As evictions tick back up in Cook County, new proposal aims to help renters who land in court
Lorraine McNeal, 53, worked for Walmart for 15 years before she was laid off in September 2021 and fell behind on her rent payments.
She said she tried to find another job, but the COVID-19 pandemic made it hard to find work, as did her disability. Her former partner had moved out, as had her daughter, leaving McNeal the sole person to pay her $1,295 monthly rent for her three-bedroom South Shore apartment, she said. Her rent had jumped $295 in April 2021.
She started selling dinners from her home and tried to give her landlord whatever money she made, but she had other bills to pay too, she said. At the time, McNeal was waiting for her Social Security disability insurance to come through.
McNeal had never faced eviction before the pandemic but has faced it twice since then.
“I was scared; I didn’t know which way to turn, who to talk to,” McNeal said.
McNeal requested rental assistance from the city and was paired with an attorney from Law Center for Better Housing who was able to get her landlord to wait until the rental assistance came through and helped her avoid eviction.
The attorney who helped McNeal was available through Chicago’s Right to Counsel Pilot Program, an initiative that would become permanent in 2027 under an ordinance introduced to the City Council by Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Department of Housing last month.
The proposal is part of Johnson’s sweeping progressive agenda to help the working class, including Chicagoans struggling with securing stable housing. Besides the right to counsel proposal, the mayor has championed raising a tax on luxury property sales in order to fund homelessness services and often speaks personally about his brother Leon, who died while unhoused.
If the City Council passes the right to counsel ordinance, Chicago would join cities including Baltimore and New York, which have in recent years approved such legislation. Introduced Sept. 14, the proposal has been referred to the housing and real estate committee, where it is expected to be discussed in the coming months.
Residential eviction filings in Cook County, which slowed in 2020 and 2021 due to pandemic-induced eviction moratoria, have been at pre-pandemic levels for more than a year, with evictions enforced by the Cook County sheriff’s office on track to surpass pre-pandemic levels this year.
Residential eviction filings stand at more than 18,000 through August 2023, with last year’s total filings — which include a small number of commercial evictions — reaching over 29,000, around the same number of filings as in 2019, according to data from the Circuit Court of Cook County.
From January through September of this year, the Cook County sheriff’s office has enforced over 5,600 evictions. In 2022, the first full year after pandemic moratoria on evictions were lifted, the number of evictions enforced by the sheriff’s office stood at roughly 4,500, which was about 2,000 less than in 2019, according to the Tribune’s analysis of data provided by the sheriff’s office.
Most evictions took place on the South and West sides in majority-Black and Latino communities, trends that line up with national data showing that racial minorities are more likely to face eviction. The pandemic disproportionately affected racial minorities, who were more likely to experience hardships such as job loss and illness.
Michelle Gilbert, legal and policy director for Law Center for Better Housing, one of the organizations involved in the program, said the majority of renters the organization helps are very low income — at or below 30% of the area median income — all of whom would qualify to receive legal assistance through the ordinance.
The right to counsel pilot program was launched by the Department of Housing in July 2022 and is funded for three years with $8 million through the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a fund with tens of millions of dollars that was created with federal stimulus money during the early years of the pandemic.
Johnson is proposing to extend the program to all eligible tenants, instead of only those who can be helped based on capacity from the legal aid organizations involved. Eligible tenants would be those who earn 80% of the area median income and below, which is $61,800 or below for a household of one in 2023, according to the Department of Housing.
As the program works now, in order for tenants to receive help, they also must have experienced a COVID-19-related hardship, a parameter that would be omitted with the new ordinance.
Legal assistance would be provided by nonprofit legal aid organizations periodically chosen through competitive processes, according to the mayor’s office. The funding for the existing pilot program was split between two legal aid organizations, Law Center for Better Housing and Beyond Legal Aid, with Law Center for Better Housing receiving the bulk of the funds.
Many landlords in Chicago and Cook County have expressed concerns about the eviction process since 2020 when the county launched the Early Resolution Program, an eviction diversion program that offers free legal aid, mediation services and connections to rental assistance for tenants and small landlords. The eviction process has slowed down significantly, with property owners saying this is more costly to them and housing advocates saying this ensures that tenants and landlords get the help they need.
The Early Resolution Program is different from the pilot program, as it provides earlier intervention to support tenants and small landlords in an effort to settle eviction cases quickly. The right to counsel pilot offers extended legal assistance and representation for tenants whose cases don’t settle early. Most cases still settle before going to trial, said Gilbert of Law Center for Better Housing. Initially funded with pandemic aid dollars, the Early Resolution Program is likely to receive further funding through the county’s 2024 budget allocations, according to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s office.
The Neighborhood Building Owners Alliance, a membership organization for property owners, told the Tribune it is not taking a position on the proposal to make the right to counsel program permanent. The Chicagoland Apartment Association, another membership organization for property owners, declined to comment, saying they are looking into the details of the ordinance.
Some attorneys who represent landlords told the Tribune they are in favor of the ordinance because all parties benefit from tenants having legal representation.
Justin Abdilla is one of those attorneys. He said landlords are receiving less favorable outcomes in eviction court because tenants do not have legal representation, causing judges to be sympathetic. Abdilla hopes the ordinance would help mitigate this.
“I think tenants are getting a lot of breaks because they don’t have competent representation so the court feels bad by ramrodding them through the process,” Abdilla said.
The pilot program had handled more than 1,100 cases as of the end of September, with services ranging from brief legal counseling to full legal representation in court. Tenants are referred to the program by the organizations involved in the Early Resolution Program.
John, 32, was one of the tenants referred to the program. He faced eviction earlier this year after being diagnosed with a rare disease that required him to seek medical treatment out of state, pay hefty medical bills and request short-term disability funds while on leave from his accounting job.
He fell behind about $600 on his rent — about half his monthly payment for his one-bedroom apartment — and while gone for an extended period of time while seeking medical care, his refrigerator stopped working, causing his food to spoil and a smell to emanate from his Near North Side apartment where he lived for around three years. John’s neighbors complained to management, and management filed for eviction, he said.
John had never faced eviction before and struggled to find legal representation until someone suggested he call Law Center for Better Housing as he went through the Early Resolution Program.
“When they called me back, I felt like I had won the lottery,” said John, who requested to be identified only by his first name because his eviction record has been sealed.
John applied for rental assistance and had been saving up money to pay off his back rent and fees, and his attorney helped argue in court that the alleged breach of the lease stemming from the refrigerator smell was not John’s fault. He was able to pay off his debt and agreed to move out, he said.
Now, after living in the city for more than a decade, John is splitting time between his parents’ house out of state and Chicago to save money.
“It was terrifying (facing eviction,)” John said. “I don’t know how anyone could possibly defend themselves without an attorney, and I don’t know how you would find a good attorney if you don’t get legal aid.”
Without eviction diversion programs and right to counsel laws, experts estimate that nationwide, only 10% of tenants would be represented by attorneys in court, whereas around 90% of landlords have representation.
Lam Nguyen Ho, co-director of Beyond Legal Aid, said he has seen firsthand how much of a positive impact it makes for a tenant facing eviction to receive legal assistance. Beyond Legal Aid partners with outside organizations to provide legal services for those organizations’ legal clinics, with about a dozen groups working with Ho’s organization in the right to counsel program.
Ho said most of the families helped so far say the organization was able to meet their goals for the eviction process — one of the metrics being used to evaluate the program — such as being able to stay in their homes or receiving more time to move.
Ho said he thinks the pilot program should be made permanent.
“We work with large communities that often can’t access legal aid from other programs due to, for example, their immigration status, or we do a lot of work with sex workers,” Ho said. “And so, as a result, it has been really powerful and inspiring for us to just be able to increase not only the services and legal aid that we can provide to these underserved communities, but also being able to hopefully increase the knowledge the community has around their rights as tenants.”
McNeal — the tenant who faced eviction in South Shore — said without the legal aid offered through the pilot program, she would not have been able to afford help. She said it would be a blessing if the program is made permanent through the City Council ordinance.
“It saved my life,” McNeal said. “It helped me not feel dumb; it helped me not feel alone, and with the funds too, it saved me, saved the institution of home.”
Chicago Tribune’s Alice Yin and Gregory Royal Pratt contributed.
