Tenant ​“Right To Counsel” Advances

A local push to guarantee legal representation for low-income tenants facing eviction notched a victory, as state legislators advanced a ​“Right to Counsel” bill out of committee and toward the General Assembly floor for further debate and a potential future vote.

The state legislature’s Housing Committee took that 8‑to‑3, party-line vote Thursday afternoon on Raised House Bill 6531: An Act Concerning The Right to Counsel in Eviction Proceedings. The virtual committee meeting was live-streamed on YouTube.

The bill follows the model of similar legislation already in place in cities like New York City, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Boulder. The bill would guarantee that tenants facing eviction all across Connecticut have access to an attorney in housing court.

For income-eligible tenants unable to afford their own lawyer, the bill would require the state to provide legal representation for them from a group of Judicial Department-designated legal nonprofits and organizations, such as legal aid agencies.

“This isn’t just a simple two-sided issue” about landlords and tenants standing on somewhat-more-equal footing in housing court, New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield (pictured) said in support of the proposed bill during Thursday’s committee deliberations.

“The other side of this issue is homelessness, to be quite frank.”

Hartford State Rep. and Housing Committee Co-Chair Brandon McGree agreed. ​“We spend money on a lot of programs,” he said about state government.

“These are the types of programs we ought to invest in in order to protect some of our most vulnerable people. … This is an opportunity to protect some of our most vulnerable, some of our most poor here in Connecticut.”

Organizer Push: ​“We Need To Value Humans .. Over Private Property”

The committee vote came after months of stepped-up organizing by New Haven housing advocates, including by a newly formed New Haven chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Those city organizers have presented at management team meetings, spearheaded online petitions, testified at state legislative committee hearings, collaborated with local advocacy groups like New Haven legal aid, Witnesses to Hunger, Sunrise New Haven, and Black and Brown United in Action, and run weekly phonebanking drives in which they’ve called state legislators directly and petitioned them to support the bill.

A right to counsel law would ​“put in place a kind of systemic backstop that changes the relations of power” between landlords and tenants in housing court, New Haven DSA organizer Stephen Poland said during a Thursday afternoon interview on WNHH’s ​“Pandemic Organizing” radio show (which you can watch in full below.)

While more than 80 percent of landlords have shown up to virtual housing court with attorneys at their sides over the past three months, according to the Connecticut Fair Housing Center and CT Mirror, less than 7 percent of tenants have had legal representation.

“What right to counsel does is it kind of moves us away from that constant response to individual crises,” added New Haven native and fellow New Haven DSA organizer Khadija Hussain.

By not having to focus on every single one of the potential 40,000 evictions that could take place across Connecticut whenever the state’s eviction moratorium lifts, she said, such a guarantee of legal representation for tenants in housing court ​“allows us to do some real, collective organizing” around achieving housing justice and building tenant power.

“New Haven has huge megalandlords who are represented by lawyers whose job it is to help evict people,” Hussain said.

She said the local tenants she has spoken at the doors and on the phone feel ​“very, very alienated from their landlords. Many of them don’t even really know who their landlord is,” thanks to layers upon layers of shell companies and LLCs.

This convoluted ownership only adds to the ​“confusing process of evictions,” she said, especially when tenants so often cannot afford their own attorney.

Fellow DSA organizer and attorney Dahlia Romanow (pictured) said she has represented tenants in New York City, where there has been a right to counsel for a few years.

“The biggest difference is just this huge shift in the way that courts are run and the way that tenants are treated and the expectations for everyone going in,” she said.

When a tenant has an attorney, that often leads to better outcomes for landlords too, she said, because attorneys know where cash-strapped tenants can turn to for rental assistance.

“You should have a right to a lawyer when facing eviction,” said local DSA organizer Alice Prael (pictured). Such a right to counsel bill would ​“help rebalance power in favor of tenants.”

She said that, while the Central Connecticut chapter of DSA has been around ​“for a while,” the New Haven branch ​“revitalized in this last year.” The local branch currently has around 250 members, she said.

“We have people power” already, she said. The political organization is now focused on ​“building organizing capacity,” not just around right to counsel and tenant unions, but also around bigger picture federal legislation like Medicare for All.

Romanow said that, if passed by the Connecticut General Assembly and signed into law by the governor, Connecticut’s right to counsel law would phase in for income-eligible tenants over the next three years.

“People who do not have private property should not be valued less than the property of people who are investing,” Poland said. ​“We need to value humans and human communities over private property.”

What About Landlords’ Rights?

Three Republicans on the state legislature’s Housing Committee voted against advancing the right to counsel bill to the House floor for further debate.

They cited concerns with how much such a program might cost the state to implement, and with leaving lawyer-less landlords out to dry.

“There are times when a landlord cannot afford an attorney because they have not been getting paid rent,” said Watertown State Rep. Joe Polletta (pictured above). ​“There’s no protection in here for a landlord.”

“This is not a bill that will help tenants have an affordable rent,” he continued. ​“It’s not a bill that will help landlords. It’s not a bill that will be easily afforded by taxpayers of the State of Connecticut.”

New Britain State Sen. and Housing Committee Co-Chair Rick Lopes, a Democrat, said that he too is concerned about how much such a bill might ultimately cost the state to implement. After doing some research into how much right to counsel has cost in New York City, he said, ​“the total amount of money that New York City spent on its eviction program divided by the number of people assisted by that program broke down into the hundreds of dollars per person.”

He said this bill will have a fiscal note, and will go to the state legislature’s Appropriations Committee for further fiscal consideration. How much it might cost Connecticut is yet to be determined.

North Haven State Sen. Paul Cicarella (pictured) joined Polletta in criticizing the right to counsel bill as unfair to landlords.

Cicarella said that the data he’s seen shows that 80 percent of tenants in Connecticut housing court don’t have legal representation, while 20 percent of landlords show up unrepresented.

“I understand that the tenants may have a larger need,” he said. ​“But there are landlords who have that need” too.

He said this bill is ​“going to make the housing market a lot more expensive.”

Plus, the cost of the program will likely be higher than supportive state legislators are anticipating as renters fall further and further behind on rent during Covid.

“We’re going to be flooded with evictions due to this virus,” he said. ​“It’s only going to drive the cost of housing up.”

East Haven State Rep. Joe Zullo (pictured) questioned the framing of the debate around this bill as providing a ​“right” to anything in housing court. He said this ​“rights” language is a ​“slippery slope.”

If tenants have a right to legal representation in an eviction proceeding, should homeowners have a right to counsel in foreclosures? Should there be a right to counsel in debt collection actions? Or Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) complaints?

“I’m questioning whether that is a necessity here,” he said. Instead, he recommended, the state should partner university law schools to provide free legal help to tenants facing evictions and homeowners facing foreclosure. Yale Law School has one such program already in place, he said, which he described as a ​“fantastic” program.

McGee pushed back against the notion that landlord and tenant needs are currently the same in housing court.

During the 20,000 eviction cases that took place in housing courts across the state in 2019, he said, only 124 times did a landlord not have a legal representative while a tenant did. That’s less than 0.5 percent of cases, he said.

“It’s important that we look at the numbers, and that we understand why this type of proposal is important.”