Volunteer Lawyer Army Braces for Eviction Fight After Biden Plea

The volunteer army of lawyers gearing up nationwide to fight eviction filings, fill out aid applications for renters, and mediate landlord disputes is racing to keep people in their homes after federal efforts fell short.

A long-feared wave of individual eviction cases is likely to hit courts across the country after the Supreme Court rejected the president’s last-ditch effort to protect hundreds of thousands of tenants who have fallen behind on rent during the pandemic.

After its loss in court, the Justice Department is asking legal aid groups to school big law attorneys and legal students on how to counsel a massive number of struggling tenants. The ad hoc group, assembled on the fly, faces a tight deadline to get lawyers more accustomed to corporate boardrooms ready for eviction court.

“You might have a lot of really smart lawyers, but they’re used to doing multinational corporate mergers, and they’ve never seen the inside of a landlord-tenant court,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-Pa.) “So you need to give them the materials they need.”

The Justice Department is also asking volunteer lawyers to help landlords and tenants get available relief money after a slew of states and counties weren’t up to the job.

‘Build a Plane as We Fly It’

Congress set up a $46.5 billion fund last December to help these families, but the vast bureaucratic machinery has prevented all but a fraction of that money from reaching tenants and landlords. State and local governments disbursed just 11% of that funding through July, according to the Treasury Department.

To be sure, Congress didn’t intend for states to spend it all at once—the funding is designed to be used over five years. But the clock is ticking in many states, where evictions can be processed in a number of weeks. Landlords across the country could evict as many as 750,000 households in the next three months, according to according to analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Attorneys spearheading the volunteer effort said they could potentially draw on thousands of lawyers across the country to help renters seek funding and fight off evictions in court, but the group is just ramping up after getting the call for help from the Justice Department this week.

“Pre-pandemic, we didn’t really have the infrastructure in state courts to keep people housed,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta told Bloomberg Law. “And we are kind of trying to build a plane as we fly it right now.”

‘The Cases are Fast’

The volunteer attorneys’ immediate mission is as much about “building awareness” among lawyers and renters as it is providing on-the-ground assistance, said Kiisha Morrow, a Cravath, Swaine & Moore lawyer who is co-president of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance. The group is holding a Thursday volunteer training session along with the Association of Pro Bono Counsel.

For the hundreds of thousands of U.S. households facing eviction and those looking to help them, time is of the essence. In Virginia, for example, legal aid attorney Brenda Castañeda said the evictions process usually takes about 45 to 60 days.

“The cases are fast. They don’t linger for years,” Castañeda said.

Castañeda and legal aid attorneys in New York and South Carolina said new volunteers need time to get up to speed before they can represent renters in local housing courts. In the meantime, those lawyers can provide vital assistance in helping people tap the billions of dollars the federal government is trying to send as a lifeline.

The administration is pushing states to deliver that money, with some success.

States, Local Governments

The Emergency Rental Assistance Program is overseen by the Treasury Department but relies on state and local governments to distribute the funds. Few governments already had effective rental assistance programs set up before the pandemic, let alone the infrastructure to deliver the unprecedented tranche of aid,
a Treasury Department official working on the program said.

The Treasury Department is pressing states and localities to drop burdensome paperwork requirements and allow applicants to “self-attest” to their financial hardship. It also recently published answers to “frequently asked questions,” about the program, a move that helped spur activity by states earlier this year, according to the Treasury Department official.

Cities such as San Diego, Calif., and Austin, Texas, have delivered most or all of their rental aid, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

White House officials and Cabinet secretaries hosted at least two eviction prevention summits over the summer for state and local governments. As a previous moratorium neared expiration in June, Gupta urged state courts to require landlords apply for rental assistance before filing for eviction for missed rent payments.

“Evictions that have been moving forward in those places despite the moratorium, because people just don’t know what their rights are at all, and they don’t have attorneys,” Judith Goldiner, who works at the Legal Aid Society in New York, told Bloomberg Law.

Blame Game

In early August, Democrats and housing advocates blasted the administration for allowing a previous eviction ban to expire. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the chamber’s Democratic leaders called on the president to immediately extend the ban, which Biden’s team initially said was legally dubious and required Congress to act.

Gene Sperling, who oversees the distribution of funds from Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package, at the time blamed states for the slow trickle of aid.

“There is simply no excuse, no place to hide for any state or locality that is failing to accelerate” aid distribution, Sperling told reporters in early August.

The Biden administration later changed course and announced a narrower, temporary ban on evictions, applying in geographic areas facing significant threats from the coronavirus delta variant. That gave the administration more time to stand up the sluggish rental assistance program—until the Supreme Court rejected it.

President Joe Biden himself questioned its legality hours before the announcement.

“The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” he told reporters. “But there are several key scholars who think that it may—and it’s worth the effort.”

Time Crunch

Gupta said the call for volunteer lawyers came in response to feedback from local court officials who need more attorneys to help renters navigate the legal process.

“The state courts are really at the front lines of this and they were speaking about how tenants and landlords and courts need able bodies in there to connect tenants and landlords with rental assistance,” Gupta said.

Despite the administration’s concern that the ban would be struck down in court, its discussions with the outside groups about calling up a small army of volunteer lawyers has been happening in real time, over the last couple of days.

Legal aid attorneys who have been working on the ground since long before the pandemic are happy to have more bodies. Their message to the newcomers: Don’t expect the federal government to come to the rescue.

“We always move on the assumption that we’re not going to be magically rescued by a new moratorium,” Castañeda said.