The City Council of Richmond, Virginia, unanimously passed on September 23 a resolution declaring that the right to counsel (RTC) is a “critical necessity” and that a lack of legal representation for tenants in Richmond constituted a “public crisis” due to the staggering rate of evictions in the Richmond area. Right to counsel is meant to ensure that tenants have access to legal representation during eviction proceedings. By passing the new resolution, the City Council will strengthen its support of existing programs in the city that increase tenants’ access to legal representation when they are facing eviction.
The resolution cites a 2023 study from the RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University that found that Richmond had the second-highest eviction rate in the country, with over 11% of all households in the city having received an eviction judgment. The study additionally found that when tenants have access to legal representation, they are nearly eight times more likely to receive an outcome in their favor, including not being forcibly displaced from their residence. In a typical year, the favorable eviction court outcome-rate for Richmond residents is 2.4% for tenants who do not have legal representation in court. For tenants who do have access to legal counsel during an eviction hearing, however, the number is exponentially higher, at 18.4%.
Typically, the average eviction hearing in Richmond lasts fewer than three minutes, with approximately 40% of hearings lasting under a minute. This short timespan reflects tenants’ inability to ask questions or learn more information about relevant housing protections in court – information that could greatly strengthen their case. Across Richmond, the same study found that in eviction cases with tenant legal representation, hearings are twice as long as those without a tenant attorney present, indicating a greater ability for tenants to assert their rights and remain stably housed.
RTC policies and programs are critically important for protecting tenants against the disparate impact of evictions. As cited by both the RVA study and the Richmond City Council in its resolution, evictions have effects beyond displacement, including impacts to tenants’ physical and mental well-being. According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, an average of 3.6 million evictions were filed annually between 2000 and 2018, with low-income women of color being at the greatest risk of eviction. Research conducted by Boston University, meanwhile, found that tenants who are threatened with an eviction typically suffer from poor health, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, and psychological distress as a result of an eviction filing, even before they are forced to move from their residence.
According to the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, across the country, an average of 83% of landlords have legal representation in court today, while only 3% of tenants do. When tenants are guaranteed access to counsel during an eviction hearing, this pronounced power imbalance shifts and empowers tenants to assert a defense, allowing them to fight back against the eviction case and prevent an involuntary move. As of 2024, 17 cities and two counties have enacted RTC policies and programs, with New York City being the first to implement such protections for tenants (in 2017). Meanwhile, five states – Washington, Maryland, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Nebraska – guarantee tenants the right to counsel during eviction proceedings, though the scope of these protections differs based on state context. For example, in Nebraska, RTC measures passed in 2024 through “LB840” only grant protections to tenants in public housing located in metropolitan cities with 400,000 or more residents.
RTC policies and programs have been successful in protecting tenants. Data compiled nationally on such programs suggest that they increase the ability of tenants to access rental assistance, remain in their homes, and in some cases avoid eviction filings altogether. In Boulder, Colorado, for example, after RTC was passed in 2020 through “Ordinance No. 8412,” 63% of represented cases avoided eviction, resulting in a 26% increase in the number of cases that avoided eviction.
In the case of Richmond, findings gathered by the City Council resulted in a recommendation that the city implement a civil right to counsel based on the notion that the presence of a lawyer or legal advocate in housing court leads to increases in hearing times and to more favorable tenant outcomes. While the resolution does not formally create a right to counsel in the city, it supports greater resource allocation to Richmond’s right-to-counsel pilot program. The proposed 2025 city budget designates $500,000 to the pilot program to expand available legal services to tenants. According to the RVA Eviction Lab, every dollar spent on legal assistance to tenants will save $2 in eviction and involuntary displacement costs. This funding will go to Central Virginia Legal Aid Society to support one new housing paralegal and three new housing attorneys. These new Legal Aid members will grant free legal resources to an estimated 450 tenant families facing evictions in the next year. Advocates hope that data on the impact of the pilot-program will push state legislators to pass full RTC.
More information about the City of Richmond’s RTC initiative can be found here.