Universal Access to Legal Help Dramatically Reduces Homelessness

Universal Access to Legal Help Dramatically Reduces Homelessness

In the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco something completely unique has been taking place: over the last 10 years, Open Door Legal has pioneered the country's first system of universal access to civil legal representation. All income-qualified residents of Bayview with a viable legal claim or defense have been guaranteed legal help, and as this has rolled out the homelessness count for the neighborhood has declined by half. A team of researchers came together to investigate the link and created a quasi-experimental study. They separated incoming service requests into a control and treatment group based on their residential zip code and then checked to see what percentage of each group subsequently became homeless. When compared to baseline data, the treatment group was significantly less likely to become homeless. When modeled out, they estimated that Open Door Legal prevented ~800 individuals from becoming homeless, which itself is enough to explain why Bayview saw homelessness decline by half since 2011, while the rest of San Francisco saw a 53% increase in the same period. From a cost perspective, the findings indicate that universal access to legal representation may be, by far, the most cost-effective way of reducing homelessness.