Imagine coming home exhausted after a long day, hungry kids in tow, only to find an eviction notice on your door. How do you respond? Do you need a lawyer? Can you even afford a lawyer?

This is an all-too-common reality for thousands of renters in California. Evictions proceed quickly—once an eviction is filed you only have five days to respond. Few tenants are aware of their rights or know how to get legal help. Default judgments, where a tenant doesn’t respond to an eviction notice and is therefore forced to leave, happen at an alarming rate.

The Tenant Power Toolkit (TPT) is an unprecedented, free online resource that helps California renters respond to eviction complaints and stay in their homes. The TPT takes tenants online answers to simple questions (currently in English or Spanish), applies all statewide and local laws governing evictions in their jurisdiction, and then generates the required legal paperwork, including an application for a waiver of hundreds of dollars in court filing fees. For lower income users in LA County, we file the documents for the tenant electronically. For tenants outside LA County, we provide detailed instructions on how to print and self-file documents. In addition to the tool itself, we provide regular training for tenants’ rights organizations and legal service providers, connect tenants to legal aid and tenants’ rights groups in their area, and provide an opportunity for tenants to connect with our team.

Our tool keeps thousands of LA tenants safely housed and links them with lawyers and tenants’ rights organizations. In the first six months of the Tenant Power Toolkit, we helped 2,411 tenants successfully answer their eviction papers and file with courts across the state. While this number is already high, each household that successfully files an answer to their eviction has (on average) three people, including children, which means the tool and the Tenant Power Toolkit team have helped roughly 6,000 people stay housed, including 2,117 children, 625 of whom live in Los Angeles. Nearly 90 percent of these families are low-income and therefore qualify for a fee waiver. Our data also reveals that Black Angeleno tenants are dramatically over-represented in eviction cases. As Covid-19 tenant protections end and evictions increase, we are filing roughly 10 percent of all eviction answers in LA County. This is a significant contribution to LA2050’s LIVE housing goal: that Angelenos should have “safe housing, no matter where they live or how much money they make.”

While our early success has been exciting, we also face challenges. For example, tenant law constantly changes, and Covid-era protections are lifted at different times in different jurisdictions, making maintaining the real-time accuracy of the tool a challenge. We also face user-error in what remains a complex legal tool, and this means that e-filing requires a robust human ecosystem to check documents for accuracy.

Over the next six months—as our filing capacity increases and evictions are likely to keep trending upward—we plan to expand our outreach significantly. This includes digital strategies, such as multilingual Facebook ads and Google Ad words, as well as radio advertising via Public Service Announcements, and the recent incorporation of the TPT into the 211 service. We are also working to enable e-filing across the entire state.

TPT is the result of a collaboration between the Debt Collective and Inner City Law Center. For outreach, we also partner with ACCE Institute, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, LA Tenants Union, and Inland Counties Legal Services.

The Tenant Power Toolkit has also partnered with the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which is currently providing two PhD students to analyze data on the back end of the toolkit to tell us how many tenants are using the tool, where they are located, the specifics of their eviction situation, and more. This ongoing data analysis will help us evaluate the reach and effectiveness of the tool, and what we will need to do moving forward to make sure tenants know exactly what to do if they come home to find an eviction notice on their door.

Media Coverage and feedback on the Tenant Power Toolkit:

NYT/LA Mag: California Housing Orgs Launch “First-Ever Website To Help Tenants Fight Eviction”

CBS8: “Failure to file an answer within five days can result in an eviction. Tenant advocates and attorneys build an online tool to buy tenants some time.”

“The app is actually pretty amazing. I had never seen this quality through an application.”

Los Angeles, CA — Los Angeles Magazine highlighted the launching of a groundbreaking website called the Tenant Power Toolkit, a free tool that “can give low-income and [Spanish] speaking residents a fighting chance to defend against unlawful evictions.” The first-ever website works “similarly to tax return software,” by asking tenants a series of questions in English or Spanish, “ultimately producing a legal document they can…submit in court.”

At a press conference yesterday, the Debt Collective, the LA Tenants Union, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy announced the launch of the groundbreaking Tenant Power Toolkit.

WATCH CBS8 Break Down the New Tenant Power Toolkit:

Read about the Tenant Power Toolkit in CalMatters: Got an eviction notice? This California website will help you file a response.

“Thousands of California tenants lose their homes every year because they fail to submit that initial answer in court. Failing to check the right box or file a timely response could, indeed, trigger a default judgment against them. A group of tenant advocates and attorneys today launched a tool they hope will change that.”