Forced Out?: Civil Legal Access and Housing Stability

Recent legal developments, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson and the proposed Eviction Right to Counsel Act of 2024, have highlighted the urgency of addressing housing instability and homelessness. Some have advocated expanding access to legal counsel as one solution. In the United States, tenants usually face eviction on their own, while landlords are typically represented by an attorney. Although it seems intuitive that legal representation would help tenants facing eviction, measuring the effects of counsel is quite challenging, because represented and unrepresented tenants are dissimilar across many dimensions, including wealth. A handful of randomized experiments suggest lawyers have appreciable impacts in housing court, but results are mixed, and these studies’ generalizability to the larger universe of civil legal housing assistance programs remains uncertain. This Article addresses that gap through a quasi-experimental evaluation of legal aid organizations funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the single largest funder of civil legal aid for low-income Americans in the nation. LSC grantees serve over 1.7 million people each year. This Article employs census data covering millions of households and exploits an eligibility rule that limits LSC services to households earning less than 125% of the federal poverty level. Using several methodological approaches, including regression-discontinuity, differences-in-differences, and a dose-response analysis, this Article demonstrates that access to civil legal aid improves housing stability. Our estimates suggest that LSC enables 75,000 households to maintain their housing each year at a rough cost of around $2,000 per prevented move. These impacts are on par with those observed in high-quality randomized trials, suggesting that civil legal aid, unlike many other interventions, does not lose efficacy with scale. Our large sample sizes allow us to measure how impacts of civil legal access vary for particular population subgroups, something not possible in prior work. Our findings suggest that access to civil legal aid is particularly beneficial for seniors aged 65+, people with less than a high school degree, Asians, and people who do not speak English well. Our findings highlight the important role that funding legal aid can play in curbing housing instability and homelessness.