Eviction Court Outcomes and Access to Procedural Knowledge: Evidence From a Tenant-Focused Intervention in New Orleans

Abstract

During the legal eviction process, tenants tend to lack procedural knowledge about how courts operate and how to argue their case. Uneven access to this information tends to result in less favorable outcomes for tenants, including a mark on the tenant’s record that severely limits future housing opportunities. However, there are few—if any—quantitative studies that systematically examine the relationship between knowledge distribution and eviction case outcomes. This article focuses on the unique efforts of a New Orleans-based renters’ rights organization to contact residents facing eviction and provide them with informative resources on the eviction process. We follow the court outcomes of 267 cases, and analyze them using a quasi-experimental approach and a series of weighted logistic regressions. For tenants who were contacted, we observe a 13% reduction in the probability of receiving a rule absolute judgment than among those who were not contacted. Direct forms of contact (e.g., a telephone conversation) tend to have stronger associations with positive court outcomes than indirect forms (e.g., sending a postcard).

Keywords:

• Eviction
• housing court
• procedural knowledge
• renters’ rights
• community-engaged scholarship
• New Orleans

Acknowledgments

For their help in collecting court monitoring data, the authors thank Maizy Stell, George Martin, Gaia Raimondo, Lauren Cargo, Jack Canizaro, Gillian Gurley, Max Balakoff, and Stanlyn Breve. We also thank Veronica Reed for her leadership, Robin Bartram and Patrick Rafail for their comments and advice, and Ryan McBride, Diana Soto-Olson, Nick Spitzer, Judith Dangerfield, LaToya Tufts, Siobhan Lash, and other members of the Tulane–Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Community-Engaged Research for their guidance.

Disclosure Statement

The content of this article relates directly to advocacy work being carried out by several of the authors, and several of the authors are directly employed by an agency (Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative) carrying out such advocacy work. This collaboration between academic and community organizations is an essential part of community-engaged scholarship. The first author does not share these ties, and is not employed in this advocacy work, and therefore ensured that no bias was introduced in the results of this study. This work and partnership were supported by the Tulane–Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Community-Engaged Research.

Notes

1 Orleans Parish (where “parish” is synonymous with “county”) and the City of New Orleans share boundaries and a consolidated government. These entities may therefore be thought of interchangeably, although jurisdiction of civil court officially falls to the Parish. Most of New Orleans (16 out of 17 wards) lies East of the Mississippi River; the exception is Algiers, a stretch of neighborhoods located across the river on the West Bank. Orleans Parish Civil District Court is divided administratively between the First City Court (East Bank) and Second City Court (West Bank). Due to resource and personnel limitations, JPNSI was only able to focus attention on evictions filed in the First City Court.

2 We did not focus on, and therefore deleted from our data set, evictions of businesses from commercial properties, as our goal was to focus on housing and residential tenants. Five such cases were deleted from our data set.

3 The full comic book can be viewed at the following link: https://storage.googleapis.com/wzukusers/user-27881231/documents/7dd105bbcbe7472e91748fbbaf579808/EVICTION-HELP-COMIC-PDF-WEB.pdf.

4 See the following link for the COVID-19 financial hardship declaration form: http://tinyurl.com/nolacdcform.

5 We are aware of recent research on the phenomenon of serial eviction filing (Garboden & Rosen, 2019; Immergluck et al., 2020; Leung et al., 2021), wherein landlords file eviction cases—often multiple times—without real intention of moving forward with the case, instead using the filing as leverage over their tenants. In this analysis, however, we are only looking at cases that make it to court. Therefore, we can be confident that these are likely not cases of serial filing, and that the landlord is intent on forcing the tenant out.

6 We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

7 The covariate balance figure was produced using the cobalt package (Greifer, 2022) in R.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

AJ Golio

AJ Golio (he/him) is a doctoral student of sociology in the City, Culture, and Community Program and a Mellon Community-Engaged Research Fellow at Tulane University. He researches and writes broadly on topics related to cities, race, and culture. Some focus areas include housing, evictions, gentrification, urban policing, and representations of the city in popular culture.

Grace Daniels

Grace Daniels (she/her) is an undergraduate student within the Tulane School of Architecture, pursuing degrees in design and sustainable real estate development. She is interested in the built environment and its many intersections with daily life.

Russell Moran

Russell Moran (he/they) is the Program and Operations Manager for Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative. They were born and raised in Louisiana and live in New Orleans with their dog, Beff.

Y. Frank Southall

Y. Frank Southall (he/him) is a manager of organizing, campaigns, and community engagement at Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative in New Orleans, LA. His primary organizing foci are evictions, renters’ rights, and habitability issues. He has a passion for housing justice, public health, and digital engagement. In the past years he has worked for Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, Tulane University’s Center for Public Service, Working America, and many other organizations focused on political, social, and economic justice.

Tricia Lamoza

Tricia Lamoza (she/her) began volunteering with the Renters’ Rights Assembly during the Spring of 2020. Court monitoring called to her, and she began regularly attending housing court in August of 2021. When given the opportunity to coordinate the court monitoring project for Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, she accepted gratefully. She has personally monitored over 1,000 eviction cases in New Orleans First City Court over the last year and a half and has helped train and support new volunteers.