Students and officials of the School of Law created a new program to assist the evicted.
The Oklahoma Bar Foundation created a grant program to further organizations that serve evicted and homeless individuals. Valerie Couch, dean emeritus of the School of Law and trustee for the OBF, met with Aimee Majoue, three-L law student and active member of the Poverty Law Group student organization, to apply for a grant to form a pro bono eviction assistance program.
The program, which launched March 21, assists recently evicted individuals by informing them of their rights as a tenant and supplying legal representation. Other than the salary of the program’s part-time director, the program will not cost anything. Law students will work through the program to receive training in housing law and serve on a pro bono basis, Couch said.
“In the long term, I hope the program provides high quality and sustained legal services for people who can’t otherwise afford an attorney,” she said. “This affects adults, but it also affects children. The children in these families are often times the victims of the parental inability to meet financial obligations, so it’s really important to our children as well as families altogether to get good legal information and advice during these times of crisis.”
Majoue said the program will be good training for students to practice what they’ve already learned.
“I hope that it provides even more opportunities for students to get involved and see that they can make a difference in people’s lives even as students, in addition to learning some good interview skills and some litigation techniques because some of the cases on the eviction docket do go to trial same day,” she said. “So, students have the opportunity to practice some of those skills and hopefully come out of law school with a lot of really good practical experience in addition to forming a heart for public service.”
Dick Klinge, director of the program, said keeping these kinds of individuals in housing is ideal in the overall efforts to fight poverty as a whole.
“It’s part of the cycle of poverty,” he said. “You lose housing, you lose your job. You lose your job, you go deeper into poverty, so it’s one of the elements. In the efforts of a lot of people to fight poverty is to keep people in housing.”
Klinge was hired as the director of the program in January and has been training for the program since then. The School of Law sent out a March 21 press release advertising the program.
“The Oklahoma City University School of Law Pro Bono Eviction Assistance Program has hopes to alleviate some of the stress that families face when going through these troubled times,” the release reads. “If a person who has been served with a Summons for Eviction desires to have their case evaluated by a member of the legal assistance team, they should call (405)-208-5207 to schedule an appointment.”
The program received its first client a week after its launch and its second a week later.
“The need’s clearly there,” Klinge said. “Every day, four days a week, all year round, 5,200 people are facing evictions from their home in Oklahoma County. That’s the magnitude of the problem, and I’m going to guess 80-90 percent of those people don’t have an attorney.”
David Hall, music education junior, said many recently evicted individuals in Oklahoma City aren’t educated on their rights as a tenant or what they can do.
“Say I have someone who just had a landlord decide to shoot up the price whenever again, they’re in an area where they like to do poor-flipping,” Hall said. “Well, that person might not necessarily know that these options are available or know what their rights are or any of those types of things, and so that’s where it can really help them out.”
Hall said the first thought of an evicted tenant is usually not to take legal action.
“A lot of times, people assume that, because they’re desperate, they just have to find a place to stay. Their immediate thought is, ‘I’m about to get evicted, I need to find a place to stay for my kids,’” he said. “That’s what they’re thinking about. They’re not worrying about the legal action that they could take or their rights as a tenant–they’re not thinking about any of that.”
For more information or to schedule an appointment, students can call (405) 208-5207 or email Klinge at rklinge@okcu.edu.
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