Tulsa has the 11th worst eviction rate in the nation. Roughly one third of all evictions that occur in Oklahoma happen in Tulsa. Black women are far more likely to face eviction in proportion to their share of the population.

We need community based solutions to the pervasive lack of legal resources available for problems like eviction. This is especially so when marginalized populations face a greater struggle for housing stability because of individual prejudice and structural racism.

A bit of context on prejudice and systems: 

Seventy percent of white Americans think individual prejudice is the primary cause of racial discrimination today. When you look at some of the ways black and white attitudes about racism and inequality have shifted over time, the perception is increasingly that inequality is tied to cultural differences and not structural racism.

Yet systemic redlining is still a problem. The zip code you are born in has vast implications on your health and longevity in Tulsa. Our city has deeply rooted segregation and destruction of black wealth built into its history.

Perhaps it isn’t really a debate over individual prejudice versus structural racism. One relies on the other to keep churning. Individuals live in and work for the systems that create disparate outcomes along racial lines. Individuals are in charge of those systems. The leader of the entire system is one guy with a very poor track record on tact, civility, and empathy, particularly when it comes to race.

The point of this blog isn’t to settle the debate that one or the other is the root cause. Instead, that debate serves as a reminder of the context in which access to justice solutions should be considered. People who get evicted are almost always low income and black women make up a disproportionate number of that evicted population. Individuals and systems work together to make that a reality and they can work together to undo it.

Limited availability for legal representation requires community-based solutions:

Legal Aid groups do not have the resources to serve the overwhelming numbers of qualified applicants who come to them. Further confounding the problem, pro bono participation in Oklahoma is well below the national average and less than 3 percent of Oklahoma attorneys charge a fee under 100 dollars.

There just aren’t enough accessible legal resources for people facing eviction in Tulsa. Let alone to reduce the disproportionate number of black women facing eviction. While the legal profession works to become more agile at providing services to a public in need, we should take the opportunity to build a network of non-lawyer advocates and improve self-representation resources. The solutions should be community driven so that they are trustworthy and accessible.

Non-Lawyer Advocates

Individuals who do not have law degrees can play a meaningful role in assisting low income people facing eviction. Tulsa might benefit from replicating programs such as the New York Housing Court Navigators. New York City’s housing court maintains a system of trained volunteers to assist self-represented litigants, one-on-one. They provide information, help litigants locate and complete forms, help them access interpreters, and explain courtroom roles and what to expect during a court proceeding. They can even respond to the judge on behalf of the litigant about factual questions, but they cannot provide legal advice or representation. Going to court is often an opaque and confusing process for people. Navigators help make it less so.

Self-Representation Resources

Improving community outreach and education on self-help resources is critical for low income people facing eviction. Without legal representation, many people facing eviction do not show up for their court date. When you don’t show up for court, you lose. There are some tools already working in other states to help low income individuals represent themselves:

JustFix.nyc is an online tool that allows New York City residents to document much needed repairs, get connected to advocacy resources, and notify a landlord of the problem. A common defense to eviction is that the tenant withheld rent because the landlord did not make needed repairs. This tool keeps all of the documentation a tenant needs to defend against an eviction.

Harvard’s A2J Lab Default Prevention Study found they could double response rates to debt collection suits and attendance in court at the first hearing by defendants if they mailed self-help materials to them. In housing court, when a tenant shows up, the judge often encourages the landlord and tenant to try to mediate outside court and come to an agreement to avoid eviction. When the tenant does not show up, a default judgement is awarded against them in favor of eviction.

These civil justice interventions are just some examples of opportunities for developing community-based support. As new interventions are tested and implemented in Oklahoma and elsewhere, keeping the inequitable racial context in mind is critical for developing the most effective solutions. Dr. Rebecca Sandefur has noted that people facing a civil justice crisis need timely, targeted, and trustworthy resources. Individual prejudice and structural racism will impact when and how someone accesses self-help and community based resources. If we want everyone to have a fair shake in court, we need solutions that understand the racial inequities that exacerbate civil legal needs.

As legal aid organizations begin funneling more resources into developing online triage systems, LGBT individuals may find themselves an afterthought in the design process.

The design process for any online tool or website involves multiple iterations of user testing. User testing is a catch-all term for the different processes developers employ to determine if a product will fulfill its intended purpose in real world scenarios.

Sometimes those processes are more inclusive to different communities than others. Human centered design processes employ principles that put the end-user at the heart of the design process. It focuses on not only usability of the product to achieve a desired result, but understanding the environment in which the end-user lives, works, and functions. In that way, it can separate usability from user experience. Two products could be equally usable, but without a focus on the individual who employs it, user experience can vary widely.

One tool design experts employ in the iterative process is card sorting. This is a simple way to learn about how end users categorize the information on your website or online tool. Critical to quality card sorting results are the participants included in the process. Without a participant pool that accurately reflects the population that will use the website or tool, the card sorting results will be less inclusive and, therefore, less useful.

Low income LGBT communities face the same kinds of challenges to obtaining legal services as other low income populations with the added difficulty of navigating institutional bias and in some cases state sanctioned discrimination, such as limited access to adoption services or having a rental application denied if the landlord does not approve of an applicant’s sexual orientation.

Civil legal aid organizations that are in the process of designing new tools to serve their clients need to be mindful of designing systems that are inclusive to all populations the organizations serve. An easy way to do that is to include those populations in the iterative design process by ensuring members of a given community are included in user testing.

Nearly 80% of all legal need goes unmet. Many Americans do not have access to legal services, do not understand their problem as legal in nature, or are ill-equipped to represent themselves in court. That means their legal issue remains unresolved or they are more likely to lose in court because they are unrepresented.

Any effort to improve access to legal resources or better equip courts and litigants for self-representation requires systems-wide coordination and coalition building. Legal Services State Support is a program that does just that.

State Support is a unique program of the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition that provides information, connections, and tools to advocates and the public to increase access to justice for all Minnesotans. It is a project that coordinates across 7 different legal aid organizations in Minnesota to support their shared mission.

State Support also focuses on leveraging technology to improve access to legal services. As an Access to Justice Technology Fellow with State Support, I am working on the rebuild of lawhelpmn.org. When the website is complete it will have 2 critical components: a forward-facing triage and the backend LOON.

Triage is an emerging technology tool designed to provide highly specific referrals to legal services organizations and self-help or educational materials. It involves an online guided interview that uses logic trees to determine what particular legal issue a person has. The concept is popping up across the country as legal aid organizations grapple with turning away about 1 in 2 people who come to them for help due to a lack of resources.

The hope is that triage will make more refined referrals to individuals who are likely to be eligible for help. If an individual is not eligible for legal aid, they will have more accurate self-help information because their legal topic will be more granular after going through triage.

LOON (which stands for Legal Organizations Online Network and is also the state bird of Minnesota) is a groundbreaking tool for legal aid organizations to coordinate services and referrals with one another. Legal aid organizations in Minnesota will be able to update eligibility information, services, clinic information, and hours by logging in to the organizational account. The information in LOON informs the referrals and self-help information generated by triage.

This system alleviates the need for individual organizations to each maintain a database of organizations for referrals. It will also help legal aid organizations make smarter referrals, rather than making educated guesses about which services are best or which programs are still active.

These 2 systems, operating together, have the potential to help all Minnesotans understand their legal problems and find the right resources to deal with them more efficiently. It will make legal aid organizations more efficient because referrals will be more specific. At the same time, it will improve clarity for individual Minnesotans about what their legal problem is and whether they should seek representation.

Technology is not a silver bullet in the access to justice crisis. However, the legal profession has much to gain by employing smarter, more efficient tools that have the potential to serve more clients with better quality. The lawhelpmn.org rebuild is doing exactly that.