It’s a familiar scene in Los Angeles County courtrooms: a landlord shows up to an eviction proceeding with a lawyer well-versed in housing law. Their tenant shows up alone, with eviction

declare

full of legal jargon they don’t understand.

LA County regulators on Tuesday vowed to shift the power dynamic and appealed to their lawyers to draft an ordinance that would

give guarantee

certain tenants in unincorporated parts of the county

to have

lawyers during eviction proceedings. The board unanimously passed a motion giving district staff 10 months to write an ordinance guaranteeing these high-risk tenants have an attorney to help them navigate the labyrinth of local landlord-tenant law.

Legal representation is expensive and unaffordable for far too many working people, said Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who drafted the motion with Supervisor Hilda Solis.

She noted that a disproportionate number of these high-risk tenants are blacks and Latinos, the most likely racial groups in the county to bear rent burdens. As the province’s pandemic eviction moratorium expires

in March

,

province the

regulators said they wanted to make sure these high-risk tenants got the legal support they needed to avoid homelessness.

In recent years, more than a dozen jurisdictions

included

New York City, San Francisco

other

Philadelphia has passed versions of this right to counsel law

guaranteeing legal representation for tenants who are being evicted

.

LA County leaders said they now want to offer the same promise of legal representation.

the

ytold their lawyers Tuesday to tinker

ordinance

That

would first establish legal services for the approximately 1 million people living in unincorporated areas. The board said it plans to expand it next

legal

assistance to vulnerable tenants living in the rest of the province, with the exception of

the city of

Los Angeles, where the City Council is working on its own ordinance to ensure tenants have legal representation.

Tenant lawyers say landlords are much more likely to be represented

by a lawyer

eviction procedures than their tenants.

A 2019

analysis

of 4,200 eviction cases in LA County found that approximately 97% of tenants in those cases did not have attorneys

. Landlords, meanwhile, were not represented in 12% of the cases

the

fallen.

Our landlords have more resources, they have more knowledge and more power than our tenants, said Rafael Carbajal,

the

head of the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs, which oversees the county’s eviction defense services.

Lawyers said

to have

no attorney often leaves tenants without a defense, no matter how much tenant protection exists to help them.

If you can’t defend them as a defense, you lose, said Barbara Schultz,

the

director housing justice at Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation.

Tenants from across the county on Tuesday shared their stories of wrongful evictions and harassment they felt powerless to stop. A woman begged the board to help her find a lawyer for two court hearings in August so she could keep her home for 17 years. A single mother of three said she was served an eviction notice last month despite knowing about her rent.

I want to fight, she said in Spanish.

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, the sole tenant on the board, said she too was once desperate for legal help to avoid an eviction.

Horvath said so

while

she was the

mayor of west hollywood,

Horvath said

she received a text from a neighbor alerting her that an eviction notice had just been posted on her door. She said her landlord claimed she hadn’t paid rent in three months. It wasn’t true, she said, and in the end she avoided the eviction.

I was shocked. I was humiliated. I was mayor of the city, she said. And if I hadn’t had friends who had legal training to protect me, I don’t know what would have happened.

While tenants provided the most testimony on Tuesday, a handful of associations argued that the board’s motion was misdirected and called for a more thorough analysis of how much the ordinance could cost and whether it would actually prevent evictions. Max Sherman, with the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, said most cases that play out in LA County courtrooms arise from nonpayment of rent and are therefore cases that are unlikely to be resolved through mediation. He argued that a law on the right to advice in such cases would only delay legal proceedings and not stop evictions altogether. Hiring a lawyer who is paid by the hour does not change a tenant’s ability to pay rent, Sherman said. We are urging the board to implement a nationwide permanent rent assistance program for tenants to pay rent, not lawyers.