As evictions continue to rise around America, Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma director Michael Figgins is working hard to get a message out to those who might be affected — it doesn’t have to be this way.
Evictions remain up 27 percent over pre-pandemic levels in Oklahoma County, according to a June study conducted on behalf of Legal Aid by Stout, which specializes in studying economic impact assessments for organizations like Legal Aid.
In May 2022, Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma received a $2.4 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant to establish an eviction-diversion program. As a result, Legal Aid launched its Right to Counsel Program, first in Tulsa County and then in Oklahoma County.
In Tulsa County, where eviction numbers have returned to pre-pandemic levels but have not spiked beyond that as they have in Oklahoma County, Legal Aid offers free eviction representation for those in the ZIP codes of 74105, 74136, 74135, 74145 and 74133. In Oklahoma County, the program serves three ZIP codes that have become hotbeds for evictions: 73120 and 73111 in north and east OKC, as well as 73119 in southwest OKC.
People facing eviction in those ZIP codes can reach out to LASO staff, who can provide information on their rights as tenants and assistance in eviction court if need be. Such interventions often result in a better outcome for the tenant and landlord, Figgins said.
“I think what the study confirmed more than anything is that when people are in these situations and a Legal Aid attorney is involved, 95 or 96 percent of the time they don’t get evicted,” Figgins said. “That’s the message that we’re trying to get out to everyone — that it doesn’t have to be one way.”
But that message has yet to reach as many people facing housing insecurity as Figgins would like. In some cases, people attempt to navigate the process on their own, which can be difficult for those who don’t know the laws. Others give up and don’t show for their eviction hearing. In some cases, even those who have paid their rent can find themselves being evicted.
“If you’re not going to pay the rent, then, yeah, you’re going to be evicted,” Figgins said. “But if you have an experienced Legal Aid attorney, they’re going to ask, ‘Did you pay the rent?’ And very often the case is they did pay the rent and can show the receipt. Then, you ask them, ‘How much is your rent?’ and someone might say $500, but they actually owe $600, and then you find out that’s because of fees and fines. And if they don’t have the $600, they’re going to get evicted. If you’ve got a lawyer, that isn’t going to happen.”
Legal Aid attorneys also make sure tenants have been provided with proper notice of eviction. They can discuss what condition the rental property is in and whether the relationship between the tenant and landlord has become problematic in other ways.
“You have some people who are being evicted because they live in a veritable swamp — because the landlord hasn’t taken care of the property — or you get a situation where they’re trying to do some kind of swap, where they might ask a tenant who might get behind on their rent and the landlord asks them to have sex with them to avoid eviction,” Figgins said. “Again, none of that is unusual.”
Of course, eviction numbers are rising nationwide. In the 10 states tracked by Eviction Lab, there have been more than 1 million eviction filings over the last year, with about 69,000 coming last month.
In Oklahoma County, those rates have climbed as well. More than 17,000 eviction notices were filed last year, with about 8,600 resulting in evictions. According to the Stout study (embedded below), that number is likely much higher now.
Figgins said there was “a brief period” during the pandemic where the eviction process stopped.
“When there weren’t any evictions, some people started being provided rental assistance, which was helpful. But what would happen is that you would have a tenant who was behind on their rent or wasn’t doing what the landlord said,” Figgins said. “The landlord would get that money, and within days the person would be evicted. It was like, ‘I don’t want you here, you can’t pay, I don’t like you, so you’re going to be evicted.’ Some states have what are called ‘good cause’ evictions where you can’t evict someone without good cause. So, you can’t be evicted for something like smirking at the landlord in the parking lot. But we don’t have any prohibition against retaliation, so God forbid you complain about anything.”
Oklahoma laws favor landlords, advocates say
Oklahoma’s laws generally favor the landlord, Community Cares Partnership executive director Ginny Bass Carl said at a housing town hall hosted in November by Oklahoma City Ward 2 Councilman James Cooper.
“In only five days, for only $45, you can evict without proof of property ownership, without proving a lease violation,” she said. “This eviction process is fast, it’s confusing, and [many] tenants don’t even show up to court.”
This legislative session, leaders of the Oklahoma Academy proposed extending the five-day eviction timeline to 10 days with a requirement for rural counties to hold a small claims court between the 16th and 31st of each month “to ensure timely hearings.” However, Senate Bill 1575 by Sen. Julia Kirt (D-OKC) never made it to the Senate floor.
“More than 70 percent of evictions happen because tenants are not in court. The scales of justice are not evenly balanced in eviction court,” Bass Carl said in November. “Landlords are represented by attorneys about 66 percent of the time. For tenants, it’s about 10 percent. Having representation can make all the difference on whether or not you’re evicted.”
During Tulsa County eviction dockets, one familiar face is attorney Nathan Milner, the namesake of Milner Legal Group, which proclaims a trademarked slogan — “Kick’em out quick” — on Facebook. In 2020, he was featured in an Associated Press article regarding Tulsa’s high eviction rates and the federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program created during the pandemic. ERAP paid landlords for up to 15 months of a tenant’s missed rent if the landlord agreed to forgo eviction proceedings.
While ERAP helped many people maintain their residences during the financial and employment uncertainty of the pandemic, its massive cash infusions sometimes drew allegations of fraud, and recent audit results have alleged that some organizations tasked with distributing the dollars improperly kept management fees.
After a Tulsa County eviction docket in September, Milner said many people forget that most landlords are carrying mortgages on their properties and cannot afford to house people who are unable to pay the rent. As a result, Milner said the ERAP program helped many tenants and landlords, although he argued that sometimes the payments just delayed the inevitable.
“We got a lot of bad publicity and press, because we had to keep filing on people, even though they had already gone and exhausted 15 months worth of rent in these programs,” Milner said. “It’s hard to do that from a landlord’s side, but by the same token, we’ve got to move forward with it. And so for some of those people, I feel like what was happening is they were just, ‘OK, you don’t have a job? OK, boom, here’s 15 months worth of rent. Boom, here’s 15 months worth of rent,’ without really kind of putting a little bit more pep in these people’s steps. ‘OK, show me if you made applications for jobs, help us help yourself to get back on the right footing.’ And that’s kind of what you saw. People that got it, absolutely. There are hundreds and hundreds of people that got back on their feet and moved forward, and it was an awesome program in that regard. But you always get bad apples in any program, and that’s really kind of what I saw — just a few bad apples with some of that stuff. But it certainly bailed out a lot of a lot of our clients in bad situations that are having to pay mortgages and were behind on their mortgages and their credit was getting dinged for that stuff, too.”
With attorneys like Milner often representing major landlords in court, Figgins said tenants facing eviction proceedings without counsel can be a recipe for disaster.
“It’s actually worse than a recipe for disaster because of the power imbalance that is so great,” Figgins said. “Most people are disempowered.”
In Oklahoma City, Homeless Alliance executive director Meghan Mueller said many of the unhoused people her organization helps reached the point of living on the streets because of an eviction.
“When we do our Point in Time count, we always kind of look at local trends, and there are some supplemental questions that we want to ask the respondents,” she said. “This year, we asked about evictions, and what we found was 36 percent of the people we spoke with who were unsheltered reported that they had at least one eviction in their past, which is a really high number. I was sort of blown away by that.”
Like many agencies that assist those in financial need or who are unhoused, the Homeless Alliance has grappled with the results of pandemic assistance ending.
“I think it speaks to our need as a community to look at policy solutions,” Mueller said. “I think in communities that have things like Legal Aid service providers with those resources, the eviction rates are much lower than what we see here but, in the end, I think the policy solutions are what makes the biggest difference. Temporary rental assistance helps, but it is a Band-Aid, not a core solution.”
In Tulsa, where community demand for affordable and low-income housing far exceeds the supply, Milner agreed.
“Everybody argues and says, ‘Well, it’s all the evictions that are creating homelessness.’ Well, you just dumped a bunch of money into ERAP programs to divvy out to tenants,” Milner said. “If we have to go through an eviction process, give them a better place to go. Do a temporary housing facility — a 90-day facility to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get out. We can’t afford this rent.’ You know, don’t don’t set don’t subsidize it for months if they can never pay it, right? If the lease is $2,500 a month, and they know they can’t ever pay it — and that’s just number — but there’s no sense in subsidizing $2,500 for three months knowing that their job or their education or whatever the case may be or their divorce is going to create a situation where they’re not going to be able to pay it in three months again, right? So we’re using public funds or grants or whatever the case may be to keep them in a place they’re not going to be able to afford down the road anyway.”
In many cases, interventions like those Legal Aid offers can produce better economic outcomes for a city as a whole, Figgins said.
Stout estimates the return on investment to be approximately $2.63 for every $1 invested in the Right to Counsel program. Additional estimated economic and fiscal benefits in Oklahoma County and Tulsa County include about $1.2 million in preserved economic value by keeping people in their homes and $1.7 million in savings related to housing social safety net responses. The study also suggested that the Right to Counsel program has saved about $700,000 that would have been spent by other groups like the Homeless Alliance to assist those who would have been evicted had it not been for help from Legal Aid.
“It’s nice to be able to point to that and show that money can be saved through programs like Right to Counsel, but in reality, it’s not an easy argument to make because it’s not a realization that people can actually visualize or see,” Figgins said. “They may see savings, but it will come in different places in different areas over time.”
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Showing up is more than half the battle
Groups like Legal Aid can make services available, but there is still plenty of onus on the tenant to seek them out ahead of eviction proceedings. Figgins said one of the biggest reasons people end up being evicted is because they simply did not show up to court to argue their case, with or without an attorney.
“If you’ve ever seen what the docket looks like, it’s just like a very good assembly line,” Figgins said of eviction court. “It’s like, ‘Bam,’ the hammer goes down, and then they’re on to the next one. It’s very quick. They might do hundreds every day and you can’t really sit there and have arguments and take testimony and present evidence if you’ve got to get through 200 evictions, and many of those become judgments because people simply don’t show up.”
Reasons for that can be numerous.
“For some, it’s that they have to work and don’t want to miss work because they’re afraid they might lose their job, or they don’t have daycare, or they have an important doctor’s appointment that they don’t want to miss,” Figgins said. “Or sometimes they think it won’t help them if they show up, so they don’t. But if they don’t show up, they lose it all.”
In Oklahoma City, the Homeless Alliance also has staff that assists those who are on the verge of eviction.
Mueller said those calls have grown so much in recent years that the organization has expanded its capacity to answer them. But funding to do more than point people in the right direction is limited. Like Figgins, Mueller said the best way to avoid eviction is to participate in the court process, no matter how intimidating it may seem.
“Show up,” she said. “That would be my most basic advice. I think something like over 80 percent of the evictions granted in 2023 were because people weren’t present at court. They think once they get that five-day notice there’s nothing they can do, but really showing up to court is over half the battle, and there are resources available to people to help them show up including rides to court if they need it. But they have to show up.”
Read the study on Legal Aid’s Right to Counsel program
