Legal aid nonprofit says it can lower SF homelessness

Reggie Daniels lived with his grandmother for nearly all his life and never doubted that he and his sister would one day inherit her house in Bayview-Hunters Point.

But when his grandmother died in 2020, he said, he discovered that her will had been reworked in the final months of her life to bequeath Daniels’ longtime residence to her children — not to Daniels and his sister.

The inheritors decided to sell the house and proceed with an eviction, which Daniels and his sister didn’t believe they could fight.

“We were powerless, really, under the situation,” Daniels told The Examiner. “My grandmother passed during COVID, and we didn’t have any real funds. Our aunts and uncles were already homeowners and they had these fancy-schmancy attorneys — and we were in a pickle.”

Daniels and his sister found Open Door Legal, which represented them in a two-year legal process — Daniels’ attorneys believed his grandmother was coerced by her children to rewrite the will’s terms — that ended in a settlement and allowed them to stay housed, he said.

“I don’t know what the other outcome would’ve felt like,” Daniels said. “I don’t know what that feeling feels like, but it feels really good to know that I’m in a position to be a homeowner, going from someone whose future was very uncertain.”

More than 10 years after it first set up shop in San Francisco, Open Door Legal hopes to expand its legal-aid services and is eyeing The City’s government for financial support in doing so.

The nonprofit wants to prove its model — akin to the come-one-come-all model of a general hospital, but for legal help in civil matters — is a more cost-effective and humane way to address San Francisco’s chronic struggles with homelessness, attempting to halt a resident’s downward spiral before it reaches its nadir.

The nonprofit argues that providing pro bono legal help to those whose income qualifies for it in every San Francisco neighborhood could make a sizable dent in homelessness citywide. The idea is that many people are at risk of homelessness because they face legal problems before losing their access to housing — and either could not receive legal help or never sought it.

“Homelessness has many causes,” said Adrian Tirtanadi, executive director and founder of Open Door Legal. “When we think about the legal causes of homelessness, it could be a housing issue, it could be a physical-safety issue, it could be an income or asset issue — and if any of those are taken away illegally, that could trigger homelessness.”

Open Door Legal currently has a budget of about $6 million annually, and it hopes to secure an additional $4 million in The City’s upcoming budget. It already has a champion in Supervisor Joel Engardio , who represents the Sunset district, where Open Door Legal opened a new office last year.

Engardio said that when Tirtanadi came to his office for help, he was taken aback by the modesty of his request for a city that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on homelessness.

“We keep kind of doubling down on things that may not be the most effective use of resources, and what Open Door Legal is offering doesn’t actually ask for a lot of resources,” Engardio said. “It seems a reasonable experiment, but based on some actual success.”

Civil right to counsel

The United States guarantees the right to an attorney for people accused of crimes, but not those with civil legal issues. A civil right to counsel already exists in other countries, such as Canada and Brazil.

City Attorney David Chiu has led the charge for a civil right to counsel in San Francisco since his days on the Board of Supervisors. In 2011, he sponsored an ordinance declaring such a policy and establishing a pilot program aimed toward that purpose.

“If you shoplift a toothbrush, you have the right to an attorney,” Chiu said. “If you’re about to lose your child in a custody fight, or you need a civil restraining order, you’re out of luck.”

San Francisco has slowly adopted a right to counsel in different stages, offering it to tenants facing eviction and — as of a 2022 ballot measure — to victims of domestic violence.

“Open Door Legal is pioneering what could be our country’s first system of universal access to legal representation ... I think we are on the verge of something truly groundbreaking, progressive, and worthy of this movement for justice,” Chiu said.

Open Door Legal wants to expand the right to counsel beyond these relatively strict parameters, welcoming any legal issue and helping them assess their needs, Tirtanadi said.

“A person might not understand that, for example, if you get locked out of your unit but don’t get filed with eviction papers, that’s not considered an eviction — you couldn’t go and get legal assistance necessarily through tenants right to counsel because there’s no formal eviction that’s been filed,” he said.

Research on Open Door Legal

Tirtanadi’s pitch has new evidence to back up his mission in hand.

Last month, researchers published a new analysis of the effect Open Door Legal had on supervisorial District 10, which includes Bayview-Hunters Point. The residents of that area were the only people the firm served from its opening in 2013 until 2019, when it opened a second office in the Excelsior district.

Tirtanadi was credited as an author of the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. The other authors declared they had no conflicts of interest and worked on it pro bono, and the group hopes to have it published.

In short, the researchers found that homelessness decreased 47% in District 10 between 2011 and 2022 but increased by more than 50% across the rest of the city during the same time period. Had Open Door Legal not existed in District 10, the researchers estimated homelessness would have risen there by about 20%.

More specifically, the study determined that providing legal services to a homeless person or one at risk of becoming homeless reduced their subsequent rate of homelessness by nearly 14%. For those whose cases advanced and were actually represented by Open Door Legal, that number improved to a 46% reduction in homelessness.

The demand for Open Door Legal’s services has been significant and broad. In the first six years, the nonprofit tackled cases in more than 30 areas of law, and about 20% of the entire population of District 10 had sought its services.

The findings, the authors wrote, challenge “the conventional view that primarily attributes homelessness to market failures in housing or personal issues like mental health and substance abuse.”

“Instead, it suggests that enhancing access to civil justice can effectively address homelessness, a viewpoint that resonates with broader economic principles emphasizing the role of institutional structures in economic welfare,” the paper states.

The dollars and cents

To city lawmakers and officials, there is not only the enticement of reduced homelessness but also potentially more-efficient spending — fixing homelessness once it starts is expensive and logistically difficult.

The study found that it cost Open Door Legal about $3,105 per person it helped avoid homelessness. The cost to provide permanent supportive housing or shelter to a person who is already homeless can vary widely. But even for a single adult staying in a congregate shelter, the cost is $17,200 per year, according to the study, which is among the cheaper options.

“Incremental investment in civil legal services saves untold public expenses for a wide range of crises facing our communities. Homelessness is indicative of that,” Chiu said.

Budget deficit brewing

Even with evidence of cost efficiency, winning support for a program expansion at a time when The City is facing a major budget deficit could be challenging. Open Door Legal will not be the only nonprofit asking for help, and The City’s precarious fiscal position means it will be trying to rein in spending — not add to it.

Of Open Door Legal’s $6.3 million expense budget, $3.5M comes from The City.

Its backers said they hope that the building body of research proves irrefutable.

“Legal aid is really an untested means of homelessness prevention and a way of reducing homelessness — and, given the scale and seeming intractability of the issue, it would make sense for the city to test it,” Tirtanadi said.

In 2019, Open Door Legal opened a second office in District 11. It has since expanded to four offices in The City, including in the Sunset and Western Addition neighborhoods. Next, it hopes to take in clients from Mid-Market, the Castro, the Mission and Chinatown.

If successful in San Francisco, Open Door Legal could one day expand beyond The City’s borders. Already, it’s receiving attention — including from students and workers at The Harvard Business School, where senior lecturer Brian Trelstad is preparing a review of the nonprofit’s work based on his students’ interest in its model.

Open Door Legal’s rise thus far has been slow and steady, but it will have to consider when to scale up.

“For us, the framework question is kind of whether, when and how he should think about replicating outside of San Francisco, and that’s a question that many promising social enterprises [face],” Trelstad said. “Everybody’s had to figure this out. There’s no right answer. There may be some wrong answers.”

Daniels said he’s among those grateful it existed in San Francisco when he needed it. With his settlement, he and his sister — native San Franciscans — plan to invest in a new house, he said, though they’re waiting for interest rates to drop.

“I feel very powerful,” Daniels said. “I feel like the potential nightmare, I would one day turn into having a piece of the American dream, having a stake in the land.”