Model and Strategy
Where do you go for help when you are facing eviction? Open Door Legal provides free, full-scope legal services and representation to low-income residents of San Francisco. We work in over 35 areas of law encompassing employment, family, elder, consumer and civil litigation, and immigration law. Our largest practice is housing. Our housing law team takes on habitability issues, evictions, and other housing needs, with the goal of preventing housing instability and homelessness before it’s too late.
“Legal aid” doesn’t necessarily sound sexy, or even compelling. But here’s what it means, really, beneath the jargon: When the heat stops working in the apartment you share with your two granddaughters; when the ceiling is ringed with black mold that sends the three of you to the hospital in respiratory distress; when human sewage backs up into your toilet and bathtub for months on end, forcing you and your grandchildren to relieve yourselves in buckets – legal aid means that you are not alone. Legal aid means that you have help. Legal aid means that you have recourse to demand that your right to a safe home is enforced. And, most importantly, legal aid is, dollar for dollar, the most cost-effective anti-poverty strategy that exists.
With offices in the Bayview, Excelsior, and Western Addition, Open Door currently serves about 40% of the city’s low-income population. 93% of our clients at Open Door Legal are people of color and over 60% are women. Of those who are parents, 72% are single parents. Over 50% earn less than $15,000 per year. Almost by definition, their housing in a city as wealthy as San Francisco is tenuous at best – they almost all exist one eviction notice away from living on a friend’s couch, in their cars, or on the streets.
Our aim is to make San Francisco the first city in the nation with universal access to legal help, without exception. Over the next two years, we will continue to provide legal assistance to those whose housing is illegally threatened, saturating our current locations as we expand our footprint. Our plans include opening an office in the Sunset District in the next year, and ultimately two additional centers in the Mission and mid-Market/Tenderloin area to reach 100% of San Francisco’s low-income residents with comprehensive legal support. We also hope to become a model for national replication, and to have a systemic impact on how we, as a society, ensure justice for the poor.
Impact
While many solutions to homeless are retroactive, ours is an upstream approach that keeps people in their homes. Key studies bear out what housing our team sees every day: tenants who are facing eviction and have full representation are four times as likely to stay in their homes and four times less likely to use homeless shelters than tenants without full representation. We know of no other human service that presents such a huge delta in outcomes from such a simple intervention. Imagine, for example, that a job training program is 4x more likely that participants would find gainful employment, or that a college-prep course is 4x more likely students would get into college. Funding and scaling such programs would be an obvious imperative.
Legal aid is also extremely cost-effective. On average, our cases cost around $2,000, compared to the over $30,000 per person that San Francisco spends annually on housing and homelessness services. Additionally, our Social Return on Investment study found that for every dollar we spend, we generate $6.63 in short- and long-term financial benefits for our clients and deter up to $14.75 in future illegal action.
We measure success both qualitatively and quantitatively. For instance, we track the number of cases opened each year and estimate that, by the time we open our 6th center, that number will be just over 2,000. We measure caseload per attorney in order to prevent burnout, and track the number of days a case is inactive so that no case goes unaddressed for too long. We also measure success by regularly reviewing client feedback, which we share publicly at our annual meeting each year. Clients are surveyed twice in the life cycle of their case, and our goal is that at least 80% of our clients continue to say we made a ‘large’ or ‘extreme’ difference in their lives.
Leadership
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Adrian Tirtanadi
Executive Director & Co-Founder
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Nikki Love
Managing Housing Attorney