Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Community Planning and Housing Committee with Denver City Council.

Your community planning and housing committee starts now.

Hi.

Good afternoon.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, I'm Diana Romero Campbell, and I am going to uh chair the community planning and housing committee today.

Thank you all for being here.

Today is October 28th, Tuesday.

And let's go ahead and start with introductions, and I will start to my right.

Good afternoon.

Flora Alvidres.

Afternoon, Chantal Louis District 8.

Hi, I'm a Sawyer district five.

Sorry, guys.

We'll do very slow.

Wonderful.

All right.

Well, we have a few action items today.

And I think we're gonna go ahead and start with the host legal services contracts.

Are you guys ready to go?

Okay.

There you go.

Awesome.

All right.

Well, I'm gonna turn it over to Melissa, right?

Okay, I'll turn it over to you, Melissa and take it away.

Thank you so much.

Uh good afternoon, everyone.

Melissa Tati, I'm the director of stability and prevention with the Department of Housing Stability, also known as host, and I'm here today to talk to you about our eviction legal assistance program and some contracts that we're putting forward for your approval today.

So our action requested is approval of uh three contracts currently, and then a future action item uh upcoming.

So we have uh the four providers who were recently awarded through a recent procurement, Colorado Legal Services, the community firm doing business as community economic defense project, Colorado Poverty Law Project, and Colorado Affordable Legal Services.

Just in terms of we are trying to use the slide everywhere so we can be clear about how our work is broken up within host.

And so within the stability and prevention landscape, we do rent mortgage utility assistance, legal aid.

Uh, we recently started administering the property tax relief program, and we have some tenant landlord counseling uh programs as well as several others in our portfolio.

So just um at a high level, wanted to talk about the eligibility criteria for these programs.

It is for households uh who have an income at or below 80% of the area median income and those who are Denver residents.

The services we provide are really broken into two main criteria.

Uh limited representation, which is kind of the light touch, we give you information, help you fill out forms, whereas full representation is we're representing you in court.

You're really negotiating with the landlord more in-depth hands-on services through that.

I did just want to include a slide about how folks can access these programs so they can reach out directly to any of the four providers, either via phone or their websites.

Um, and then I think as most of you know, we also offer a free on-site uh legal clinic Monday through Friday, uh, just down the hall on the first floor.

Um, and so we are usually seeing most of our residents come through the eviction clinic at this point, which is great.

Um, and then I also know familiar with the uh eviction filing numbers, also known as FED filings.

Um, and so just for some context, prior to COVID, we were seeing about 8,800 eviction filings annually.

Uh, when COVID hit, there was eviction moratoria, obviously a lot of federal resources.

We saw a significant decrease in the number of filings, and then after COVID, we have continued to see the eviction filings increase, especially over the last couple of years.

I think it's important to put some state and national context uh within this conversation as well.

Um, if you all are familiar, the eviction lab tracks uh a lot of cities across the nation and uh what is going on in the eviction landscape in those communities.

Um of the 35 cities that they are currently tracking, 19 or 54 percent of those uh had a higher eviction filing rate last year, uh similar to Denver, um, that was typical then prior to the pandemic.

In Colorado, the eviction process is governed at the state level, and so often we are limited with our policy tools that can be enacted here without first getting state legislation passed for us to do so.

I just wanted to highlight one example that I've kind of been tracking over the last several years, which is in Philadelphia.

They have an eviction diversion model, which requires landlords and tenants tenants to participate in mediation before the landlord can go through the court process.

Philadelphia is now the second lowest filing rate of those tracked in the eviction lab.

And before this policy went into place, they were that they had some of the highest eviction filing.

So just demonstrates where policy can be really effective in this work.

Every year we send you all a report about the eviction legal assistance.

So I just wanted to highlight some of the things from 2024.

Over 3,300 households were served with eviction legal assistance last year.

Majority of the households we served were at or below 30% of the area median income.

We do see high representation of BIPOC households, and we also see a high percentage of households who are female head of household.