Eviction filings are costly, disruptive, and often harmful for both tenants and landlords. How can partnerships between landlords, legal aid organizations, tenants, and other community stakeholders shift the focus from conflict to collaboration, creating systems that can work for both parties and promote housing stability and affordability?

In a recent episode of the Talk Justice podcast, hosted by Ron Flagg, President of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), Neil Steinkamp of Stout and Ama Romaine of Progress Residential, a provider of single-family rental homes, explored this important question. LSC recently released a research brief on this topic, “Beyond Eviction: Landlords as Essential Partners in Housing Stability.”

Their discussion is summarized below.

Why Are There So Many Evictions?

Ama Romaine: It helps to take a step back. During COVID, eviction moratoria were implemented, and many companies, including mine, extended these protections beyond the legal requirements.

We all want stable housing for people, but maintaining homes requires funding. During COVID, many homes were occupied by people who couldn’t pay rent, creating challenges for landlords who couldn’t maintain properties without income. After COVID, we faced a “COVID cliff” with a surge in eviction filings nationwide. Now, we need to pause and reevaluate what normal looks like, especially as the funding available during COVID is no longer there. Honest conversations are needed about where funding will come from.

Think about hotels: If a hotel is empty, it doesn’t make money. Similarly, rental homes need paying tenants. Evictions are costly and create additional challenges. For instance, someone with an eviction on their record often can’t find other housing, leaving them stuck and disincentivized to pay rent.

To address this, we’ve been working with Stout, legal aid groups and others to find proactive solutions: ways to stabilize tenants before an eviction filing. Stability benefits everyone: it ensures cash flow for landlords and prevents the significant impacts of housing instability for tenants and their families.

Why the Current Eviction System Hurts Landlords Too

Neil Steinkamp: We've worked in several jurisdictions across the country, examining eviction ecosystems. In this work, we’ve had conversations with various stakeholders: not just the legal services community and tenants facing eviction, but also the landlord community.

While legal representation for tenants is essential — there will always be eviction cases and a need for lawyers assisting tenants as they navigate complex legal systems and processes — landlords often tell us their primary concern is avoiding eviction filings altogether. Many landlords support tenant legal representation once a case is in the system, recognizing its importance (for both the tenant and landlord), but would greatly prefer to resolve delinquency outside court. The eviction process is costly, time-consuming, and financially burdensome for landlords, as unpaid rent accrues during the proceedings.

Landlords note that if they don’t have paying tenants, they need to charge higher rates to compensate when they do. They acknowledge the challenges faced by low-income families like fluctuations in income and a need for flexibility, but landlords stress that there’s a limit to how much they can absorb before they themselves can’t cover mortgage payments and maintain housing. In response, some landlords say they may need to increase rents, implement stricter screening processes, charge higher application fees, or require larger security deposits to offset losses.

The message from landlords nationwide is consistent: we need a better system that addresses delinquency and rental housing disagreements before they reach the courts. This isn’t just about responding more effectively to eviction filings, but it’s about preventing them from happening in the first place.

How Legal Adversaries Can Collaborate to Reduce Evictions

Ama: I was relatively new in my role when one of my attorneys flagged several cases in North Carolina where legal aid was involved on the other side. That raised a red flag for me because legal aid typically wouldn’t take on cases unless they believed there was some validity to them. Something was clearly going on, so we decided to dig deeper.

I suggested we talk directly with legal aid to understand their perspective—what they were seeing in our cases, the trends they noticed, and what we might be missing. In our system, the legal team wasn’t deeply involved in eviction filings; that process ran through our collections team. So, we met with legal aid to discuss their experiences and perceptions of our business. Those conversations evolved into discussions about potential solutions.

One key takeaway was identifying people at risk and figuring out how to help them. Something I hadn’t fully appreciated before was that when people face instability, they often avoid talking to their landlord. Even when we call, those calls are often seen as “collections calls,” which no one wants to take. If they could pay the rent, they already would have.

What we’re really trying to figure out is the path forward. How can we make it easier for people to access help, know there are resources available, and have someone advocate for them during tough times? Sometimes the solution involves hard conversations, like recognizing that the current housing situation may no longer be affordable for someone given their circumstances. In those cases, finding a different path or place might be necessary, and while those conversations are difficult, they’re possible.

I think of this as being “collaborative adversaries.” While we’re on opposite sides with legal aid, representing different clients, we’re focused on ensuring our homes remain financially sustainable. But we want to do that in a way that’s sensitive to the needs of the people living in our homes and the communities we operate in.

What Success Could Look Like in the Eviction System

Neil: One of the key opportunities in addressing eviction filing processes revolves around improving communication, building trust, and resolving issues before eviction filings become necessary. This includes addressing delinquency, disputes about the ledger, or even referring tenants to a lawyer when a legal issue arises. Many of these situations can be resolved upstream, without having to initiate eviction proceedings, if we foster better communication and trust between landlords and tenants.

Helping tenants understand the process and showing them there’s an alternative pathway to resolution is critical — not just from the landlord’s perspective, but from the tenant’s as well. For example, discussing the tenant’s budget, understanding why rent hasn’t been paid, and exploring solutions can lead to outcomes like staying in the home or negotiating a move-out with less accrued back rent. Providing more time and options can make a significant difference.

A primary measure of success here is reducing the number of eviction filings. This presents a great opportunity that can be approached at both the individual landlord level and the local community level. Moving away from the “high-volume” eviction model, which many courts are accustomed to, can shift the system toward a lower volume approach. Courts often express a desire for this change, but they can only respond to what comes through their doors. The real question is: how do we reduce the number of cases reaching the court system?

Legal aid can play an important role in pre-filing resolution processes, which is an essential part of success. Beyond that, success can also be measured by housing stability, both from the tenant’s perspective and the landlord’s financial perspective

Taking Steps to Reducing Eviction

Ama: One of the things we started doing this year, as we focus more on resident stability, is testing ways to reduce the number of eviction filings going through the funnel. We need to have fewer filings on our end. If we’re opening our homes to families with lower incomes, less stability, or weaker credit scores, we have to be creative about payment mechanisms.

One strategy we tested was delaying eviction filings until later in the month. What we found was a decrease in the number of evictions filed and a higher cure rate: more residents were able to catch up on their payments. I believe this is because many tenants simply need more time to pay, and filing later gives them that opportunity.

I think landlords should assume the best about tenants. Not all landlords are bad, and not all residents are bad. We need to create systems that work for the majority — the 80 or 90% — while recognizing that a small percentage of people may try to abuse the system. But we can’t design systems solely to address that 10%.

Getting Buy-In From Businesses on a New Eviction System

Ama: Businesses will see the value of a new approach to evictions when they see the math. We’re seeing this all over the country: the numbers just don’t work when it comes to eviction filings. It’s expensive to keep someone in a home who isn’t paying, expensive to file an eviction, expensive to remove their belongings, and expensive to prepare the home for a new resident. All of those costs are borne by the property owner.

As property managers, we make money too, but the owners and investors won’t see returns if evictions are the primary way we handle less stable residents. The goal must be getting people into homes, keeping them there, and ensuring they’re paying.