A Right to Counsel for
Tenants Facing Eviction
A Comprehensive Guide
Tenants deserve housing justice.
To move closer to housing justice, we need significant changes. One critical change is ensuring a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction (called “eviction RTC” in this Guide).
As of early 2025, over 20 jurisdictions have enacted an eviction RTC ordinance or law and advocates in nearly 150 cities, counties, and states are working to do the same. At the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel (NCCRC), we support these efforts by offering technical assistance, connecting advocates in different jurisdictions, talking to the press, and by providing training and education.
About the Guide
This Guide has been years in the making. To develop it, we have relied not only on our experience working with advocates, policymakers, and organizers around the country, but we also had the awesome opportunity to interview key RTC leaders in each of the jurisdictions that has enacted an eviction RTC. Through this work, we gathered the strategies, tools, and models vital for developing, enacting, and implementing these laws. This Guide is a living catalog of this critical information! As such, as the list of jurisdictions that pass eviction RTC grows, along with the knowledge we learn from those jurisdictions, so will this Guide.
New Resources
Advancing Racial and Health Justice Through a Right to Counsel for Tenants: A Primer for the Public Health Field
This new resource outlines how organizations and individuals working in the public health field can help advance racial and health justice by supporting efforts to enact and effectively implement a right to counsel for tenants. The primer was developed by Human Impact Partners, NCCRC, Results for America, ChangeLab Solutions, and PolicyLink, in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association as part of their Healing Through Policy Initiative.
“The power of the people can and will change the tide and stop decades of institutional bias and equity against poor renters and homeowners in Detroit, starting with the Right to Counsel.”
— Tonya Myers Phillips, Project Leader, Detroit Right to Counsel Coalition, in Detroit’s Right to Counsel Victory Shows the Power of the People