Members of the Board of Aldermen heard the successes and challenges of a St. Louis program that city officials hoped would help thousands of tenants facing eviction at an oversight hearing Wednesday night.
The board approved its Right to Counsel program in 2023 and launched it last year as the Housing Eviction Law Program. It aimed to pair city residents facing eviction with free legal defense and aid, but the program struggled in its first year after receiving just a fraction of its proposed funding.
The ordinance that created the program called for somewhere between $1.3 million and $2.5 million in funding over a two-year period, though the city has only allocated $685,000 in American Rescue Plan funds.
In recent days, tenant organizers have criticized the city’s handling of the program in its first year, questioning the amount of funding it receives.
At a rally before the hearing, tenant groups We the Tenants and Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis called on city officials to fully fund the program, calling it a major success for the tenants it has served. Three tenants, one of whom was helped by the program, spoke at the rally.
“I was able to get legal counsel through them,” said Misha Hurst, a tenant who avoided eviction through the program. “Had I not been able to do that, I would have probably been out on the street.”
The ordinance that created Right to Counsel called on it to serve more than a thousand tenants in its first year, 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.
It’s hoped that by the end of 2026, the program will have defended 2,250 people.
Daniel Buran leads Right to Counsel as an attorney at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, the nonprofit the city contracted to do the work. Currently, he and one other attorney, Shawn Caruso, handle the deluge of tenants facing eviction who seek help from the program.
Buran told the committee that he and Caruso have to turn off the hotline set up for the Right to Counsel program just hours after opening it for calls on Mondays because the two attorneys cannot handle the demand.
“It breaks my heart every Monday to do it,” Buran said. “Shawn and I can only take so many cases without ethically being overloaded.”
He told the committee that with the full $2.5 million funding the ordinance originally called for, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri could hire and have at least 15 attorneys defending clients.
According to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, evictions in the city this year 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 St. Louis each day.
Buran said he expects demand will increase due to the rising cost of living and other factors.
Board members Shameem Clark Hubbard, Alicia Sonnei and Rasheen Aldridge asked several questions of the attorneys and members of the city’s human services department that oversees the program. Hubbard called for the hearing.
Tenant organizers criticized the department for failing to meet with them, a requirement laid out in the ordinance.
Department of Human Services Deputy Director Valerie Russell and the city’s program director, Edna Jackson, agreed the program needed more funding and had fallen short in its first year, but they pushed back against criticism of their department.
“I have to disagree with statements that have been made that there has been nothing that has done by the Department of Human Services and in the role as program director in this project,” Russell told the committee.
Russell said she wasn’t prepared at the meeting to tell the Board of Aldermen members what specific areas the program needed help in, outside of funding gaps.
Russell said that in the wake of the May 16 tornado, Jackson had more added to her plate. But board members questioned why she’d be assigned any work outside the program’s purview.
The three members and Russell agreed to continue dialogue about the program.
Lee Camp, an attorney with Arch City Defenders who helped write the ordinance that created the program, urged the board members to push Mayor Cara Spencer and other city officials to look toward the original bill that created the program and fulfill the full vision of the program.
He called the current state of the program a crisis.
“We don’t want to see another promise that we’re going to launch another program, that we’re going to have another relief source for you,” Camp said. “We want to see this one work.”
Buran said that with more money, the program can meet a growing demand. He said $2.5 million won’t fully fund the program, but it would allow for a better program that better serves people facing eviction.
“We can fix the power imbalance that’s inherent in our state laws, we can help our clients avoid larger money judgments,” Buran said. “People we represent have better outcomes. They can stay in their homes, they can find better homes.”
