Legal Help for Homelessness

San Francisco spends $646 million a year trying to address homelessness. The results have been less than desirable.

Yet a small nonprofit that gives free legal services to poor people claims it can reduce homelessness by 20% in two years – for only $4 million.

Does this sound too good to be true?

Adrian Tirtanadi says his nonprofit Open Door Legal has found an approach that moves the needle on homelessness in a way we haven’t tried before.

By offering free legal help to people with little or no income, the attorneys at Open Door Legal have prevented hundreds of families from becoming homeless. They’ve also helped homeless people get re-housed.

Is scaling universal access to legal representation the key to ending homelessness?

An academic study of Open Door Legal’s work over the past decade found that they caused unsheltered homelessness to drop by around half in the Bayview area of San Francisco.

How does legal assistance keep people housed? Consider the myriad situations that can make someone homeless when they can’t afford to defend themselves. Open Door Legal covers it all: Eviction, housing discrimination, domestic violence, child custody, wage theft, employment discrimination, consumer fraud, elder abuse, wrongful foreclosures, debt collection, immigration, asylum and bankruptcy.

“Open Door Legal envisions a world where everyone who needs legal help gets it,” Tirtanadi said. “Our goal is to show that when everyone has access to the law, poverty will be dramatically reduced.”

Homelessness is a complex issue that requires many approaches working in concert to make an impact. But are we measuring the results of each method to focus on what works best? Are we considering every possible approach?

Tirtanadi wonders why San Francisco’s Department of Homeless and Supportive Housing devotes 0% of its budget to legal services.

Nearly 60% of the $646 million budget to fight homelessness is spent on building permanent supportive housing – the most expensive, difficult and time consuming solution to implement.

What if we spent a portion on legal services to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place?

Tirtanadi says legal services can help 100 times more families avoid homelessness for the cost of one unit of permanent supportive housing. That means not only saving money but seeing positive results more quickly.

Here’s one example: Open Door Legal helped a mother escape domestic violence and homelessness. The abused woman was arrested after her husband claimed she had hit him. The husband obtained a restraining order to keep the woman from returning home and seeing her kids. He blocked access to their bank account, and she became homeless. The woman asked for help and was turned down by multiple agencies.

Then she found Open Door Legal.

“We went to court on her behalf, and we won,” Tirtanadi said. “We got her back in the home, got her husband out of the house, and got her a divorce – even though her husband tried to hide all the community assets. She got full custody of the children and child support. She was never hit again. She’s remained housed and in the workforce. She and her children are doing great.”

Open Door Legal was able to provide all this help for only $3,500.

Tirtanadi isn’t asking for much. Of the $646 million San Francisco spends annually on homelessness, Tirtanado suggests redirecting just $4 million to legal services.

He is confident the results of the study about Open Door Legal’s success in the Bayview can be replicated citywide.

“Once the program is fully scaled up, we should see a 20% reduction in homelessness in two years and a 40% reduction in four years,” Adrian predicts.

Currently, Open Door Legal has offices in four neighborhoods: Bayview, Excelsior, Western Addition and the Sunset. Tirtanadi wants to pioneer a system that offers universal access to legal help throughout San Francisco.

The Sunset office is the newest. In the past year, Open Door Legal has helped 13 Sunset residents preserve ownership of their homes and secured more than $100,000 in canceled debt.

Legal aid is not a magic solution for all of homelessness. It won’t address people experiencing homelessness with extreme mental illness and drug addiction. But if free legal services can help others escape homelessness at much less cost, the savings means more resources to tackle the hardest cases that include mental illness and addiction.

Tirtanadi notes that preventing homelessness with legal aid could also prevent a homeless person from spiraling into deteriorating mental health and addiction.

“When low-income residents have their assets illegally taken or face domestic violence, they can become homeless if they’re unable to get legal help,” Tirtanadi said. “Once homeless, their mental health deteriorates, and they start using drugs. Instead of addressing a major root cause of someone’s homelessness, which is a lack of access to legal help, San Francisco has focused on treating the symptoms at a huge expense.”

Solving San Francisco’s daunting problems will take a combination of innovation and common sense. Open Door Legal’s approach of using legal services to save people from homelessness is promising. So far, it’s shown to be effective and cost-conscious. We should do more.

Joel Engardio is the District 4 representative on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He can be reached at engardiostaff@sfgov.org.