UCLA Public Interest Research Awards Recognize Tenant Advocacy Project
When millions of Americans lost wages at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass evictions loomed. California, and particularly Los Angeles County, with an estimated 365,000 renter households at risk, were no exception. In response, UCLA scholars Hannah Appel, Gary Blasi and Ananya Roy and their colleagues launched an online eviction-defense application called the Tenant Power Toolkit. Working with housing justice lawyers, technologists and community partners, the UCLA team coded the regulatory landscape of California’s 580 jurisdictions into a program tenants can easily use on any internet-connected device, in Spanish or English, to prepare their defenses. For this work, the three scholars have received UCLA Public Impact Research Awards, which celebrate the efforts of faculty who translate research into positive public action that benefits local, national and global communities. The UCLA Office of Research and Creative Activities, which bestows the annual awards, will host a ceremony honoring the recipients later this year. Since the Tenant Power Toolkit launched in July 2022, the program has prepared more than 8,000 eviction defenses, allowing approximately 21,000 tenants — over a third of them children — to avoid default eviction. “Eviction is a systemic problem,” said Appel, who noted that tenants face civil court eviction proceedings alone. “Our toolkit seeks to provide people the tools to fight their eviction while building the collective tenant power necessary to meet that of landlords and a financialized housing market.” Roy is founding director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, where Appel is associate faculty director. Blasi is a professor emeritus at UCLA Law. — Madeline Adamo
