Right-to-Counsel Policies and Mothers' Eviction Stress: The Role of Vacancies

Background and Purpose: Low-income mothers face high risk for eviction. Evictions can lead to significant trauma by forcing displacement; in tight rental housing markets with few vacancies, an eviction can push a family into homelessness. Stress about housing costs and eviction has been associated with adverse outcomes for families including maternal depression, intimate partner violence, and child maltreatment.

Tenants are significantly disadvantaged in eviction hearings; while over 80 percent of landlords have legal representation in eviction proceedings, only 3 percent of tenants do. Tenants who have attorneys are more likely to remain housed, receive more time to relocate if displaced, and are less likely to use homeless shelters compared to unrepresented tenants.

Right-to-counsel (RTC) policies guarantee tenant access to free legal representation in eviction cases. Recent legislative successes have led to passage of statewide right-to-counsel policies in five states since 2021. The present study tested whether living in an RTC state was associated with lower eviction stress among mothers renting their housing in 2023, and whether the policy effect depended on the rental vacancy rate.

Methods: Data came from the 2023 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), an annual repeated cohort survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau on the well-being of families with children. The analytic sample was limited to mothers renting their housing (N = 5,902). The dependent variable was an ordinal categorical variable assessing the frequency with which mothers experienced stress about eviction (1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Sometimes, 4 = Usually, 5 = Always). The key independent variables were 1) whether mothers lived in a state with a statewide right-to-counsel policy (1 = Yes, 0 = No), and 2) a continuous measure of the state’s rental vacancy rate; lower values indicated tighter housing markets with fewer unoccupied units available for rent.

Ordered logit regression assessed the relationship between RTC, rental vacancies, and eviction stress. Model 1 tested main effects of living in a RTC state and the rental vacancy rate on of eviction stress, and Model 2 included the interaction term between RTC and the rental vacancy rate to test whether vacancies moderated the effect of RTC on eviction stress.

Results: There were no main effects of living in an RTC state or the rental vacancy rate on eviction stress; however, a significant interaction term indicated that the effect of living in an RTC state depended on rental vacancies. The negative interaction (ß = -6.26, p < 0.001) indicated that RTC was protective against eviction stress at higher vacancy levels.

Conclusions and Implications: Guaranteed legal representation in housing court can significantly reduce tenants’ stress about eviction, but only when sufficient vacancies exist in the rental market. Attorneys may provide tenants better information about the state of the rental market, and higher vacancy rates may give tenants greater leverage in eviction cases. The present study shows that RTC policies may also improve housing-related mental health among vulnerable mothers. Future research should further assess the impacts of policies that empower renters in tight housing markets.