Preventing Displacement — One Family at a Time

Like many communities in the United States, the Bay Area is experiencing a housing crisis. The shortage of affordable housing results in skyrocketing rents and economic incentives to replace low-income tenants with higher earners. On the ground in communities surrounding Stanford, tenants are facing evictions for nonpayment of rent at unprecedented numbers. Often, tenants have legal defenses, but without representation they cannot assert them, and they are vulnerable to swift and often catastrophic dislocation.

CLC students and attorneys are among the only lawyers in the local community who provide full-scale representation to tenants facing eviction in San Mateo county. Eviction cases move fast, and demand a lot of CLC students, who must draft pleadings, conduct discovery, negotiate and prepare for trial in the space all within a very short number of weeks. CLC’s eviction defense practice exposes students not only to the displacement crisis but also to the access to justice crisis, as they experience first-hand how having an attorney moves the needle for families facing eviction, and observe the hundreds of tenants who go unrepresented faring much less well.