Bayview/Hunters Point Community Legal works out of a former beauty salon on 3rd St in Bayview

Roughly 167 people move out of San Francisco every day, including 105 renters, according to the Census Bureau. Based on our experience, almost no low- and moderate-income residents are leaving willingly: They’re being evicted or forced out in other ways — sometimes illegally.

The lack of legal aid for those who can’t afford an expensive lawyer is a big factor. In fact, legal aid is such a big issue that that President Obama recently called for a roundtable to investigate ways of extending legal aid to more people. Obama pulled no punches, writing that “gaps in the availability of legal aid — including legal representation, advice, community education, and self-help and technology tools — for America’s poor and middle class threaten to undermine the promise of justice for all and constitute a crisis worthy of action by the Federal Government.” He continued that people without legal help “may be left by their economic circumstances to face life-altering events — such as losing a home or custody of children, or escaping domestic violence or elder abuse — on their own.”

The ways that tenants can be forced to leave take many forms in San Francisco. The most understood and talked about is the formal eviction process. This is the only legal way a landlord can remove a tenant, but it’s an extremely fast-paced and complicated process, which makes it hard for tenants to resist it without help.

In one of our cases, the landlord tried to place the blame for a faulty plumbing system on his tenant. He claimed that she and her family caused the water to overflow from the sinks and bathtub every day, rather than admit that his pipes were faulty. He then brought two eviction actions and one small claims action against her within a four-month period. Fortunately, we were able to represent the tenant and defend all these actions — and to this day the tenant and her family still remain in their home.

Bayview/Hunters Point Community Legal welcomes walk-ins Monday through Fridays in SF’s Bayview district

For tenants who aren’t lucky enough to get representation, the consequences can be grim. One study in San Mateo found that 55% of tenants with full representation kept possession of their unit, while only 14% of unrepresented tenants did.

But formal evictions are only the tip of the iceberg. Even if all filed evictions resulted in a displacement, it would still only account for about one tenth the total number of people leaving the city. In our own practice, we see many more landlords attempting to remove their tenants outside of the legal eviction process rather than through it.

In one case, the landlord would scream homophobic death threats through the walls every night until the tenant left. In another case, the landlord completely stopped maintaining the premises until the tenant left, forcing the tenant to deal with rats, insects, mold, no heating, no electricity, and no trash service for months. In a third case, the landlord simply entered the tenant’s unit, trashed all his possessions, and changed the locks.

In situations like these, political activity and protests fail to remedy the problem because the underlying behavior is already illegal. Rights counseling and even City inspections, on their own, also don’t work. In our experience, the only thing that works at changing a bad landlord’s behavior is litigation or the threat of litigation — and that has to come through legal representation.

A client of Bayview/Hunters Point Community Legal looking out to Hunters Point

Sometimes though, an eviction is merely a symptom of a different legal issue. For example, when an employer fires his employee for taking a sick day, then claims it was for cause so he doesn’t have to pay for the unemployment insurance, the employee can’t make his rent and gets evicted. When a consumer gets defrauded by her illegal tax-preparer, causing the IRS to start garnishing her wages, she can’t make her rent and is evicted. When an elderly man’s savings are stolen by his nephew and the bank refuses to treat it as fraud, he can’t make his rent and is evicted.

These are all examples of situations our clients have found themselves in. In our experience people living paycheck to paycheck don’t have enough savings to absorb losses like these and still pay their rent. If they are to stay housed, they need to be able to access immediate representation to remedy their cash-flow problems.

Evictions are just one side of the displacement issue in San Francisco. We have also seen a whole different class of legal problems that prevent people from obtaining new housing. For example, one of our clients had his rent illegally doubled one month, and rather than fight it he went on a rent strike. He got served with an eviction summons, and because he didn’t respond properly he ended up with a default judgment. Now, his applications to new apartments are being denied because his tenant report says he’s had an eviction. Other clients face discrimination based on their criminal record or their disability and are denied housing.

These problems are solvable. With legal help, wrongful evictions can be fought, past evictions can be restricted from someone’s record, convictions can be expunged, and reasonable accommodation requests can be proffered.

One study in San Mateo found that 55% of tenants with full representation kept possession of their unit, while only 14% of unrepresented tenants did.

The question we need to ask ourselves is, if legal representation is so useful for preventing displacement, why have we consistently refused to fund it?

Right now there is 1 legal aid attorney per 10,000 people in poverty in California, according to the Justice Index, a project launched last year by the National Center for Access to Justice, a national policy organization founded in 2011 to improve access to civil and criminal justice systems. What we’ve observed in San Francisco–a city with roughly 453,000 renters–is that lack of funding forces many attorneys working on displacement to focus exclusively on formal evictions, making it extremely unlikely that a tenant would get representation defending constructive eviction attempts, or representation to obtain housing.

Public funding is slow and hard to come by. But some local corporations are pitching in to help. Bayview/Hunters Point Community Legal provides legal services to help prevent evictions in an entire neighborhood, and we’re a finalist in the Google Impact Challenge: Bay Area. If we win, Google.org will contribute $500,000 to our organization, which will help prevent even more displacement in even more neighborhoods.

So you can help today: Vote for Bayview/Hunters Point Community Legal in the Google Impact Challenge — voteLEGAL.com — and help us protect housing for low- and middle-income families living in this city. Voting ends tomorrow at midnight.

Adrian Tirtanadi is the executive director of Bayview/Hunters Point Community Legal, a nonprofit legal aid firm in Bayview Hunters Point and winner of the 2015 Google Impact Challenge: Bay Area.