Episode 10: Transcript
- Hi, y'all I'm Marisa Zapata. And this is the podcast where we examine homelessness by talking to researchers and experts who of course include people who've lived experience of homelessness to understand what we're missing in the headlines and soundbites. In each episode, we will help clear up misconceptions about homelessness and to answer what it would take to prevent and end homelessness in Portland and beyond. I'm an associate professor of land-use planning at Portland State University and director of PSU's homelessness research and action collaborative. A research center dedicated to reducing and preventing homelessness. Where we lift up the experiences and perspectives of people of color. All right, well welcome y'all. Thanks for joining me. For listeners, we have two exciting guests today. We have Becky Strauss and Emily Rena-Dozier from the Oregon Law Center here to talk with us today. I've known Becky for a lot of years through the A Home for Everyone coordinating board which is the Multnomah County continuum of care for homelessness. And they're gonna be telling us a little bit about what the Oregon Law Center does and some of their exciting work, particularly around evictions prevention. Becky, you wanna introduce yourself first? Just tell us what makes you amazing, Becky? What makes you amazing?
- Thanks for having us both. I'm Becky Strauss. I have been with the Oregon Law Center for going about on about seven or eight years now. I'm a staff attorney there. I primarily do landlord tenant cases, homelessness related cases, and some related state and local policy work on those topics. And most recently, with Emily starting in probably early 2021, we started working on a new Eviction Defense Project. So we're focusing almost exclusively right now on eviction defense.
- Emily, what about yourself also for everyone, because we are not on video for y'all, but we are all personally looking at each other. Emily has a very cute cat right now. And so hopefully Emily will introduce her cat as well.
- Yeah, this is Simon. And he's a very large cat and is an active participant in all of my legal work. So I'm Emily Rena-Dozier I am also at the Oregon Law Center. I am the statewide support unit attorney for housing. So I coordinate and support housing litigation statewide at both Oregon Law Center and legal aid services of Oregon. And I've been in that position for almost two years. And before that I was at legal aid doing housing work and some civil rights work and domestic violence work as well. And yeah, currently, Becky and I are doing the Eviction Defense Project which has been amazing.
- I wanna get back to this kind of how things have unfolded, but first I was hoping you could share with listeners, particularly aspiring lawyers and women who were thinking about becoming lawyers. What brought you to being the law?
- I think that a lot of people that I work with at legal aid, and I think myself included, probably could be doing this work in many different pathways, meaning that we are social justice advocates first and found a way to pursue that mission through legal work. But I couldn't see myself being a lawyer for any other work. If I were not doing social justice work, I would be doing it not as a lawyer. One of the things that I love so much about working with Oregon Law Center is that we really think strategically and have a little bit of funding flexibility to be looking at what types of tools help us pursue a social justice mission, rather than focusing on we have one tool and this is the way we can use it. And what I mean by that, is we can engage in client outreach and learn from our clients what is the biggest issue facing them and try to be responsive in that way. And we can go try to address those issues in the court, or we can also work with our legislative advocacy team to try to address those issues at a policy level. We can try to address those issues through communication and education to our clients. And the mission is first as opposed to the tool.
- I love it, I mean, I think that's such an important thing of like finding the way that you can advance the cause that matters most to you, as opposed to thinking about the profession you wanna be in and then figuring out what you wanna do within that profession.
- I completely agree with that. And I will also say having a law degree as a vocation, there is something authoritative that comes with having a law degree that oftentimes is completely undeserved in my perspective from what I'm bringing to the table. But our clients advocating for themselves, me putting that advocacy on a lawyer letterhead can often make all the difference and that's disturbing, but it's also an asset that is nice to be able to bring.
- So, what about you? How did you become a grown up lawyer?
- Well, I'm definitely a lawyer, I'm still not sure about the grown up part, but it seems to be working out okay. I feel like Becky and I are a good compliment for each other in this work because Becky, I think that you are much more interested in and good at the sort of Swiss Army knife approach of like, let's just figure out the strategy that is gonna meet the need. And for me, I like being a lawyer, specifically. And I tend to tell people that I got into the law because I found a way to use my various personality disorders for the greater good. Like I like to fight with people and I like a certain level of ambient conflict. And I also never really got past the thing when you're a little kid where you have a tantrum because it's not fair, and it's really, really upsetting that it's not fair. And I still am having that tantrum. It's just that now, like Becky says, I have letterhead and people have to pay more attention to me. For people who are thinking about going into this profession, I think realizing the extent to which it is a legal system rather than a justice system. And that what we are ideally trying to do is use the system to achieve justice in greater amounts, but that the justice part isn't built in, you actually have to hack the system a little bit to try and get it more in that direction. And the more you can think about it systematically and as sort of a grammar that you can use to make slightly different sentences than it was maybe originally designed to make. I think that can make it slightly more successful in terms of outcomes. And even if not more successful in terms of outcomes, reduce the wear and tear on the individual advocate Who's trying to actually move things in a particular direction.
- I think this discussion of like legal versus justice system is super, super helpful. And I think we'll probably come back to that as well when talking about the project itself. Could you all like give this like two sentences or three sentences about what the Oregon Law Center is?
- The Oregon Law Center is a legal aid organization. We serve low income Oregonians on a range of civil legal issues. We do housing work. We do employment work. We do domestic violence and family law work. We do civil rights work. Really, we try to listen to what low income Oregonians are experiencing and find a way to address those issues through the legal system, by providing access to justice through legal representation and advice.
- For listeners who don't really know what legal aid is or only understand it through the framework of law and order the best television show ever created. Could you explain what legal aid is?
- I wanna take that because it is my lifelong fantasy to create a TV show about legal aid, because nobody knows what it is or what it does. To legal aid is free legal assistance to clients in the non-criminal context. So I think people are mostly familiar with legal narratives in the law and order context or similar there's less attention paid to the civil end of things which is the not criminal end of things. So it's where one person is up against another person versus one person is up against the state. That is what we do, and we do it for free, and we do it for anyone who has very low income, and we do it statewide and it's the best job.
- All right, so can you tell us what's going on on evictions. Maybe talk a little bit about some of the policies that happened a couple years ago. We seem to have a pretty big change of heart around some tenant policies, at least, at the state level that y'all had worked on. But then leading up to like, what I really do think is a pretty dramatic change in funding and support for doing some evictions work.
- There have been thanks to the great advocacy work by some of our colleagues and also the leadership in the legislature. We have had some level of tenant protection through most of the pandemic, for tenants who are impacted by COVID and unable to pay rent because of COVID. There has been some form of protection, whether it be a moratorium against non-payment evictions or other moratorium light throughout the pandemic. And starting in January, 2021, there was a new law, a new version of those protections that had just taken effect, and that was at the point where it was House Bill 4401. And there was now a new requirement where tenants who wanted to be protected from non-payment of rent during the pandemic had to submit a financial hardship declaration to their landlord to attest to their deservedness of the protections. And so Emily and I were curious at that time, how is this working? Are tenants filling out that financial hardship declaration, are they falling through the cracks? Are people still being evicted during the pandemic, despite all of these efforts to keep people in their homes? And so we started looking every single day at the Oregon eviction docket, the court records that are online to see what was going on. And in the course of doing that, not only did we see that people were falling through the cracks in House Bill 4401, we were seeing that the range of all other types of eviction that were permitted at the time, mostly lease violation type evictions, were still churning along at a regular pace. And not only were they churning along, but somewhere around, I think it was about 40% of them at the time were just wholly unlawful on their face. The landlord was not giving the right amount of time. The landlord was not giving the right kind of notice. The landlord was evicting for reasons that were not allowed given that amount of time. And I think, I'll speak for myself, I had generally known that this was happening in eviction court and had experienced it through anecdote and through my cases, but to see it every day statewide started to be something that we couldn't really unsee. And to do this kind of really concerted docket watch takes a lot of resources which is why no one has done it before, you have to-
- Becky, can I just interrupt for a second?
- Go on.
- So you're saying that like judges were okaying evictions when there weren't, there wasn't the appropriate amount of notice done. Like they were approving things that they shouldn't have been approving?
- Yeah, there are a lots of ways that cases move through the system, and many of them are without a judge's eyes on the details of the case at all. So yes, that is happening. Or in some cases, even when a judge did have eyes on the case, the law requires a party to assert that defense. And if no one is there to assert that defense, or if someone is there and fails to assert that defense, the wholly unlawful eviction moves forward. And so being very disturbed by this and doing a lot of late night texting, Emily and I decided at first to begin sending letters affirmatively to those tenants who we knew just had an outright defense, and tried to reach them there. And then from there, the project really took off and we were able to hire more staff, and were now sending letters to every tenant, regardless of whether they have a defense, just outright to call us for intake. But that was the beginning. And to have the ability to see these things, and then be close to immediately responsive. To find an intervention point to the tenant to say, "Hey, we are here to help. There's free legal help that can help save your housing." Has been very powerful.
- And if I can just sort of jump in with a couple of asterisks there, I do think that one of the things that has been really striking about this project is realizing how many people, including lawyers, including lawyers in our program are asking kind of the same questions that you are Marisa and are sort of blown away by the idea that you can have an eviction that is based on a just completely facial unlawful set of papers, right? Like if you just look at it, you see that, oh, the law requires that a tenant get 30 days of notice before getting evicted under this particular type of termination, and this is only giving 14 days. Or the law allows termination with 24 hours notice in certain really extreme situations involving like, violent misconduct. And here, the landlord gave a notice, terminating with 24 hours notice for touching the landlords flowers in the front yard. I'm not actually making that one up. But so people think that, oh, a judge is gonna look at that and is gonna throw the case out because we have the justice system idea in our head. But they're not going to look at it because, as Becky said, it's a system and the way the system is set up is there are two sides that the law assumes are equal and have an equal capacity to know the law and assert their rights. And we know in practical terms, that's not true. The two sides are not equal, but that's how it's set up. And so unless the tenant or the tenant's lawyer shows up and says, "Hey, judge, this notice is bogus. You can't evict somebody for touching your God damn flowers." It's just gonna move forward, it's like, I live right near the friend's bread factory, and you look through the window and you just see the loaves of bread moving by on the conveyor belt. And that's really what eviction court is set up to be is the smooth rapid movement of people from housed to houseless. That's what it's for.
- Okay, so just given the history of property ownership and tenancy in this country, do you actually think they set it up assuming that it would be equal?
- Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
- Did they said-
- God, no.
- They did not really assume that like there would be like equal representation on both sides.
- No, I mean the way it's kind of a, there's just such a mismatch, right? Because originally there was no legal involvement in evictions whatsoever. If you were the landlord and you didn't want the tenant there anymore, you would just show up and physically throw the tenant out. And as society urbanized more, there was less tolerance for just sort of ambient street violence. And so there was increasingly a sense that there should be some kind of legal involvement in throwing your tenants out. And so you need to kind of graft the extent legal system onto the property right system that is about throwing people out. And so the extent legal system presumes equal parties, equal power, equal representation, even though that's also frequently not true. But the civil legal system, I think is more based on the idea of that kind of a equality. And then when evictions got grafted onto the civil legal system, essentially what happened is all of the legal timelines got abbreviated and all of the defenses got minimized. So that landlords could still mostly achieve the desired outcome, which is rapidly removing someone from your property. But it has the stamp of legal process to mean that people aren't just brawling in the street.
- Becky, you look, you might wanna add something to that.
- I think just to highlight again, this issue of what people assume a justice system to look like, and then what happens when you show up? I, myself am frequently reshocked, every time I take a little break from cases to manage the project, and then dip in, and I'm taking some cases, and I show up in court, and I witness the inevitable result of what is a frequent conversation with my own clients. Where clients want to explain to me, or they want to just wait to explain to the judge their situation because they assume that there's some sort of human to human connection that will be made. Where there's sort of a, the judge will be there to hear how unfair this is and the judge will do the right thing. And I think that's what we all sort of envision the justice system to be. And I think that's what Emily means when she says that the court system doesn't have those values built in. It's not working in that way. And so that is in part why we as lawyers try to bring in our knowledge of the statutes and the constitution to know that this is gonna work and this isn't gonna work, and here's where we can go and here's where we cannot. Sadly, the kind of the injustices that happen when those two things overlap is really acute. I'll tell even just a recent conversation I had with somebody who is deserved of all of the pandemic tenant protections for non-payment of rent. She did everything that the law asked of her because she applied for rent assistance. And as the law requires now, she provided her proof of rent assistance to her landlord, which statutorily entitles her to not get evicted while her rent assistance application is processing. Her landlord moved forward with a court eviction anyway. She for very understandable excusable reasons missed her court date. She ran out of gas on the way to court. She got a default judgment against her for not going to court. She utilized the system to go back and asked the court for a second chance and explained why she didn't make it to court. The judge denied that motion to start her case over again. Did not think that that was a valid reason and her case has moved forward to a sheriff lockout. That is just the prime example of everything that we have done as a state, as a country, to support renters during a pandemic. The tenant understanding and cooperating and knowing her rights, and yet still finding herself displaced and homeless because the eviction court system failed her.
- Every story I hear is enraging about what is actually happening. And it just reminds you, like in no system, are we actually set up to support and serve people who are poor or people of color. One of the things you talked about that I felt was super interesting was that you were sending letters to every tenant who was showing up on the docket. Are you still doing that? What had you been hearing from people? Like how many people called you back?
- We are still doing it. The yield has been measurable, but not 100%. It's not as many tenants as we send the letters. I've been really excited and inspired by Multnomah County's program, Bienestar, that was aware of the issue very early on of tenants defaulting in court and started up a door knocking program very early. So they're both door knocking every tenant in the docket and going to the courthouse to try to make connections with tenants, those who are not appearing remotely which many people still are. So we are sending letters, Senate Bill 891 also requires that courts send our Eviction Defense Project intake line number now with the court summons for eviction. So we're hoping that that yields more information to tenants about where to get help, but it's not been enough. And it's been super inspiring to see other groups be creative about how to find different intervention points to really reach people who need help.
- If you can talk about what the affection defense project is and what you're doing in that. So, yeah, so tell me about the program.
- So I'm gonna just like do a little tiny blurb about the eviction process and then kind of where we intervene when we can. So the eviction process in Oregon, one of the things that I think people misunderstand the most about evictions is they think that it takes a really long time. When I run into random people and tell them what they do, they always wanna tell me like, "Oh my God, it's so terrible. It takes like six months or it takes years to get rid of tenants, mer. I don't know where people get that idea. It's probably like, just sort of ambient bullshit, sort of like the McDonald's hot coffee thing that everybody thinks that they know about and feels compelled to tell you when you say you're a lawyer. So it does not take a long time to evict somebody is the first thing. Every eviction starts with a written termination notice from the landlord to the tenant. And depending on what the termination is for, the time period is different. And it can be as long as 90 days or as short as 24 hours, in some circumstances. When that notice period is up. When the termination date has passed. If the tenant has not moved out. The fact that the tenant is still there and the termination date has passed is what gives the landlord the legal right to go to court and file an eviction complaint which says, "Court, I have the legal right to this property, give it back." Once you file that complaint, typically, the next court appearance is eight days later, so it's a very fast. It's not one of these things where, you file your lawsuit and then there's a 30-day response period. And then that gets extended. And then there's time for discovery. And then there's all of these motions, and it's just, you file the eviction eight days later, the tenant has to be in court. If the tenant doesn't show up in court, the landlord wins automatically. If the tenant does show up in court, the tenant can decide either to agree with the landlord to move out. Under some circumstances, can agree to something else like to pay money or behave in a certain way, or the tenant can ask for a trial. By law, the trial has to happen in 15 days. And so most typically a tenant will go from the termination date on their notice to moving out of their home in 30 days or less. That's the standard timeline.
- You're telling me that somebody who was renting in Oregon, I could lose my housing in 30 days.
- Yes.
- And that sounds like it's faster than almost anything that I could do as a human being in legal system, right? So if I wanted to sue-
- It is the fastest civil timeline in the legal system.
- Wow. And it's to lose your housing.
- Yes.
- The most fundamental thing that we need to continue. Yeah. And I think this idea that, yeah, in 30 days you could be out just re-emphasizes that property is owned privately by people who deserve to own it. And you are lucky enough to be able to live there and you can't make any mistakes. Like the running out of gas story, Becky, really reminded me of. There was a stat that came out a while ago of how many years it takes of your life going perfectly in order to get out of poverty, right? Because when you don't have money, you're always one thing away from things being even worse. And I mean, it's such a powerful example of how then the legal system is not actually helping people. It's designed to protect a certain set of interests. And those interests are not people who are renters. All right, Becky, tell us about the program.
- So we are here to help. So what the Eviction Defense Project is doing, we're looking at the eviction docket every day. We are with the help of PSU, amassing a data set and analyzing data from eviction court in a way that we've never really had or understood before. And we're able to do that because of the people power of our project to manually enter that data every day. So in addition to the data aspect, we are also taking the names and the addresses of the tenants who are in eviction court when we pull that data. And we are sending them a letter to say, "Legal aid is here for you. Free legal help is available. Please call us, but call us quickly because court moves really fast and we need to hear from you soon." The court is also sending our Eviction Defense Project phone number to tenants. And so we are hearing from them in that way as well. And tenants are calling our intake line in greater and greater numbers. And every single tenant who calls us assuming that they are calling with enough time for us to do this is getting attorney eyes on their case which is new. Legal aid has always done eviction defense work in some form, but it is unprecedented at the volume that we are doing now. And the commitment that we have now to look at every single case and do our very best to serve every single tenant that's coming in our door.
- What do you think has really given rise to this commitment? Like how do we suddenly have the resources to do this?
- I think it's a combination of federal resources, funneling through, just more money is happening in the pandemic. And I think there's also some element of greater political will right now for people other than extremely low income people experiencing housing insecurity. And I think we've seen this even before the pandemic, housing has become more and more of a "Mainstream issue" because housing affordability has impacted more than just the people that as a society we blame for their housing insecurity. So is that issue has grown to be more mainstream, and then of course the pandemic rolled on top of it. There is something very disturbing about someone losing their home because of the pandemic that is not as disturbing when we were in other times able to assign both to them because of their housing insecurity. There are other reasons as well, but we have those resources and we are trying to use this moment to test the hypothesis that we believe in, which is that lawyers make a difference in eviction court. And so with the data that we are gathering and with our experience in court, we are hoping to prove that this is a project that we as a state, we as a country, we as a city, whatever jurisdiction should be investing in long after the pandemic. We will learn a lot about how the court works and about how rent assistance distribution works through this project that we have. And we hope that we can maintain at least a piece of it going forward, because this is the way that we can start to insert a little bit more justice into eviction court. So when we hear from tenants, we review their case. We try to represent as many people as we can. We give advice to as many people as we can. We are in court with 14 new attorneys since July 5. New paralegals. More hiring every month to just meet the demand in a way that we haven't been able to do before.
- What are some of the results that you've been seeing? Have you all been helping people? Is it working? Tell me something happy.
- Yes. Yes, it is. I will tell you, obviously, every case is different in some way, but one of my favorite stories is about client who got in touch with us after they had already been defaulted on their eviction. So they'd missed their court date and there was a eviction judgment against them. They got in touch with us before the judgment was executed. They managed to get their paperwork to set aside the judgment to the court in time, the paperwork that we provided them. The court in this case, unlike in Becky's case, actually did agree that the tenant had a good reason why they weren't able to make it to court and set the judgment aside. We provided representation and we won the case. So this is someone who went from default judgment of eviction to success, and they get to stay in their housing. So that was a really encouraging story. And obviously that's not the majority of them. The majority of cases are lawful eviction cases. And the majority of lawful eviction cases are based on non-payment of rent. And so in those cases, what we're doing is working really hard to make sure people are aware of the resources that are available, getting them connected to those rent assistance resources, and making sure that the landlords honor their obligations to pause the eviction while waiting for those resources. And also make sure that the courts honor their obligation to pause those cases. Because there are some courts and some judges that are, I think just delighted that this assistance is available, and delighted that they don't have to sit there and rubber stamp 35 evictions every morning. But there are some courts where the frustration is palpable. Like, "Oh, another law saying that these can't move forward. How long are we gonna keep doing this?" I mean, "Okay, fine. I can only do what the legislature tells me to do, but..."
- And I will say as well, I mean, our lawyers are also doing real actual trial lawyering.
- What does that mean? What does that mean real actual trial lawyering? Is everything else fake lawyering?
- No, but I think that there are some category of our cases that are like those lawyers with letterhead cases. There's not a lot of law involved. It's a little bit of posturing, and it's a little bit of negotiating on behalf of our clients.
- We use cease-and-desist We use the phrases cease-and-desist a lot.
- That one doesn't come up a lot, but I think it carries that same kind of weight and those are really important. I think we're getting better outcomes for our clients because we know the bounds of a negotiation and the leverage involved. But I think that the place where having a lawyer makes the most difference is at trial. It is virtually impossible, really for a landlord as well in some counties to succeed at trial without a lawyer, it's so technical. And oftentimes, tenants without a lawyer are just, there is no way they are totally at the mercy of whatever potential onsite manager with a beef against them wants to say in court. And oftentimes it's not true. It's just not true. And so we are representing tenants to make sure that the other side meets their burden to prove their case and bringing other witnesses, or bringing other evidence to fight a case in a really classic way. And that's also getting some good results for our clients.
- Yeah, I would describe a lot of what you're having to do is like the triage emergency response. Like what if we wanted to go on the offense and stop this from happening? Like what would that look like? This has gotta be part of your fiery texting at night. We could just do these five things, this will change everything. But if you're thinking about, like, if you're gonna go into the state legislature in 2023 and say, "Here are some of the key things that we need to change to protect tenants."
- I think this program has shed a light on where we started this conversation, which is that court is not what people believe it to be. And those people or anyone from legal aid lawyers to someone walking down the street to certainly legislators. You know, the Oregon Law Center doesn't have our 2023 agenda right now, but I think that we even now, before that session should be talking about what we're learning and how this process is failing people. So I think there are any number of technical changes to the process. I would love to see happen. There are the vast majority of eviction cases that move through court are based on non-payment. So just the most intuitive solution there is let's address housing affordability. Let's address income issues. Let's make sure that there is a pathway before the courthouse to rent assistance resources. Some of this kind of like maddening puzzle that we've been in the past couple months between rent assistance provider, and court, and client, and landlord, where if you don't do the right steps at the right time with the right words, it's too bad for you, tenant, is just maddening to watch. So definitely taking a look at that and using the opportunity where there is a spotlight on eviction court to see what improvements we can make.
- I think that different people in our organization have different views on this. But for me, the experience of doing the EDP has really radicalized me as far as the civil Gideon approach to. I think that.
- What is civil Gideon?
- So civil Gideon, sorry to jargon, under Gideon versus Wainwright, the United States Supreme Court said that it is unconstitutional to subject someone to imprisonment for a crime without providing representation. And so that was the case that means that now we have public defenders. And you can't go on trial for a crime unless the state is going to provide you with representation if you can't afford your own. And I find it similarly horrifying that a person can be at risk of losing their housing without access to any legal representation whatsoever. I have become strongly of the opinion that if the state wants to fund eviction court, they have to fund eviction defense.
- And I think more and more people who've listened to the podcast followed y'all's work are equally shocked to learn that there is not a right to legal representation in this system. I wanted to just squeeze in one more question. This is one of my things that I'm gonna be looking into with the data that we've been collecting on evictions is that, a number of our top victors are nonprofit providers, and a number of them are the homelessness services nonprofit providers. There is the philosophical issue, of course, of them evicting people who can't pay which is a whole set of things. But then of course, people are being evicted, not for failure to pay but for behavior. And this to me seems to come up in a direct rub of the expectations of a housing first model. And so I don't know if y'all have done any work or digging into cases that are not about failure to pay, or basically being used to address failure to pay, like touching the flowers or to just get rid of people. I don't know if y'all have looked into that at all, but this is like one of the things that I'm really worried about. It's like the state of these non-failure to pay evictions, particularly as it relates to our work to how people exit homelessness.
- One of the most frustrating things that I see personally is supportive housing providers that their whole mission is to provide housing for people with in many cases, behavioral health issues, who are then evicting people for experiencing behavioral health issues. And it kind of boggles the mind. And I don't know what to do about it other than take on each of the individual cases one at a time which is a, they're just terribly messy and inefficient way to do it.
- It's become very evident to me. And then particularly in the last few months in the state conversations that we have set up this, like the people who deserve to be protected from eviction and everyone else. And so this is just kind of something that I'm really, I mean, I'm ready to go on it, that I'm gonna dig into because they want me to really look at the relationship between homelessness and eviction. And so this is one of the areas. So Emily, it sounds like you and I should hang. Becky, do you have anything to add to this area of evictions?
- No, I think you all said it best.
- All right, y'all. Well, I can't thank you enough for hanging out that we appreciate it and keep up the great work. That was Becky Strauss and Emily Rena-Dozier, who co-run Oregon Law Center's Eviction Defense Project, which provides free legal help and representation to anyone facing an eviction in Oregon. Tenants facing an eviction can reach their team at 888 585 9638. or at oregonlawcenter.org/eviction-defense-project. And as always, you can check out additional content on our website, understandinghomelessness.org. Thanks for listening.