A program St. Louis aimed to help thousands of tenants struggling with eviction, but documents show only a few hundred received legal defense from the program in its first year.
Approved in 2023 and funded by American Rescue Plan money, the city’s Right to Counsel program set a goal to defend 1,125 cases in fiscal 2024-25. The program, later known as the Housing Eviction Law Program, would provide tenants facing eviction with legal representation and provide information and referrals to others.
But a report released in September shows that out of 1,352 people served by the program, only 343 received legal defense for eviction cases through the program. The others received some legal assistance or a referral.
Ordinance 71694, which created the program, envisioned the program’s caseload growing over time. By the end of fiscal 2026, the city aimed to defend 2,250 people facing eviction, with that caseload growing each year. By the end of 2028, the goal was to serve 4,500 cases each year.
According to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, evictions in the city are up an estimated 11% from October 2024, and there were an estimated 6,360 evictions filed in the past year. An estimated 17 evictions are filed in the city each day.
Several tenants' rights groups in the city pushed for the bill and called it a massive victory at the time of its approval. But a year after its launch, those same groups claim the program has been underfunded, having received only 20% of the money the ordinance creating the program stipulated.
“The city has severely underfunded the program,” said Rachel Hurtado, an organizing lead at Arch City Defenders and a co-anchor of Action St. Louis’ tenants rights campaign. “The program isn't robust or sustainable enough to support the number of people who are facing eviction in St Louis, and the city also is not really feeling pressure about fully funding it.”
Ordinance 71694 called for the program to receive $1.3 million to $2.5 million in funding for its first two years. Currently, the program has only received $685,000 for that time span, pulling from American Rescue Plan Funds. A bill to allocate $5 million of those same funds for the program failed at the board.
We the Tenants, Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis and 14 other advocacy groups sent a letter to city leadership about the program. They plan to hold a press conference at 5:15 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall ahead of an oversight hearing by the city’s Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee to highlight what they call "insufficiencies" of the program.
The groups are calling for the Board of Aldermen, Board President Megan Green, Mayor Cara Spencer and Comptroller Donna Baringer to fully fund the program.
The city contracted Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, a nonprofit that provides free legal aid to low-income individuals, to run the program for its first two years. The program is overseen by the city’s Human Services department.
Ryan Sheehan, spokesperson with the department, said more information would be provided on the program during the oversight meeting on Wednesday night and declined to comment further.
“We are appreciative of the partnership with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, and, if given additional funding for the program, we would love to expand to meet the ever-increasing need as individuals are still facing evictions,” he said in a statement.
Hurtado stressed that she believes the program does good work and that Legal Services of Eastern Missouri is doing the best it can with the resources available. She said the city’s funding and oversight are crucial to the program’s success.
In a statement, Green said she supports the program’s full funding. She pointed to her support of Prop S, a measure approved by voters that established a 3% tax on short-term rentals. The collection that tax has since been paused.
Green said she expects a bill to be introduced to the Board of Aldermen in the coming weeks, directing the city to resume collecting Prop S funds in order to further fund the program.
After its launch, the program met a scaled-back reality, as reported by the River City Journalism Fund in an article from December 2024. According to the report, the program got off to a slower start than some had hoped and was termed a “pilot project.”
At a meeting in late November 2024, Daniel Buran, an assistant attorney at LSEM who leads the program, said the program was off to a good start and outlined the impact it provided to people struggling with eviction. He told the River City Journalism Fund the program would take on 520 cases over the next two years, an obtainable number but far short of the ordinance’s goal.
Buran said he could not comment on the program due to the upcoming oversight hearing.
According to the annual report, after taking on 58 cases in its first month of operations in August 2024, the number of new cases dropped to 20-30 a month. In July, the most recent month for which data was available, the program defended 33 new cases and provided legal information or a referral to 104 people.
“It can be very difficult to plead your case in eviction court,” said Kristian Blackmon, executive director of Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis. “If someone goes in there without a lawyer, the odds are much more higher that that is not going to be in their favor.”
Blackmon said the scaled-back reality of the program frustrates tenant groups that had envisioned more when the Board of Aldermen first approved the original ordinance. She said it’s more important in St. Louis than ever, as the city faces what she called an eviction crisis, six months after an EF3 tornado severely damaged or destroyed thousands of properties in north St. Louis.
“It’s great when bills get passed, but there's always the next big part after that,” Blackmon said, pointing to the lack of funding and lawyers to fully support the original vision of the program.
Blackmon said the city needs to invest in the program to see it fully flourish.
Still, the program had its successes. The annual report, released in September, estimated the program had a direct financial impact of roughly $299,000 on renters at risk of or facing eviction.
The report stated that the estimate includes monetary judgments, attorney fees, late fees and back rent avoided, as well as reductions in rent or fees owed, financial assistance and returned security deposits.
Three success stories were included in the report, laying out situations in which Legal Services of Eastern Missouri attorneys successfully defended cases and worked to scrub eviction records from public view on Missouri’s online legal case database.
But Blackmon, Hurtado and other advocates say while the program is doing good work, it’s not enough to meet the legal needs of people facing evictions in the city.
“Housing is a basic human right and is not being treated as such in a lot of spaces and places,” Blackmon added. “We just want our people to stay housed.”
