LA’s eviction defense plan up in the air amid a battle with the city attorney

The Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles often sues the city – and wins.

In the past two months, the nonprofit has won three lawsuits over the city’s handling of the homelessness crisis.

Legal Aid also defends tenants at risk of eviction as part of the city and Los Angeles County’s Stay Housed LA program.

Last Tuesday, the City Council was supposed to vote on a $177-million contract for Legal Aid to continue representing employers for the next three years, along with other groups that provide related services.

But the night before the vote, City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto sent a confidential memo to council offices recommending that council members “reconsider awarding such a large contract to someone who is constantly suing the city,” according to part of the memo obtained by the Times.

On the day of the scheduled vote, the council delayed it for a week, until Tuesday.

“[Legal Aid’s] mission includes improving the lives of our client communities through systemic change, which sometimes means suing government agencies for illegal behavior,” said Barbara Schultz, director of housing justice at Legal Aid, in an interview.

Schultz said Legal Aid’s prosecution and eviction work are “totally separate.”

A spokesman for Feldstein Soto declined to comment. He is running for re-election this year.

The contract, which will last for three years, will award approximately $107 million to Legal Aid to protect and prevent evictions, $42 million to the Southern California Housing Rights Center for temporary emergency rental assistance, approximately $22 million to the Liberty Hill Foundation to reach out to tenants and close to $7 million to Strategic Actions for the Economic Protection of Victims.

The fight over the contract has a big impact on Los Angeles employers who are at risk of being fired, Schultz said.

Legal Aid, which has been involved in the program since its inception in 2021, will have to stop accepting new clients if the contract is not passed by Tuesday. Each month, about 160 employers will be without attorneys and about 575 more will not be able to get advice that could help them avoid eviction proceedings, Schultz said.

Schultz said Legal Aid subsidizes some of the legal services in the program to groups such as Bet Tzedek and the Inner City Law Center.

“We receive 600 to 800 eviction papers every month in our district alone. If the council doesn’t stand up, those families will have no help from the city,” said City Council Member Hugo Soto-Martínez in a statement.

The Stay Housed LA program has opened about 26,000 cases in total, providing full representation in 6,150 cases and working on nearly 20,000 “limited” cases, according to data from Legal Aid. The original contract, scheduled to expire at the end of the month, was valued at $90 million.

Measure ULA, a “capital house tax” passed by city voters in 2022, includes funding for the program.

Last June, Feldstein Soto tried to block the City Council from extending the contract without a competitive bidding process, a core tenet he preached as the city’s appointed legal counsel.

At that time some members of the City Council complained, but nevertheless, they opened the contract to tenders.

Months later, the city’s Department of Housing awarded the contract to Legal Aid and other organizations before sending it to the City Council for approval.

“Our understanding of the city’s contracting process is that it is trying to get the best services it can at the best price and not use the process to influence the political or legal activities of nonprofit advocacy organizations,” Elizabeth Hamilton, deputy director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, which also filed lawsuits against the city, said in a statement.

Feldstein Soto’s confidential memo outlined other potential problems with the contract, calling for an audit of Stay Housed LA and asserting that a confidentiality clause in the original contract may violate state public records laws.

Recently, Legal Aid has won several victories against the city.

In January, a judge ruled that the city violated the state’s open meeting law when council members made a behind-closed-doors plan to sweep 9,800 homeless encampments. Legal Aid is representing the plaintiffs in that case.

In February, with Legal Aid also acting as counsel for the plaintiffs, a judge ruled that the city lacked the legal authority to enact a state law that allows the demolition of abandoned or idle RVs worth up to $4,000.

That same month, Legal Aid scored another victory when a judge found that the city had violated the constitutional rights of homeless people by seizing and destroying their property during encampment cleanups.