Why Codified Right to Counsel in LA City is within Arm’s Reach
By Mike Dennis, Senior Director, Housing Justice
Return to NewsletterAfter years of relentless advocacy, the Right to Counsel Coalition worked alongside the City of LA to get a "Right to Counsel" ordinance nearly passed into law. Unfortunately, one last minute roadblock created by the LA City Attorney has thwarted final passage. The City Attorney is requesting changes to the definition of who can be considered a tenant—which highly favors the landlord lobby.
If the City overcomes this hurdle, LA could join other cities like New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco to enact meaningful measures to address housing crisis pressures on working families. This policy, long advocated for by tenant groups, guarantees legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction. Although building up the infrastructure—which will include financial resources and staffing—may take several years, this law would be a significant step toward achieving housing justice in a majority-renter city.
Tenants facing eviction and harassment have not had the same right to a free attorney as defendants in criminal court do. This results in thousands of wrongful evictions across the county each year. Under the new law, any tenant making less than 80% of the area’s median income (or $77,700 per year per individual, or $110,950 for a family of four) can receive free legal services.
Why does this matter? Because a large portion of people that fall into street homelessness every year do so because of an economic hardship, which often requires them to fall back on rent. Eviction defense, outreach and education, rental subsidies, and tenant navigation services are a critical piece of a larger homelessness prevention strategy.
Once this ordinance becomes law, critical programs like Stay Housed LA can help enforce the protections it affords by integrating Right to Counsel resources into the services it is already providing to vulnerable communities in need.
Liberty Hill, alongside Legal Aid Foundation Los Angeles, contracts with the city and county to support Stay Housed L.A., a groundbreaking program providing outreach, education, and legal assistance to tenants across LA County. Between 2020 and 2025, the program reached over 2.2 million tenants. This program is also supplemented with support from L.A. Care Health Plan.
The connection between codified eviction defense policies like Right to Counsel, dedicated public revenues from Measure ULA, and service delivery programs such as Stay Housed LA creates meaningful systems change for tenants who otherwise have few resources or options to defend themselves.
By stopping the inflow of new people falling into homelessness, we can turn the curve upside down.
None of this work would be possible without the hard work of community-based organizations across the city like Affordable Pasadena, ACCE, Build Hope, Burbank Tenants Rights, Changing the Faces of Homelessness, Eastside LEADS, Glendale Tenants Union, Housing Long Beach, InnerCity Struggle, Inquilinos Unidos, Keep LA Housed, Long Beach Housing Justice Coalition, Pasadena Tenants Union, and many others.
