KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The cockroach infestation in Khatib Williams’ kitchen was the first of many red flags signaling he needed to get out of his place owned by Citadel Apartments, near 61st Street and The Paseo.
“They were everywhere,” Williams said. “They were in places I’d never imagine. I couldn’t even use my microwave to warm up some pizza.”
Williams wanted out, but his complex automatically renewed his lease after six months, due to a stipulation in his lease. When Williams withheld rent while trying to figure out what to do, the landlord served him an eviction notice — the building is one of the top evictors in Kansas City.
Even though he had wanted to leave that apartment, Williams knew an eviction would damage his rental record, making it harder to find a new place to live. He reached out to the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom for help.
With representation from a lawyer, instead of being evicted, Williams won a settlement.
“When you don’t know anything, people take advantage of you,” Williams said. “[The lawyers] were there to inform me of everything I wasn’t familiar with.”
A new city program called Right to Counsel is hoping to make Williams’ experience in court more of the norm in Kansas City, granting free legal representation to any tenant facing eviction.
And with his experience, Williams is working to ensure the program’s success by serving on its official advisory board.
So far, the outcomes are promising. The program is working.
Right to Counsel has helped dozens of tenants keep their homes or postpone eviction, and among the hundreds of tenants who have been enrolled, the program has dramatically reduced the number of cases that have ended in eviction.
But the program has been off to a slower start than those who pushed for its creation for years had hoped. Initial outreach efforts lagged. Kansas City has not hired someone specifically to oversee the program, even though the ordinance required that the city hire a program director. For now, other staff members in the city’s housing department have absorbed the role into their jobs.
The Right to Counsel program is not at capacity to serve all the tenants in Kansas City who are at risk of eviction. As word gets out and more tenants learn about their rights, the number of lawyers may not be enough to keep up with the demand for services. And the city has yet to identify a sustainable way to pay for the program after its initial budget runs out.
“The city did not exactly grab the bull by the horns in terms of implementing this program,” said Tara Raghuveer, director of city-wide tenant union KC Tenants, one of the groups that pushed the city to create the program. “What we will be eager to see is the city committing to Right to Counsel not as a program, but as a guaranteed right that all Kansas Citians can expect to be fulfilled by the city.”
Another leader with KC Tenants, Tiana Caldwell, told The Kansas City Star she’s hopeful, but she wants to see more promotion for the program and for the city to deliver on all its promises.
“It’s about evening the playing field for everybody here in the city,” she said. “It’s about making sure that we’re all okay.”
City manager Brian Platt told The Star that he’s proud of the early strides the program has made, but that he knows more work needs to be done, especially with outreach and hiring.
“We’re very hopeful about the continued progress we’re going to make as we build and expand this program down the road,” he said.
Why focus on evictions?
Widespread research shows that evictions are a contributing factor to homelessness, increasing someone’s chances of needing shelter services, and that losing stable housing makes it much harder for someone to find new housing.
And in cities across the country, evictions disproportionately impact Black and Latino women.
“If you are evicted, then you are less likely to be able to rent in the future,” said Councilwoman Andrea Bough, who represents Kansas City’s 6th District at large. “And so it perpetuates an endless cycle of houselessness and difficulty with renting.”
Eviction is also closely linked with the affordable housing crisis. In September, Kansas City reported that nearly 20% of tenants are “severely cost-burdened,” which means they pay more than 50% of their income toward housing.
This rent burden disproportionately affects Kansas City’s lowest income renters, who make 30% of the average median income or less. The city does not have enough housing for its lowest income renters. The September report found that Kansas City is more than 27,000 units short of being able to house renters in this lowest income group.
That pushes those tenants into more precarious housing situations, with more than 60% of lowest income renters paying more than 50% of their income toward rent, putting them at higher risk of eviction with few options of other places to live.
Groups in Kansas City including KC Tenants, the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, Stand Up KC and the Missouri Workers Center worked and campaigned to get the city to create the Right to Counsel program, which city council passed in December to launch in June.
Prior to the program’s launch, city officials reported 99% of eviction cases filed ended up resulting in the tenant being evicted. In those cases, tenants had legal representation in about 1% of cases, while about 90% of landlords had lawyers.
What it means to have a ‘right to counsel’
As of June, any tenant in Kansas City facing eviction has the right to a city-sponsored attorney to represent them in court and help them with their case. There are no other qualifiers to participate in the program: It doesn’t matter what your household income is or what ZIP code you live in, as long as you’re in Kansas City limits.
Having the program open to anyone facing eviction is relatively unique. Kansas City is the 13th city in the country to offer a program of its kind, but only one of five without some kind of income restrictions.
“We eliminated all of that, and simply allow any tenant being sued by their landlord to have access to the program,” said Gina Chiala, executive director of the Heartland Center, which is one of the organizations providing lawyers and training.
The city contracts lawyers from the Heartland Center, Legal Aid and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Community CareLink handles the intake process, making sure that a tenant is eligible and then assigning them to one of the three legal service organizations. Each agency takes on cases based on availability.
The program also works to resolve cases by connecting tenants to rental assistance if their eviction case is because of past due rent, with the help of United Way and the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Center. Since 2021, nearly 6,000 individuals and families have applied for and received $30 million in rent and utility assistance through the center in Kansas City.
Even if a tenant would qualify for that assistance, if their eviction case moves along before they get the money, they can still lose their home. Right to Counsel lawyers are working with the courts to slow cases down while tenants wait for that assistance to come through.
So, is it working?
Chiala said that the Right to Counsel program is already making serious strides.
Between June and August, 372 cases have been referred to the program, and 243 cases are processing. By August, 40 cases were dismissed or decided in favor of the tenant, and 35 cases gave the client more time in their home before the judge ruled on the case, according to the program’s initial report.
The city reported that only 20% of the cases where tenants have been able to receive representation or rental assistance from the city have resulted in eviction, compared to 99% before. That means about 80% of those who got help from the Right to Counsel program avoided eviction.
That’s slightly lower but on par with early data from Right to Counsel programs in other places. Cleveland’s program has helped 93% of its clients avoid eviction. In New York, 86% of renters represented by the program avoided eviction.
“The initial results from Kansas City’s Right to Counsel program are amazing,” Kansas City’s Housing and Community Development Department director Jane Pansing Brown said in a statement. “Counsel for landlords and tenants have been able to amicably resolve a significant number of cases through settlement or dismissal.”
But beyond the data, Chiala at the Heartland Center said she has seen a more intangible effect — hope among tenants who are at risk of losing their homes.
“I was in the halls of the courts doing outreach to tenants and I spoke to a mother, she had her toddler with her,” Chiala said. “I explained to her that she now had a right to an attorney and to witness the shift in her morale was amazing.”
More tenants evicted than the city can help
According to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, about 9,000 evictions are filed in Jackson County each year. So far, only a fraction of those are benefiting from the new city program.
In the time that the first several hundred tenants were enrolled in Kansas City’s program to get representation, thousands of evictions were filed in the county. According to Eviction Lab, nearly 2,300 evictions were filed in Jackson County in June, July and August.
That number isn’t exactly apples to apples though, because it includes tenants in parts of Jackson County beyond Kansas City proper, but it doesn’t include Kansas Citians in Clay, Platte or Cass counties.
“Our initial numbers indicate we are serving approximately 120 family units each month,” Melissa Kozakiewicz, a city spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “If that average holds true, we will serve 1,400 to 1,500 family units each year if those individuals continue to choose to use our program.”
Eventually, some hope Right to Counsel will operate similarly to a public defender’s office where every person in need of representation can access a lawyer, which is how the ordinance that created the program designed it to be.
As of Sep. 12, about 10 to 15 lawyers were staffed on the program, with each lawyer prepared to take on between 100 to 120 cases each year, according to the three legal organizations.
All three agencies said that more help would be needed as the program grows, and that more people need legal help than those who know about the program so far.
“We are seeing that the need is so intense that we need a couple more folks,” said Alicia Johnson, executive director of Legal Aid of Western Missouri.
Johnson said there is enough funding for additional lawyers, but the hard part is finding attorneys who are eager to join the program. Legal Aid, UMKC and the Heartland Center said they are all actively recruiting.
One of the biggest challenges is needing to compete with law firms that can offer higher wages and finding people passionate about public interest work, according to Thomas from UMKC School of Law.
Thomas said that the public interest sector typically pays attorneys around $40,000 to $45,000 per year, whereas private sector lawyers could start out upwards of $60,000 to $65,000.
“I think in terms of our call to action, it would be incredibly helpful if there are compassionate, zealous advocates out there who have an interest in doing public interest work, and have an interest in really working with some of the most vulnerable members in our city,” Johnson said.
Platt said the city is committed to staffing up the program.
“As our outreach continues and grows, we’ll obviously need to hire more attorneys and expand our contracts that we’re using for that sort of thing,” he said.
Do enough tenants know they have a right to counsel?
In its first months over the summer, most clients reached out to the Right to Counsel program for help proactively, which meant that residents who were unfamiliar with the program could miss out on legal help.
The city didn’t initially hire someone to direct the program, which was a requirement of the ordinance. The role of coordinating between the city and the legal service organizations and leading outreach fell to Jane Brown, director of Kansas City’s Department of Housing and Community Development. In mid-August, the city tasked its deputy director for local and state initiatives, Kyle Elliot, with running the program.
Platt said the position was posted this spring — with critieria for the position developed in collaboration with KC Tenants — and that the hiring process has been delayed due to a lack of qualified applicants.
“We very much hope to hire a dedicated staff, specifically focusing on the program,” he said. “But you know, we’ve had that position posted for a while, we’ve been doing a search for candidates for that [position], and we’re still working on it.”
To give more people a better chance at keeping their homes, the city and legal organizations have recently started boosting their outreach efforts to let more tenants know about the program.
Since the start of September, Kansas City has coordinated with Jackson County to get notifications about every eviction filed in the county and mails a letter to every person in the city who has had an eviction filed against them. In the week of Sept. 1, that was 78 people.
Housing Director Brown said that the surrounding Platte and Clay counties are both experiencing staffing challenges that have prevented them from sending the city more information on tenants who have been evicted each week.
“We will continue to reach out to Clay and Platte and work with them and we are very hopeful that at some time in the future, they will be able to provide us with the same list the Jackson County provides us with every week,” Brown said.
Raghuveer said that contacting every tenant with an eviction filed against them is the baseline of outreach that the city needs to be doing.
“The city is on the hook via the legislation that we wrote to enshrine the right to counsel to do proactive outreach to any tenants who have received an eviction filing against them, to inform them of their right,” she said.
For now, lawyers are working to fill that information gap and let tenants know about their rights.
In Platte County, Legal Aid lawyers video chat into the docket for outreach every Tuesday morning. During their announcement, they notify tenants of rental assistance and let them know that they might be eligible for Right to Counsel.
In Jackson County, around 10 lawyers from all three organizations pile into the courthouse each Thursday to connect with clients, answer questions for tenants in need and introduce people to the program. In most courtrooms, there are also flyers describing the program and how to apply.
Getting the word out has helped judges, too, according to Ashlee Crowl, an attorney with UMKC. She said she’s seen judges become more tenant-friendly since the program launched, making sure tenants get connected with lawyers and seeing that they apply for rental assistance before moving a case forward.
United Way is working with the Right to Counsel program to connect those who call their 211 hotline to get legal help or rent assistance, according to Jim MacDonald, United Way of Greater Kansas City chief impact officer.
“We’ll ask them if they’ve been sued by their landlord and we find a lot of people that way,” MacDonald said. “It’s a very effective way of finding people who need the service.”
The future of evictions in Kansas City
An advisory board tasked with ensuring the program’s success is also focused on making sure more tenants know about it, according to Elizabeth Walburn, a lawyer with UMKC, and Khatib Williams, the tenant who avoided an eviction because he had a lawyer and is now a housing advocate.
The board is made up of lawyers like Walburn who are advisory members and tenants like Khatib Williams who are voting members. It has met twice so far and is still working to find its stride, Walburn said.
Williams said that he’s happy to be working with the board as an advocate who understands how tricky the eviction process can be and that the program is helping more people in situations like his.
“I joined forces with the right people just to get that message out and spread awareness and give people knowledge and hope that they can get out of a situation that they feel they can’t get out of,” he said.
For now, the program is slated to spend about $700,000 of its initial $2.5 million in funding. The city has yet to figure out how it will keep the program funding after that runs out, but it included it in its recently announced housing plan to end homelessness in Kansas City, and Platt promised to add it to the city budget.
“We are 100% committed to fully funding the program based on the need that we have in Kansas City,” he said. “And by that I mean that this will be an item that will be a separate line item in our budget that will be introduced next year and for years to come.”
And in addition to staffing the Right to Counsel program, the Heartland Center is working on raising money independently to be able to support more tenants who may not be facing eviction, but want to take their landlord to court because of poor living conditions.
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