Investigating the Impact of Kansas City’s Tenant Right to Counsel Program on Eviction Outcomes

• In Event: Housing Stability and Financial Well-Being

Abstract

Evictions have profoundly detrimental impacts on individuals' lives, increasing the risk of homelessness, financial hardships, and adverse physical and mental health outcomes. Tenants typically face significant disadvantages in eviction court due to a stark imbalance in legal representation compared to landlords. To address these disparities, several localities in the U.S. have implemented tenant right-to-counsel (RTC) laws, which guarantee free legal counsel to qualifying tenants facing eviction if they request the service. 

Kansas City, Missouri initiated its RTC program in June 2022, contracting with Legal Aid, Heartland Jobs, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City to provide attorneys for tenants facing eviction. The city also established a Memorandum of Understanding with Jackson County to receive weekly eviction filings, enabling timely notifications about the RTC program. Tenants within Kansas City are entitled to free legal representation, while those outside the city are not. 

Previous studies have primarily employed descriptive methods to investigate the impact of RTC laws on eviction outcomes (Ellen, O'Regan, House, & Brenner, 2021; Keene, Olea Vargas, & Harper, 2024). To conduct a more robust causal assessment of RTC legislation impacts, we employed an interrupted time series design. We evaluated the impact of Kansas City’s RTC law on eviction outcomes by comparing eviction data from Kansas City's part of Jackson County (treatment group) to the non-Kansas City part of Jackson County (control group). Specifically, we used the OLS regression model with Newey-West standard errors and zero lag to analyze both level and slope changes in the treatment and control groups. 

We utilized geocoded eviction court records from January 2018 to December 2019 as the pre-treatment period, and from June 2022 to May 2024 as the post-treatment period. We assessed the effect of the RTC program on (1) tenant legal representation rate (number of cases where tenants had legal representation per 100 eviction filings), (2) default rate (number of cases with a default judgment per 100 eviction filings), and (3) eviction rate (number of cases where tenants were evicted per 100 eviction filings). 

Our findings indicate that the RTC program substantially increased the percentage of represented tenants from 2% pre-pandemic to 20% post-RTC implementation in Kansas City, compared to a marginal increase from 2% to 4% in the control group. Interestingly, while both treatment and control groups experienced declines in default and eviction rates, the differential changes between the groups were not statistically significant. The concurrent declines may be partially attributed to other tenant support programs available across Jackson County. 

The results suggest that although Kansas City's RTC program significantly enhanced legal representation for tenants, it did not correspondingly improve eviction case outcomes. This implies that other forms of tenant support (e.g., tenant education, tenant organizing, emergency rent assistance) might be more effective in reducing the likelihood of eviction judgments. Further research is needed to examine the causal effects of these other forms of tenant support on eviction outcomes to contextualize the impact of RTC and determine its relative efficacy compared to other support mechanisms.

Authors

• Yi Wang, Washington University in St. Louis
  Presenting Author

• Caitlin McMurtry, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author