The City of Boston launched an Access to Counsel Pilot Program in January to help families facing eviction, following the state legislature passing a statewide Access to Counsel Pilot Program in July 2024. Advocates hope that successful implementation of these pilot programs will lead to permanent and expanded funding - at the city and state levels - for legal counsel for tenants facing evictions.
The Boston program is being led by the City’s Office of Housing Stability in partnership with Boston Public Schools, FamilyAid Boston, and Greater Boston Legal Services. The Access to Counsel Pilot Program was established with $300,000 from the City’s FY25 annual operating budget; it is expected to assist at least 120 households in 2025. Boston Public School families experiencing or at risk of homelessness, who have long been connected to FamilyAid Boston through case management and wrap-around services, will now have access to full legal counsel when facing an eviction. The organizations implementing the program have a history of collaborating to support low-income households across the city. The pilot program funding expands their capacity to serve more households with children, thereby reducing educational disruptions, stabilizing family environments, and promoting long-term wellbeing. The pilot program is part of Boston’s comprehensive eviction prevention strategy, which also includes providing emergency rental assistance, housing search services, and an established presence at housing court to facilitate landlord-tenant mediation.
"Access to stable, safe, and healthy housing is a basic need for every child and a cornerstone of equity and justice in our City; yet, right now, less than five percent of families facing eviction in Boston have legal representation,” said Hed Ehrlich, managing attorney of the Housing Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. “This program is a bold step toward addressing that inequity, significantly expanding legal services to protect our most vulnerable community members, and hopefully a foundation for a future where every tenant has a right to counsel."
The statewide Access to Counsel pilot program provides full legal representation for low-income tenants and low-income landlords who also rent properties they own. In 2024, the State of Massachusetts included a $2.5 million dedicated line item in its FY25 budget to create the pilot program. The statewide program is being administered by the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation (MLAC), which funds civil legal services statewide. The pilot will provide full legal representation for low-income tenants and low-income owner-occupant landlords. After funding passed, MLAC, reached out to more than 200 stakeholders in communities across the Commonwealth with a survey soliciting feedback about where to focus the work of a statewide pilot. With that feedback, MLAC identified four preliminary focus areas: public housing tenants facing eviction, voucher tenants facing eviction and at risk of losing their vouchers, tenants facing eviction from particularly problematic private landlords owning a large number of units, and representation of low-income owner-occupants in eviction proceedings. In December, MLAC designated six legal services organizations to represent tenants and one legal service organization to represent owner-occupants.
For more than a decade, advocates have been working to secure access to counsel programs for tenants facing eviction in the City of Boston and throughout Massachusetts as stakeholders aimed to address the housing crisis from every angle possible. At the city level, the Office of Housing Stability primarily led the effort to create and fund a pilot program. At the state level, a coalition of more than 240 organizations representing the legal community, health care service industry, landlords and property owners, municipal officials, faith-based leaders, the education sector, and other housing advocates have endorsed a statewide Access to Counsel program. The coalition cites various reasons to ensure greater access to legal counsel for tenants, including the traumatic and disproportionate impact of evictions on women, families of color, and households with children. The coalition also points to trial court data showing that only 6%-7% of tenants facing eviction had representation in 2024 compared with 90% of landlords. Evictions have also been on the rise in recent years, with Massachusetts reporting more than 38,000 evictions filed against tenants in 2023, a sharp increase from 2021 when the state reported approximately 23,000 eviction filings.
“The statewide work to provide full representation is now starting and starting thoughtfully,” said Annette Duke, an attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, which has led the Massachusetts Access to Counsel campaign and will also be part of the pilot. “For eight years we built a broad-based campaign. The campaign was built on principles that legal assistance is a critical tool to prevent displacement and homelessness, that implementation must allow for community engagement and input from key stakeholders, as MLAC did to start the program, and that we must build upon the strength of existing organizations. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it is exciting to start the work.”
In January, an “Act Promoting Access to Counsel and Housing Stability in Massachusetts,” SD.1771/ HD.3912, was introduced to codify the pilot program into law. Governor Maura Healey also included in her recently proposed FY26 budget another $2.5 million dedicated line item to support Access to Counsel. Advocates are encouraged to see this support for a permanent Access to Counsel program and hope to see the bill enacted in this legislative session.