Cincinnati’s Access to Counsel program has helped 19 households avoid eviction over the past month.
"In the past, you either had to hire an attorney with your own money, and let's face it, folks [who] can't pay the rent can't afford private counsel," said Director of Human Services Deanna White. "Or, you had to be able to get a Legal Aid attorney, and they don't have enough funding to process all of their requests."
The city now helps pay attorney Shannon Price to work in the Hamilton County Help Center at the courthouse two days a week, offering immediate, day-of legal assistance to tenants who come into eviction court without an attorney. The University of Cincinnati College of Law also helps fund Price's salary.
Since the program launched Sept. 10, Price has represented 23 tenants; of those, only four have ended in eviction.
White says the program has reached triple the number of people she expected, but it’s still a drop in the bucket: 3,622 people received an eviction notice in Cincinnati from June to August, according to the Princeton University Eviction Lab.
The city’s eviction prevention program also helps tenants earlier in the eviction process, like when a household receives a three-day notice to leave the premises.
"This is a great intervention point for us, because the person has not received an eviction filing yet — it's not on their record," White said. "They've got a warning, basically, from the landlord saying 'You need to do X, Y, Z, or I'm going to file an eviction against you.' "
In other words, it's early enough that direct rental assistance provided through the United Way of Greater Cincinnati can prevent an eviction filing. White says $600,000 in rental assistance was distributed starting in January until it ran out in mid-September.
United Way Program Manager Matthew Long says they've been able to provide payment for a majority of tenants in under two weeks.
"And we know from manual data scraping by looking at the Clerk of Courts record system that of all the individuals we have worked with, about 89% of them never reappeared or received a court eviction filing against them," Long said.
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The city is partnering with Stout, a national eviction prevention consulting firm, to study the program and recommend how best to deploy the limited funding available. White says the city is looking to other potential funders; that includes applying for a $1.4 million eviction prevention grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Expanding the program will include facilitating mediation between landlords and tenants earlier in the process.
See the full presentation from Tuesday's City Council Climate, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee below (article continues after):
A separate city-funded program launched in July and aims to use predictive data analytics to identify families at risk of housing instability and intervene.
The project has $2.1 million in funding from the city of Cincinnati through the Impact Award, part of the human services funding in the annual budget. Strategies to End Homelessness is the lead agency.
"The data analytics essentially generates a priority list of households that are at risk of getting an eviction notice," said CEO Kevin Finn. "We are then referring those households to three of our partner agencies: Bethany House, Found House, and Lighthouse. Each have hired a system navigator who is taking referrals of these households and doing outreach to them to engage them in the program."
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The system initially identified nearly 40,000 households in Cincinnati that met criteria for possible housing insecurity and had not already become homeless. Of those, nearly 15,000 include at least one child. A narrower list of 440 households includes those most at risk, who have not received an eviction notice, and who have contact information.
"Since these are people that did not request this service, there was a lot of concern early on that this would feel a little Big Brother-ish to people, like, 'Why are you calling me? How did you get my name?' " Finn said. "Overwhelmingly, people have not been concerned about why they were being contacted — they were grateful that they were being contacted and offered assistance."
Finn says the predictive model is clearly accurate; people contacted have confirmed they are at risk for losing their housing.
He says up-to-date contact information is the biggest challenge so far. Of the 238 households referred to a partner agency to be contacted, only 22 are in process and receiving help, and another four families have completed the process.
One solution is the winner of a hack-a-thon earlier this year, where anyone was invited to pitch an idea to help prevent homelessness. It's a website where anyone can self-report that their housing is insecure: tenantguard.org.
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Finn says he expects the quality of contact information to greatly improve with two updated data sets being added soon: tenants of Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority and people who apply for help through Freestore Foodbank. Both agencies have implemented a voluntary consent form that allows their data to be shared with the prevention program.
See the full presentation from Tuesday's City Council Climate, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee below:
