Originally published: Law Week Colorado
It’s no surprise that rental rates in Denver continue climb, but one factor usually doesn’t make the connection: the growing price tag of legal representation for those facing eviction.
A forthcoming report on eviction by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy compiled Denver County court data from 2014 to 2016. The sample looks at every eviction case led by the Denver Housing Authority and from seven private property management companies. The report found that in 100 percent of those cases, a property manager or housing authority had representation, whereas tenants of the housing authority only had representation roughly 3 percent of the time. That number fell to about 1 to 2 percent for tenants in private housing depending on the year. “What this tells us is it’s not a fair playing field in Denver county eviction court,” CCLP attorney Jack Regenbogen said.
The report includes data from the city of Denver stretching back to 2001, though Regenbogen noted it’s primarily cases occurring between 2008 and 2016. During that period, there were approximately 93,000 cases of eviction, and tenants in about 800 of those cases, roughly 1 percent, had representation in court. Regenbogen said that in cases where a tenant did have a lawyer, their chances of preventing eviction were much higher. “The access gap is enormous. The number of tenants that do get representation is very small,” Colorado Poverty Law Project vice president Tom Snyder said.
Snyder said the clients he assists usually don’t understand their rights in these cases. The Colorado Poverty Law Project provides legal counseling, direct representation and assistance in landlord negotiations. Colorado Legal Services also offers support, but it solely handles eviction for those in subsidized housing only, which Snyder says is about 20 percent of all cases. There are different types of federal housing assistance. Some are tied to the unit itself, while other programs like Section 8 vouchers through the Denver Housing Authority allow a tenant to find a place and utilize the voucher. But supervising attorney for the CLS Denver housing unit Leslie Ebert said sometimes finding a private landlord that will accept the vouchers can be difficult. “For the most part, a landlord can say ‘I’m not accepting a section 8 voucher,’ or even if they rent to them for a year, they can say ‘You know, I’m no longer into this program, bye.’”
And though resources like Colorado Affordable Legal Services serve low income tenants facing eviction, Regenbogen feels none of it is enough. “It’s a drop in the bucket when we see around 8,000 evicted each year in Denver alone. It’s around 45,000 statewide,” he said. Data from the Colorado Eviction Defense Center found a 6 percent increase between 2015 and 2016 in the number of total forcible entry and detainer cases led in Denver County court.
Most of the time, everyday people don’t understand courtroom expectations and procedures for submitting evidence. Snyder says when an individual attempts to self-represent, they could do more harm than good for their case.
“You can’t just show up in court with your cell phone and start showing the judge all the photos you’ve taken of what you think are squalid conditions,” Snyder said. He added that even in the event a tenant has a valid habitability defense, they may take the first out, like assigning a judgment that buys them a week to stay when they could have negotiated more time or possibly prevented the eviction altogether, something he referred to as “catastrophic” once it’s on a person’s record.
“I always liken eviction to a divorce. Oftentimes, when a landlord brings an eviction, whether the tenant feels the landlord is right or wrong they decide they want to move too, because who wants to stay with a hostile landlord?”
Colorado Poverty Law Project vice president Tom Snyder
Snyder acknowledged increased housing costs are becoming a major player in evictions. He said that in Denver’s seller’s market, when property owners and landlords want to turn property over to a developer, they seek to evict in order to make that happen, and sometimes the claims may not be entirely valid. He mentioned two mobile home parks, one in Jefferson County and one in Adams County.
“I have met with individuals in these trailer parks, and clearly the pattern is to start writing people up and start laying the groundwork for evictions, not related to payment. Nonpayment, of course, is usually a pretty good reason to evict somebody, but usually they’re related to infractions that are minor and maybe not even real in order to build a case to evict people,” Snyder said.
The 2017 Denver Metro Apartment Vacancy and Rent report for Q1, published by the Apartment Association of Metro Denver found that average monthly rent increased to $1,382 per month. The report noted that average rent has risen from $800 in 2002.
The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies defines cost-burdened renters as those who spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. In 2015, 47.9 percent of Denver County was cost-burdened, while about 52 percent of Fort Collins and Colorado Springs spent over 30 percent on housing costs. The metro Boulder County area’s rent burdened population was the highest in the state at 56 percent. (Update: The Colorado Legislature passed SB-180 to create a statewide Eviction Legal Defense Fund in May 2019)
April L. Jones, managing attorney for Colorado Affordable Legal Services noted the financial burden that legal representation places on tenants usually makes it simply out of reach for those already struggling to make rent.
“Tenants generally do not have the funds to pay for legal representation. They as a group are generally living from paycheck to paycheck. They’re spending more than 40 to 50 percent on living expenses and rent,” Jones said.
Last month, New York City passed an ordinance guaranteeing legal representation to those that meet the income requirements (200 percent or less of the federal poverty level). Snyder said Denver is one of the largest cities without some type of volunteer lawyer program in place to assist those facing evictions. He noted that other places like Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles have these types of programs in place and said those cities don’t have the same number of pro se parties in court.
“In some cases, the city might chip in half a million, a million, but a little bit can go a long way when we’re looking at social disparity and access to justice,” Regenbogen said.
Four initiatives were introduced on matters of tenants’ rights and evictions last legislative session, but only Senate Bill 245 passed in June. It requires landlords to give adequate notice to tenants renting on a month-to-month basis, extending the notice requirement from seven days to 21. Most other states require that a landlord provide at least 30 days’ notice.
“Seven days is just an insanely short amount of time for anyone to find new housing, let alone people who might have to find particular type of housing,” Regenbogen said. He added that for parents who want to stay in the same school district or for people with disabilities who need certain housing accommodations, this can be especially challenging.
An eviction record in many states including Colorado is public information. Some states have attempted mitigation efforts for what the Colorado Eviction Defense Center executive director Floyd Jones calls the ‘scarlet letter’ of an eviction on one’s record. Minnesota passed a bill in 2015 that allows for expungement of eviction-related records. California’s unlawful detainer “masking” law previously allowed access to cases where eviction proceedings may have been initiated but the tenant paid rent or fulfilled a notice to cure stipulation, yet the record still remained. The law was changed last year and now allows for records to remain sealed unless a landlord or property manager wins the case.
The Denver Office of Housing and Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) proposed a partnership to begin tackling what Jones calls an epidemic. The program will focus on eviction assistance, pulling in data from the Office of Economic Development, the Department of Environmental Health and Denver Human Services to identify at-risk neighborhoods. It will also implement a temporary emergency housing assistance pilot program and expand the DHS program that assists tenants in court, an initiative that partners with Denver City Council.
“It’s absolutely critical that our city and county and local officials pay attention to what’s going on. This is not DIY. You can’t point people to a website and go ‘Ok, if you get served with this paper, then check this box.’ These people are facing the loss of their homes.”
Floyd Jones, Eviction Defense Center executive director