Portland, Ore., is moving to give low-income tenants facing eviction free legal representation, responding to a courtroom imbalance that housing advocates say has fueled record levels of homelessness in one of the West Coast's most housing-stressed cities.
The city is now seeking a legal services provider to run the Eviction Legal Defense and Right to Counsel Pilot Program. Specific funding levels and eligibility thresholds have not been disclosed in the public notice. The pilot structure suggests the city plans to measure outcomes before deciding whether to make the program permanent.
The need is hard to overstate. Multnomah County saw more than 12,000 eviction filings in 2023, the highest on record and roughly triple the pandemic-era lows, after federal COVID rental assistance ran out and Oregon's emergency eviction moratorium fully expired in September 2022. Legal aid organizations including Oregon Law Center and Legal Aid Services of Oregon, which run the county's existing Eviction Legal Defense Project, have been turning away the majority of tenants who seek help.
Source: NationGraph.
The underlying problem is a lopsided courtroom. Nationally, roughly 90% of landlords in eviction cases have attorneys, while roughly 90% of tenants do not. Studies from cities that have adopted right-to-counsel programs consistently find that tenants with lawyers avoid eviction or displacement in 70 to 90 percent of cases, compared to far lower rates for those who show up alone. New York City pioneered the model in 2017, and at least 17 cities and four states have followed. Oregon legislators introduced a statewide right-to-counsel bill in 2023 but it did not pass, leaving Portland to act on its own.
The pilot fits the priorities of Portland's new city government. Mayor Keith Wilson, who took office in January 2025 under a reorganized 12-member council, campaigned almost entirely on ending unsheltered homelessness. Housing researchers generally estimate that $1 spent on eviction legal defense saves $2 to $5 in downstream shelter, healthcare and foster care costs, making prevention programs politically easier to defend than emergency responses.
Portland is a majority-renter city where rents rose roughly 40 percent between 2015 and 2023. The 2024 point-in-time count found more than 6,300 people unsheltered in Multnomah County, one of the highest per-capita rates on the West Coast.
The city has not announced a timeline for selecting a provider or launching services.
