Recently, we looked back at the past five years of RSI’s Kane County Eviction Mediation Program. When we launched the program during the COVID-19 pandemic, an eviction moratorium was in place and the prospect of mass evictions loomed. Families feared losing their homes, landlords contended with uncertainty over managing property costs, and courts were concerned about their capacity to handle the anticipated volume of eviction cases.
The program’s primary goal has been to provide mediation as an opportunity for tenants and landlords to avoid eviction and pursue alternative solutions. One of the key ways we support this work is to connect parties to resources that may help them navigate their situation, including legal aid and information, financial counseling and, crucially, rental assistance. During the pandemic, the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program helped renters who fell behind on payments. In the years since, our staff has continued to reach out to state and local programs to determine what assistance is available and to share this information with parties.
In this article, I discuss the program’s role in sharing resources with parties and how the availability of rental assistance supports positive mediation outcomes. I also discuss recently published research by Eviction Lab analyzing the ERA’s impact across the country.
Sharing Resources with Parties
Most eviction cases that enter our program involve nonpayment of past due rent due to financial hardship. Rental assistance programs provide emergency relief in such cases; funds can cover back rent or a set amount of future rent for eligible applicants. Rental assistance benefits both tenants and landlords. It ensures landlords get the rent they are owed and helps tenants maintain their housing and avoid having an eviction on their record.
However, tenants and landlords often do not know how to access these funds or how to determine their eligibility. Sometimes these programs are also paused as states or localities determine their budgets. These factors may prevent interested parties from knowing about or accessing critical resources to ease their situation.
This is where the Eviction Mediation Program steps in. As Program Manager Christina Wright shared, “Our program has the opportunity to keep the court and parties informed of these programs, increasing the likelihood of use with or without mediation. Rent assistance is a lifeline for both landlords and tenants and often plays a role in resolving said cases.” Our program staff regularly refers tenants and landlords to rental assistance programs, particularly the Illinois Court-Based Rental Assistance Program (CBRAP), which provides up to $10,000 to cover past due rent and/or funds to cover two months of future rent.
Rental assistance is especially time sensitive because application approval and disbursement of funds cannot happen immediately. At this early stage of the case, self-represented tenants and landlords are often overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive and feel unsure about what they need to do. This is where the mediation program’s intervention can make a meaningful difference. Ensuring parties can effectively and capably access the resources they need remains a core part of the work we do.
Rental Assistance Benefits to Mediation
RSI connects tenants and landlords to resources at various points of the mediation process. Beyond the direct benefits they provide, these resources also help parties better prepare to participate in mediation. As a result, parties are able to develop agreement terms that are practicable.
Without rental assistance resources, the scope of possible solutions narrows. Financial issues may remain unresolved if tenants feel unsure about what they can pay or are pressured to agree to payment plans that they later cannot meet. “We see fewer opportunities for parties to settle with a ‘pay and stay’ agreement,” shares Wright. RSI’s evaluation of New Hampshire’s Eviction Diversion Program found a similar trend. When the state’s rental assistance funding ended, overall agreement rates held, but the proportion of agreements to stay dropped (from 62% before rental assistance ended to 31% afterward).
Research on other eviction mediation programs finds that the availability of rental relief contributes to positive mediation outcomes. For example, an evaluation of Hawai’i’s Act 57 mediation program, established to anticipate the end of the state’s eviction moratorium in August 2021, found that 66% of agreements that involved the repayment of back rent noted the use of rental assistance[1]. Mediators and attorneys interviewed for the study agreed that rent relief helped parties to resolve their disputes[2].
A similar evaluation of an Eviction Diversion Program in Philadelphia found that cases were less likely to result in a subsequent eviction filing if parties received rental assistance (7.4% filing rate) than if they did not (42.2% filing rate). The researchers also note that provision of rental assistance made a meaningful impact in lowering court filing rates whether or not parties mediated or reached an agreement. The lowest rates were among those who received assistance, mediated and reached an agreement (4.2%) and those who received assistance, did not mediate but reached an agreement (1.8%).
When RSI launched our eviction mediation program, ERA was the largest source of rental assistance funds. Eviction Lab recently conducted a study on whether ERA was successful at reaching those who needed assistance most and what patterns emerged in how states distributed funding. Overall, their data suggests that ERA spending was significantly higher in high-risk neighborhoods —where eviction cases were most concentrated before the pandemic. They found that ERA also reached the demographics most at risk for eviction, including renters in majority-Black and majority-Hispanic neighborhoods. Additionally, households with children and those with higher unemployment rates received higher rates of funding than those without children or with lower unemployment rates. States varied in how they distributed funds, but Eviction Lab’s data suggests that these variations had little effect on national patterns: “the distribution of aid matched the geography of housing insecurity.”
Conclusion
These findings point to the benefit of having external support programs such as rental assistance to promote mediation program objectives and help tenants and landlords avoid eviction. Reaching parties who may not know what resources are available or how to access them remains a challenge. This is where effective communications — such as those we identified in our OPEN Project — can make a meaningful difference. The RSI research team is currently working with the eviction mediation program team to update our program materials to ensure parties can effectively learn about the program and access the resources they need. Stay tuned for updates on this project.
[1] The researchers note that it is unclear whether the remaining 33% of cases did not involve rental assistance or if the mediator did not make reference to it in the settlement agreements.
[2] The researchers note that while rent relief availability is an important factor to ensuring housing stability, it alone does not ensure such an outcome. They note that combining rent relief with a robust pre-litigation mediation process strengthens mediation outcomes.
