Saving sinking homes
Stephanie Alexie awoke one morning to find her home surrounded by water too deep to wade through. "It looked like the ocean," she recalled. Neighboring houses appeared barely suspended on top of rippling blue pools-mirrors reflecting the clear sky. In the distance, the wooden boardwalk built over marshy tundra dropped off into a vast sea. Alexie and her children were stranded until neighbors came by with a boat to her corner of Nunapitchuk, a Yup'ik village of roughly 550 people.
The land Alexie's home sits on never used to flood. But, in the last few years, seasonal transitions in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta-an area of western Alaska where the state's two longest rivers empty into the Bering Sea-have become more disruptive. Now, every spring, when the region undergoes a great thaw and chunks of ice break free from frozen rivers, Alexie finds herself sitting on an island.
Alexie's home survived the May 2020 floods, which were the worst the village had experienced in years. But, floodwaters rose dangerously close to the building's foundation, rotting the insulation underneath its floors. Black mold-likely a result of moisture trapped in the home-bloomed across the kitchen ceiling.
Alexie worried about where she and her family would go if the home became uninhabitable. It already felt like it was bursting at the seams: 26 people shared its four bedrooms. Mattresses with dozing children lined the living room floor. And toys and clothes spilled out of closet doors into the hallway. "There were too many things and no room," she described.
Alaska is home to 40% of the country's federally recognized Tribes, nearly half of whose members are based within roughly 200 villages in rural Alaska. These Alaska Native communities are diverse in culture and geography, but share a common risk: Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average. A 2024 assessment by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium found that 144 of these Tribes were facing some form of erosion, flooding, permafrost degradation, or a combination of all three.
The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Nation have investigated how those environmental changes have contributed to a severe housing shortage in western Alaska. In Nunapitchuk, for example, water damage during the 2020 floods rendered several homes uninhabitable, forcing some displaced residents to move in with friends and family, increasing already-high rates of overcrowding in the village. Alexie thought about moving back to Bethel, a city of more than 6,000 and the largest in western Alaska, which also serves as the hub for the 56 villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region. Although there is more available housing there, in Bethel, it would be more difficult to access the same traditional subsistence lifeways they practice in Nunapitchuk.
In the absence of meaningful government assistance, residents have taken extreme acts of adaptation to stay on their ancestral lands, from dragging houses across the tundra to safer locations to moving into already crowded homes. As governmental neglect persists and climatic shocks worsen, Alaska Native communities worry it will be increasingly difficult to maintain safe shelter and keep their Tribes together.
"We just have to live through it even though we don't get any help," Alexie said.
The legacy of 'sick homes'
Prior to prolonged contact with settlers and missionaries in the late 19th century, Indigenous peoples in western Alaska lived semi-nomadic lifestyles. Based on subsistence needs, Tribes might have moved from the coast in the spring, to riverside fish camps in the summer, to the tundra for black and whitefish trapping in the fall, and ice fishing in the winter. This mobility offered protection: People moved frequently to adapt to changes from flooding and erosion.
Starting in the late 19th century, roaring waves of economic development brought an influx of settlers and boom-town investment. During the gold rushes in northwest Alaska, the federal government invested in schools as a tool of colonial control, in hopes that Native children "might find viable economic and social roles to play in western society," as described in a 1996 book recounting the history of education of Indigenous peoples in circumpolar regions. Settlers and the U.S. government positioned schools as crucial hubs for medical care and sanitation, with some also offering religious services, food, and clothing. These offerings, coupled with mandates for compulsory school attendance, pushed Alaska Native peoples to settle permanently around newly constructed schools.
As a result, land that Tribes may not have found suitable for long-term habitation became the locations of many modern-day villages. In western Alaska, people settled along wetlands, marshy tundra, and rivers-where they frequently camped for ease of hunting and fishing. Decades later, these fragile waterside ecosystems have become bellwethers for the climate crisis.
When temperatures warm in the spring, melting snowpack restores flowing river channels, plentiful lakes reemerge and trails become soggy. This "breakup season" ushers in a short subarctic summer, when the tundra transforms into muddy wetlands, reviving salmonberry shrubs and opening new opportunities for subsistence hunting and fishing.
These days, snow melts earlier than ever before, and erratic temperature swings in the spring can unleash sudden deluges. Rapid breakup of ice hastens erosion along riverbanks. Although breakup season typically brings some flooding along riverbanks, more extreme floods, such as the ones affecting Nunapitchuk, are now more common.
The warming climate warps life in western Alaska year-round, too. Freeze-up comes later in the fall, restricting traditional winter travel routes along frozen rivers and across sea ice, and consequently limiting access to fish, seals, whales, walrus, and other important subsistence resources. Fall storms are increasing in frequency and strength. In September 2022, Typhoon Merbok, born out of warmer-than-usual waters in the Pacific, pummeled western Alaska. Forty communities in the region were damaged, with losses to homes and fish camps, according to a government tally in the month of the storm. From 1953 to 2017, the number of federally declared disasters in the state increased dramatically, with the majority of these events caused by flooding or severe storms in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region.
And, as western Alaska has become wetter and warmer, once-frozen ground is sinking. Permafrost-the ice-rich soil that rests below the surface of roughly 85% of Alaskan land-is rapidly thawing. That phenomenon is projected to cost billions in infrastructure damage and is already increasing upkeep costs for homes that are losing their structural integrity as the ground below lurches.
Worse, the effects of climate change-erosion, flooding, and permafrost thaw-don't always appear in isolation. They often amplify one another, leading to major land collapses, known by the Yup'ik term usteq.
Natalia "Edna" Chase, a 60-year-old Yup'ik woman, moved into her Nunapitchuk home with her family when she was 2 years old. When it was built in the late 1960s, the house sat high off the ground on wood stilts-a structural feature intended to prevent the home's heat from thawing the permafrost below. As long as permafrost remains frozen, it can support homes and infrastructure. With rising temperatures, however, this frozen soil is degrading rapidly, transforming solid ground into muddy sinkholes and swallowing Chase's home.
Each year, the home sinks 6 inches. When the marshy land engulfed the original flooring from her childhood home, Chase laid another floor on top. Soon, both were entirely underground.
Chase's house, crookedly descending into the earth, is now supported by layers of plywood she built haphazardly on top of the sunken floors.
Like Alexie, Chase was also affected by the 2020 Nunapitchuk floods. Water inundated her house, and she bailed out over 100 gallons. The flooding accelerated permafrost degradation underneath the building, according to Chase. Since then, conditions in her home have gotten exponentially worse. Her floors warp at steep angles. Whenever it rains or snow melts, the home floods. Last year, Chase tried digging a culvert under the building to drain floodwaters. A foot and a half underground, she hit permafrost, signifying what she already knew to be true-that the building was rotting from the ground up. "So if I want to build a house, it's not gonna be here," she said.
As the ground shifts, the joints between her walls and floors split open. Every week, despite her chronic back pain, Chase moves all her appliances and furniture away from the walls to seal the cracks with a fresh layer of duct tape. But these are only stopgaps.
Homes like Chase's were never equipped to survive in Alaska's extreme climates. Instead, developers constructed them hastily, and with little consultation with local residents, while riding the oil revenue booms of the 1970s.
The discovery of oil in Alaska's North Slope in the 1960s set off fierce lobbying for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline project, which was the largest private-capital project in world history at the time. The resulting pipeline boom drastically altered life across the state, especially for Alaska Native communities. Oil companies sought control over vast swathes of land in order to begin oil drilling. They pushed for the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, which extinguished all Indigenous land claims across the state; in exchange, Alaska Natives received roughly $1 billion and 44 million acres of land. In a departure from the reservation system in the contiguous United States, the federal government conveyed these lands to newly established Alaska Native corporations.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act secured the future of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, effectively creating a "pipeline right-of-way through the center of Alaska," according to Philip Wight, an assistant professor of History and Arctic and Northern Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It also inextricably linked Indigenous land sovereignty to oil development, and further consolidated Tribes in permanent villages by forcing them to lay claim to specific portions of land via Native corporations.
The state of Alaska reinforced these permanent villages through investments in infrastructure. Massive amounts of oil revenue enabled the state to construct housing at an unprecedented rate; over half of Alaska's current housing stock was constructed during the 1970s and 1980s. Many homes in Indigenous villages-including Chase's home-originated in this industry-fueled housing boom.
The speed and scale at which these homes were constructed had consequences. Much of this housing development ignored centuries of Indigenous wisdom on which structures are most resilient in climates of extreme cold. Developers modeled many homes after those typical in the temperate continental United States, erecting California ranch-style houses across the tundra.
Decades later, these houses are deteriorating rapidly.
"That has a lot to do with the current housing crisis, frankly, and it has a lot to do with the health issues we've seen with housing," said Ryan Tinsley, a Fairbanks-based construction expert. Tinsley has been advocating for more adaptable housing models in Alaska with his wife, Stacey Fritz, an anthropologist who formerly worked with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center.
Older homes built in the 1970s and 1980s had thin, uninsulated walls that offered poor protection from subarctic cold temperatures. Weatherproofing processes attempted to fix these issues by adding insulation and sealing leaks, but failed to install proper ventilation. As a result, a 2018 statewide housing assessment estimated that more than half of Alaska's households lacked the ability to properly remove moisture and indoor pollutants from their homes. In such indoor environments, the health of the occupants suffer. "Many, many people we've interviewed have called [modern homes] sick homes," Fritz said.
Alaska Native communities suffer from respiratory diseases at high rates; in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region, children are hospitalized for RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, at rates up to seven times that of the national average, according to a 2023 study published in the Pediatrics journal. And climate change is making indoor air conditions worse, as ambient temperatures and moisture levels increase, and wildfire events become more common.
Chase's household has been living with long-term health consequences since their home sustained damage in the 2020 floods. Her 15-year-old son started using an inhaler, and her former partner, who was living with her at the time of the flooding, developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, a lung condition that causes breathing difficulties.
No matter what she does, she can't seem to prevent moisture from seeping in, sending mold-green, then black-up the walls of the house. "That stench on my clothes can never come out, that mildew smell," she said.
'We're not getting the help that we need'
On an overcast March afternoon, Simon Lawrence drives on the Kuskokwim Ice Road. Parking just east of Kwethluk, a Yup'ik village about 30 miles inland from Nunapitchuk, Lawrence gestures out the window at an opening of the Kuskokuak Slough, a tributary of the Kuskokwim River. Just three decades ago, village children could safely hop over the narrow gap and play in its shallow waters during the summer, Lawrence recalls. Over time, erosion has deepened the channel, widening the gap between its banks and redirecting powerful currents toward the village.
At age 55, Lawrence has spent almost half his life working in maintenance in Kwethluk's local education system. When he built his two-bedroom house in the early 2000s, he thought sitting it on the higher ground uptown would shield it from flooding.
But now, the eroding river channel is inching westward toward a small stream connected to the heart of the village. When the two bodies of water inevitably meet, the resulting oxbow will likely unleash an outpouring of river water on Kwethluk's uptown. The floods could engulf several homes, including Lawrence's.
This isn't the first time that changing river conditions have threatened housing. A few years prior, the advancing riverbank forced Kwethluk to apply for federal funding to tow four of its homes inland. The village needs to move four more buildings that are within 15 feet of the water, but are struggling to find funding. The equipment and personnel required for the relocations are costly. Even gathering the data to demonstrate climate-related threats, which is a requirement for many government funding requests, is an expensive task. The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium estimated in its 2024 report that this would cost $20 to $30 million for the 144 threatened villages across the state.
When scarce federal resources are being spent on moving and repairing homes, local housing authorities are redirecting funds that normally go to new development.
Maintaining safe homes in increasingly extreme and unpredictable environmental conditions is costly, but also increasingly necessary. "The reality of their climate is changing faster and more harsh[ly] than anybody expected 20 years ago," said Brian Wilson, the executive director of the Alaska Coalition on Housing and Homelessness. "The upkeep budget gets more and more expensive, which then also makes it so you can't build as many homes."
And, even when housing authorities build new homes, volatile weather swings can interfere with construction that is already confined to a short season. Rural villages like Kwethluk are off of Alaska's road system. In warmer weather, people arrive by boat on the Kuskokwim River. And, when subzero temperatures hit, local crews plow a seasonal road averaging 200 miles over the thick river ice. Building materials are delivered to Kwethluk via river barges in the limited summer months. To get to the village, lumber and steel must travel through Seattle, Anchorage, and Bethel first. By the time they arrive, it's late summer's rainy season. And crews scramble to put the homes together before freezing temperatures set in.
Global warming brings a wetter environment-and an increased incidence of precipitation events, such as freezing rain-that can disrupt these already-tight schedules.
To alleviate these pressures, one of the former directors of Kwethluk's housing program wanted to build a facility in which homes could be fabricated. This manufactured housing system would enable prefabricated homes to be assembled year-round, regardless of weather conditions. "He had a good vision. If we had funding for that building, I would say go for it," said Chariton Epchook, Kwethluk's Tribal administrator. "Funding is what holds us back from the things we want to do."
Epchook said the region's housing authority is already stretched thin. Access to funding is a particular challenge for Native communities living in rural Alaska, who are disproportionately low-income. Indigenous people in Alaska experience poverty rates nearly triple that of white Alaskans, census data shows. And poverty is the highest in rural, predominantly Native areas of the state: In one western Alaskan village of Alakanuk, nearly 40% of residents live below the poverty line. In many rural areas, people depend on subsistence harvesting-not just for survival, but to maintain culturally and spiritually important practices, too.
Public funding is therefore crucial for maintaining infrastructure and services in villages. Many residents rely upon affordable housing units to remain in their village. Even for higher-income families that can afford market-rate rent or homeownership, the high cost of construction in remote villages disincentivizes private developers from investing in new homes. The majority of construction for affordable housing for Alaska Natives in villages today is funded through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act programs, which were passed in 1996 to address housing gaps in Indigenous communities. Since the law went into effect, the program's funding has been used to build or acquire almost 41,500 affordable homes and restore an additional 105,000 affordable homes on Tribal lands and in Alaska Native communities.
Funding levels, however, are subject to political whims and have remained largely stagnant. Until the 2024 fiscal year, inflation-adjusted dollars for the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act's housing grant program remained below levels from fiscal year 2000. That means fewer houses have been built in the last two decades. That decline in available resources can be seen clearly in a coastal Inupiaq village north of Nunapitchuk. In Brevig Mission, a village outside of the hub community of Nome, the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act funded 20 houses in the late 1990s, but in recent decades, it has barely covered the construction of five homes.
The Bering Straits Regional Housing Authority, headquartered in Nome, serves Brevig Mission along with 17 other communities. The housing authority estimated in 2022 that Nome and its surrounding villages need about 400 new homes over the next 25 years. However, the housing authority only delivers about three new homes each year. Building one costs about $780,000, said Jolene D. Lyon, president and CEO of the housing authority in the Bering Strait region. Lyon and her staff also have to balance the logistical puzzle of constructing new homes with the upkeep of already existing ones. In Brevig Mission, for example, the severity of permafrost thaw has come as a surprise. Homes are sinking several feet. Water and sewer lines are pulling away from their hookups and creating mini glaciers. Windows are warping.
"The 20-plus homes that we leveled last year need to be re-leveled again," Lyon said. "I cannot afford to do that every year…I don't have that kind of funding allocation."
In other words, the climate crisis is exacerbating the funding squeeze for housing agencies. "Those changing terrestrial processes, whether it's permafrost degradation and thaw, whether it's erosion and flooding, that's all coinciding with a time where we have fewer resources than ever, at least at the state level, to put toward these kinds of projects," summarized Griffin Hagle-Forster, the executive director of the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities.
And now, with frenetic federal funding freezes, even more projects-including several intended to proactively protect villages at risk for major climate hazards-are in jeopardy.
Genevieve Rock coordinates mitigation efforts against climate impacts for the Tribal government in Shaktoolik, an Inupiaq village of around 200 on a narrow spit of land along Norton Sound, an inlet of the Bering Sea. The community was already considered one of the state's most threatened by climate change; that existential threat became even more urgent after Shaktoolik lost its protective berm in the 2022 typhoon. The community also has a prospective relocation site further inland with a potential water source and enough land to sustain a village. But in the near term, the village badly needs a safety access road and emergency shelter so that residents are not stranded when the next storm comes, Rock said. Much of Rock's time is spent applying for competitive federal grants from entities like the Environmental Protection Agency to attempt to meet those needs.
"We're all competing against each other for federal funding, and that is just not our way," Rock said. "In our Native culture, we're a kind, caring, supportive, loving group of people that support each other. I have relatives over in Shishmaref, and that's miles and miles away, but now I have to compete against my relatives over there for federal funding to save all of our lives, and that's not right."
There is no federal agency solely devoted to addressing the climate threats these communities are facing. As a result, solutions are emerging in a patchwork, and Rock said she often finds herself in a catch-22. Shaktoolik needs critical infrastructure, but federal agencies don't want to fund new construction in areas that may soon be underwater. Meanwhile, Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster funds are restricted to help with individual disasters, rather than the slow-moving disaster of climate change.
"We're not getting the help that we need," Rock said.
Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project, The Margin, and The Nation.
This story was produced by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Nation, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
© Stacker Media, LLC.
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The percentage of tenants represented by an attorney declined steadily after January 2022. According to a paper written in 2023 by 11 legal services organizations, the right-to-counsel program has been plagued by "client eligibility outstripping provider capacity, funding shortfalls, and staff attrition, while tenant needs continue to rise." There were 111,830 eviction filings across the city last year, compared to just 42,203 in 2021. The Bronx is consistently the hardest hit, experiencing an eviction rate double that of the other four boroughs. And the majority of those Bronx tenants go it alone. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, only 42% of people facing eviction in New York City received full legal representation, while about half had no legal help at all; in the Bronx, less than a third were fully represented, while about 60% went through eviction proceedings by themselves. When a New York City tenant receives an eviction notice, they must reply to avoid automatic eviction. Their response triggers an "intake part," or IP, date. That's where, if they're lucky, they'll be assigned a legal aid lawyer who can help them. But there are 80 households at each IP date, which are held over Microsoft Teams for cases in the Bronx, and legal aid lawyers "just don't have the capacity" to cover all of them, said Jennie Stephens-Romero, deputy director of the housing unit at Bronx Legal Services. Her organization and the five others that offer free legal help to tenants facing eviction in the Bronx use a calendar system to make sure that one of them covers at least some of each weekday's IP date. Stephens-Romero's team was "very big," but they could only cover part of their assigned day; for a while they were able to cover either the morning or the afternoon, but after staff departures, they can only take on the first 20 tenants on their given day. Other organizations, she imagines, can take on even less. "It's really luck of the draw," she said, as to whether a tenant's IP date corresponds with the part of the day when attorneys are able to tune in and help. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves. It's "incredibly rare," Stephens-Romero said, for a tenant facing eviction to be able to afford their own lawyer without the help of a legal aid attorney. Last year, 11,587 tenants without representation called The Legal Aid Society's hotline (some may not be eligible for the right to counsel, and others may get a lawyer later in the process). Stephens-Romero said it's unusual for her to come to housing court and not be approached by somebody asking how to get a lawyer. Post-pandemic flood There doesn't seem to have been any planning for what would happen when the housing court system returned to its pre-pandemic state. Right-to-counsel lawyers in the city quickly realized that they couldn't handle all of the cases for eligible tenants; they didn't have adequate funding to meet the demand. So they, along with elected officials, asked housing judges to issue adjournments and postpone cases for tenants who weren't yet represented to give them time to get an attorney. The courts refused. "Courts are totally aware legal service providers can't handle all these cases," Stephens-Romero said. Indeed, as Community Service Society of New York policy analysts Oksana Mironova and Yvonne Peña write, courts are "choosing to move cases faster than the legal services providers can take them on, prioritizing speed over the tenants' right to due process." These priorities are precisely backward, Stephens-Romero said. "We're pushing tenants' rights to the side to clear the docket." Meanwhile, New York City's right-to-counsel program has only expanded further. In 2023, eligibility was extended to anyone of any income age 60 or older facing eviction. Legal service providers calculated that they needed $16 million a year to be able to handle those new cases-an alarming number, as the program wasn't fully funded even before that expansion. In 2023, legal aid providers told the city that it would take at least an additional $351 million to adequately serve the tenants they were already taking on plus all of the qualified tenants who were estimated to go through the process solo in 2024. Yet legal services providers in the city were granted only an additional $36.6 million for this work last year, and even then, the Eric Adams administration failed to pay out the money on time, forcing some organizations to contemplate cutting the help they offer. This is despite the fact that an analysis found in 2016 that the city would actually save $320 million a year in foregone shelter and housing costs by providing tenants with attorneys in eviction cases. "We want the right to counsel to really have the true meaning of what the tenant movement and folks who fought for this right really wanted, which is that everybody will get it," Clifford said. "But the city doesn't seem to be putting resources toward that kind of idea." More funding could also ease the staffing problems plaguing legal services organizations. Of the $351 million that these organizations have asked for, $226 million would go toward hiring more than 880 staff attorneys, a badly needed influx. Public interest lawyers face crushing workloads on salaries far lower than what they could command at private practices. In 2023, legal aid organizations reported attrition rates ranging from 20 to 55%; one provider lost six of 13 new hires within a year. "This is a tough job," Stephens-Romero said. If caseloads could be brought down and salaries increased, more people might stick around. The state court system released a report in 2023 recommending that attorney caseloads be limited to 48 a year. That represents an improvement from what caseloads used to be; Clifford said lawyers were routinely taking on more than 60 a year. But it's still a high number, according to Stephens-Romero, especially when some can be lengthy. Housing laws "are pretty complicated and complex, and each housing case requires a tremendous amount of work," Clifford said. Legal service lawyers wouldn't have to work so hard, however, if there weren't so many eviction cases inundating the system to begin with. As much success as the right-to-counsel program has shown for the tenants it's able to reach, New Yorkers would be much better off if they could simply stay housed in the first place. Yet New York City has long struggled to build and provide affordable housing, and the housing crunch is now the worst it's been in 50 years. "So many people wouldn't be ending up in housing court if apartments were eminently affordable," Clifford said. The city could also offer more help covering rent. Vouchers, which help low-income tenants afford apartments on the private market, are notoriously hard to use: The eligibility limits are stringent, and although it's illegal for landlords to refuse to rent to voucher holders, many do in practice. But the city has struggled to make improvements. In 2023, the city council overrode Mayor Eric Adams' veto to expand eligibility for some voucher programs, but Adams refused to implement the expansion, claiming it was too costly. After the city council sued over his refusal, a judge sided with Adams last summer. Other attempts to protect tenants might prove more successful. New York State approved good cause legislation for the city in 2024, which, for covered buildings, caps rent increases and bans landlords from evicting tenants except for things like nonpayment of rent or illegal behavior. But the law has a number of carveouts, including for buildings constructed after 2009, luxury units, rentals in condos and co-ops, and those owned by landlords with small portfolios. The hope, Clifford said, is that the law will eventually push the number of eviction filings down. "It's not everything that we wanted," Stephens-Romero said. But "it's definitely something we can use." Going national The early success of New York City's right-to-counsel program inspired other lawmakers around the country. "It basically made right to counsel seem achievable for lots of places," said John Pollock, coordinator at the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. In the three years after New York City enacted its program, four other jurisdictions-Cleveland, Philadelphia, Newark, and San Francisco-passed their own. Then the pandemic, which exposed not just the way job loss deprives people of the income to pay rent but also the impact of housing on people's health, lit a spark. Since the start of 2020, 14 cities, two counties, and five states have passed programs. Three states and six cities added their programs in 2021 alone. That frenzy has calmed down, but "we're still seeing the momentum rolling forward," Pollock said. These jurisdictions, and any others that join in, will have to heed the lessons of New York. Funding is one of the biggest question marks for other right-to-counsel programs, too. Many were set up with pandemic-era federal aid, money that has all been disbursed. When Hepburn and his colleagues at the Eviction Lab recently interviewed people working on implementing all the right-to-counsel programs across the country, "underfunding was something that came up throughout," he said. Still, Pollock hasn't seen any jurisdiction renege on its right-to-counsel program even as federal funding has dried up, and many are turning to their own sources to keep it going. In Hepburn's research, he and his colleagues found that thirteen programs are supported by state and local funding, including four that have their own revenue streams from things like taxes on landlords or developers. But even if programs were flush with cash, there is still a shortage of lawyers interested in and willing to do this work. "This is a sector-wide problem," Pollock said. Fixing it, as in New York, will take not just enough funding to make salaries competitive and workloads bearable but also a steady pipeline of new lawyers ready to go into housing law, which some law schools don't even cover. Then there are the court systems themselves, which have appeared to resist slowing things down to make sure tenants get the legal representation that they're due. "That approach of continuing cases when lawyers are not available, making tenants go through when unrepresented, that's a huge part of the problem," Pollock said. Courts tend to favor the interests of landlords. But in Washington State, judges are required to delay a case if a tenant who is eligible for the right to counsel appears solo. "Courts could take a different approach. They're choosing not to," Pollock said. He pointed out that, at less than 8 years old, the movement for the right to counsel in eviction proceedings is a relatively new one. "As with any movement, you expect there are going to be challenges," he said. But if New York wants to retain its status as a leader, it will have to pave a path toward finding the resources and the political willpower to make a groundbreaking right mean something real for everyone to whom it's owed. Pay up None of the half dozen Bronx tenants who were called before the judge in Room 550 over the course of an hour on that morning in late January had a lawyer helping them make sense of the process. A woman with the court's Spanish interpreter and no one else by her side was told she had to pay $3,554 by the end of February to avoid an eviction warrant. A white-haired man, also accompanied only by the translator, had accrued $2,221 in outstanding rent; the eviction warrant against him would be put on hold, the judge said, if he paid his February and March rents on time. "Good luck sir," she told him. Another woman, her dark hair tied up in a bun, sat next to her landlord's attorney. She owed $24,660 in outstanding rent. She was told, with the help of the interpreter but no lawyer, that her warrant would also be put on hold if she paid by the end of February. Last was a man who had accumulated $5,395 in outstanding rent; he had nine days to pay $3,200, plus the following months' rent, in order to stave off his eviction warrant. He, too, faced the judge alone. These judgments represent staggering amounts of money for most low-income renters. Many of Stephens-Romero's clients are "in really dire straits," she said. A large number have physical and mental limitations that prevent them from working, while others struggle to find jobs, or at least ones that offer enough hours and pay to make rent. If the tenants in Room 550 had had a lawyer on their side, they would likely have pushed back against the judge and managed to lower the amounts that their clients had to pay, or at least bought them more time. None of the tenants had the capacity to argue on their own behalf. Instead, they all accepted the sums that were handed down, whether they could afford them or not. Right to counsel "is a law," Stephens-Romero said, "and we aren't meeting it." Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler. This story was produced by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker. © Stacker Media, LLC.
