Housing Rights Legal Clinic Launches Program to Help Families Negotiate Their Eviction Cases for Free

The Housing Rights Legal Clinic at USD's School of Law held a ribbon cutting at the San Diego Law Library this week to officially launch its Eviction Negotiation Program.
The Eviction Negotiation Program will provide free legal assistance to low-income tenants in eviction negotiation proceedings. The tenants, on the day set for their trial, will be able to receive free legal assistance in negotiating a resolution to the eviction. This service is presently available for people with trials scheduled on Mondays, due to funding limitations. In the future, we will expand to include additional days of service.
“I’ve sat there in a courtroom and watched as three sets of households became homeless before 10 a.m.,” said Alysson Snow, Director of the Housing Rights Legal Clinic. “It’s brutal. All of that was preventable if they had legal counsel to help them negotiate a deal.”
Snow estimates that about 80% of tenants facing eviction show up to their court proceeding without a lawyer. And, without someone working in their corner, many tenants could face homelessness, bad credit, an eviction on their record and, in turn, have a hard time securing housing in the future.
“We’re able to get in there, help people know and understand their rights and obligations, analyze whether the tenants have viable defenses, and advise them of their legal options. Empowered with this knowledge and real legal representation, USD law students and supervising attorneys provide meaningful negotiation assistance to help tenants work out a deal with the property owner to avoid eviction,” Snow said.
Prior to seeing a judge, tenants are required to negotiate a deal on the day of their court proceeding with their landlords. Without legal counsel, Snow says many tenants are left in the dark on the best strategies for resolving their case. That’s where the Eviction Negotiation Program comes in.
On the day of a tenant’s eviction trial, Snow and her team of law students from the Housing Rights Clinic will be at the San Diego County courthouse in front of Dept 501 to ask if any tenants need legal assistance for their case. If they do, the law students, alongside Snow, will sit down with the tenants, interview them, inform them of their rights, and negotiate for them – all for free.
The program is free since students are the ones taking on the cases, supervised by Snow. Students get hands-on legal experience while being able to help the community in the process, which is a pillar of the work that USD’s 12 legal clinics are built on. The USD Legal Clinics provide free legal services to San Diego County residents while providing practical legal skills as students represent real clients in real cases. In 2024, students logged more than 18,500 hours for clients and closed more than 500 cases.
“We want these students to get social justice and public interest work deep in their hearts before they leave law school. Part of being a lawyer is being able to use your skillset to help the people who are really struggling the most in our community,” said Snow.
The new program will be housed at the San Diego Law Library.
NBC 7 covered the new program - you can view the story here.
Contact:
Elena Gomez
elenagomez@sandiego.edu
(619) 260-2739