are destabilized, the ordinance states.
“I’m that family,” Councilman Kevin Conwell said at the Finance Committee hearing. “When I was young, we constantly moved from one part of Glenville to other parts of Glenville and to Hough. It always kept me behind [in school].
“I don’t want someone to have to grow up like I did, having to move from one area to another,” he said.