If Landlords Have to Pay for Their Lawyers, Shouldn’t Tenants Have to Pay a Little Too?

Recently, the County Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance to provide free legal counsel to tenants facing eviction in unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County whose household income is equal to or less than 80 percent of the area median income. The City of Los Angeles is considering a similar ordinance. While the general thought processes behind this is that landlord’s have attorneys, so why shouldn’t tenants, and attorneys for tenants will help keep people in their homes; free attorneys, much like anything that is free, creates all sorts of incentives for abuse - in this case, at the expense of taxpayers.  If the City and County want a healthy legal program where tenants have attorneys to counterbalance landlord’s attorneys, then those tenants should be required to pay a small copay, like with most other publicly funded programs.

I am a mom-and-pop landlord, meaning I own a few units and I don’t make a living as a landlord. First and foremost, I can tell you that I never want to evict a tenant. I don’t want to throw anyone out on the street, and here in Los Angeles it is a very costly endeavor. I’ve been involved in two evictions for nonpayment of rent and both times the tenants eventually were forced to move out. In neither case did a tenant’s attorney raise a relevant legal issue, they simply dragged out the process. This is the problem that concerns me.

At a recent City Council meeting, L.A. Councilmember Soto-Martínez, explained that, “Landlords have an attorney in 95% of eviction proceedings but tenants have a lawyer just 3% of the time.” He went on to say, “that is not a fair fight.” While these numbers might seem disproportionate, when you dig down into the details, you can see a very different story. You see, landlords don’t “have an attorney,” landlords pay for an attorney and it isn’t cheap. In the two cases I was involved in, I paid anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for my attorney.  Throughout both of these two cases, I was forced to make decisions that involved the cost of the attorney versus the probability of winning, the length of time it would take for a tenant to be removed, and so forth. The question I would pose to members of the County Board of Supervisors and City Council is this, why should landlords be forced to make economic decisions around an attorney that costs thousands of dollars to remove a tenant who is in violation of their lease or not paying rent, while the tenant who has caused the legal issues is not forced to make any of these same decisions.

A tenant who knows they will receive a free attorney is disincentivized to work with their landlord on any issue, like if they fall behind in rent, because they can always fall back on that attorney. They are also fully incentivized to not only contest evictions even when there is no legal ground for doing so, and regardless of the eventuality that they will be removed, they are incentivized to drag that legal process out as long as possible as there is no cost to them or their attorney. The only people who are financially impacted by this are the taxpayers who are paying for the tenant’s attorney and our court system that will become more clogged and slower than it is now.

Requiring tenants to have a copay for their attorney and have some skin in the game could address some of these problems and is not a foreign concept for public programs. Medi-Care, Medi-Cal, and the VA health system all have copays as do many public child care programs. By simply requiring a tenant to pay a small copay for an attorney, tenants would be required to consider whether an attorney is really necessary to them or if they are just being frivolous. This would in turn save the taxpayers money both in saved attorneys fees and court costs. Going back to Councilmember Soto-Martinez’s line one more time, requiring tenants to pay some fee for their attorney, just as landlords do, would make this a “fairer fight.”

Joshua Kamali is a landlord in Los Angeles and a member of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles. He worked for almost 10 years in Democratic politics and policy in Washington, D.C. and in California before becoming a nonprofit fundraiser. He now works in property development and construction and owns twelve units in Los Angeles County.