On the Home Front

Abbie Leonard, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri 

Confusion and misinformation about tenants’ rights and housing law consistently challenge our work in the Housing Law unit at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri (LSEM) in St. Louis. Coupled with well-resourced landlords and skewed laws fueling a stark power imbalance between tenants and landlords, this challenging landscape negatively impacts housing outcomes across the city and nationwide. Consequences include evictions, housing instability, and cyclical poverty, especially for women of color and their children, who are disproportionately impacted. According to the NCCRC, just 4% of tenants in the U.S. have legal representation, compared to 83% of landlords. Navigating housing issues – with or without a lawyer – is incredibly difficult.   

As the St. Louis Right to Counsel program rolls out over the next few years, we want to ensure that all renters can access accurate legal resources and educational materials about their housing rights. Propelled by timely feedback from our clients and community, including the We the Tenants campaign, concerning better tenant and court navigation resources, as well as the need to update internal Landlord-Tenant resources and growing citywide tenant momentum, we identified renters’ rights as a resource area with significant potential for development. Community input from Action STL’s monthly renter meetings organizing St. Louis tenants frequently included the need for tenant education around housing issues and the legal system. The Housing and Consumer Law units at LSEM were already pursuing several strategies to help tenants become better informed self-advocates. These initiatives included creating a Court Table outside the Housing courts to help community members and renters navigate the courts and developing the MOTenantHelp.org website to answer legal FAQs and generate pleadings for tenants to use in court. Additional tenant resources and new research by community partners, such as Arch City Defenders’ Pro-se STL guides, Action STL’s Housing Report, and a Health & Housing collaborative study by Tenants Transforming STL, Human Impact Partners, the Vacancy Collaborative, and the City of St. Louis further fueled the momentum for tenant empowerment city-wide.  

Last July, we began reviewing LSEM’s existing tenant resources to see what needed updating as well as researching newer models for accessible tenant education across the country, always centering tenant feedback. Since MOTenantHelp.org is a web-based resource, we thought a longer-form, print-style guide would be a complementary resource for those with less access to technology or familiarity with the internet, though we recognized the need to make any such guide available online as well. 

Over the past year, alongside fellow paralegals, social workers, and attorneys, we wrote, developed, and edited legal content and compiled up-to-date community resources into a new resource: the Tenant Toolkit. We aimed for the Tenant Toolkit to provide legal information about housing rights, templates for key communications with landlords, tips for best practices when looking for housing, and general resources for those seeking to maintain long-term housing stability. Our goal was to equip renters experiencing poor housing conditions and landlord-tenant issues with the knowledge and skills to be informed self-advocates and to avoid similar situations in the future. We worked with our Development Team and a graphic designer to ensure the Toolkit was visually appealing, engaging, and accessible for community members and clients.  

In July, we distributed the first copies of the Tenant Toolkit and have continued to distribute them throughout the community, focusing on local libraries, courts, and community partners with a wide reach. We welcome community feedback on the Toolkit once it is widely distributed, and we intend to evaluate its effectiveness in assisting renters and make changes and updates as needed.  

Although distribution is still in progress, we hope that the Tenant Toolkit, along with other recent St. Louis-based, housing-focused legal guides, will be a valuable resource for renters and community members seeking to better understand their legal rights and navigate barriers to stable housing. By offering legal information to St. Louis renters via an accessible, multi-media toolkit for tenant advocacy, we can help level the playing field between landlords and tenants and ensure that critical resource reaches those who need them most. Responding to and utilizing tenant and community feedback continues to be at the heart of this work. We are proud to work alongside renters and advocates working to change the landscape of housing in St. Louis and nationwide.   

You can view the LSEM Tenant Toolkit online or download a PDF version at: https://lsem.org/housing-law/ 

The mission of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri is to advance justice through legal representation, education, and supportive services. In order to achieve this, Legal Services partners with the community to improve lives, promote fairness, and create opportunities for those in need. Since its inception in 1956, Legal Services has advocated for equal access to justice through high quality legal assistance for individuals living in poverty. The organization now serves 21 counties in eastern Missouri.