Replication Data for: FORCED OUT? CIVIL LEGAL ACCESS AND HOUSING STABILITY

There is considerable current interest in policy solutions to address the post-pandemic rise in evictions experienced in many communities. Some have advocated expanding access to legal counsel as one solution: in the U.S., tenants usually face eviction on their own, while landlords are typically represented by an attorney. Although it seems intuitive that legal representation in housing court would help tenants facing eviction, measuring the effects of counsel is quite challenging, because represented and unrepresented tenants are dissimilar across many dimensions, including wealth. A handful of randomized experiments suggest lawyers have appreciable impacts in housing court, but results are mixed, and these studies’ generalizability to the larger universe of civil legal housing assistance programs remains uncertain. In this Essay, we address that gap through a quasi-experimental evaluation of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the nation’s largest civil legal aid provider that serves over 1.7 million people each year. We employ Census data covering millions of households and exploit an eligibility rule that limits LSC services to households earning less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level. Using several methodological approaches, including regression-discontinuity, differences-in-differences, and a dose-response analysis, we demonstrate that access to civil legal aid improves housing stability. Our estimates suggest that LSC enables 75,000 households to maintain their housing each year at a rough cost of around $2,000 per prevented move. These impacts are on par with those observed in high-quality randomized trials, suggesting that civil legal aid, unlike many other interventions, does not lose efficacy with scale. Our large sample sizes allow us to measure how impacts of civil legal access vary for particular population subgroups, something not possible in prior work. Access to civil legal aid is particularly beneficial for seniors aged 65+, people with less than a high school degree, Asians, and people who do not speak English well. Our findings highlight the important role that funding legal aid can play in curbing housing instability and homelessness. Though eviction defense models vary, what matters the most is having an attorney.