Legal Aid releases Eviction Report 2016

The Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County and co-author Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto release the San Mateo County Eviction Report, funded by The San Francisco Foundation, and designed by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, compiling three years of the agencies' eviction case data between July 2012 and June 2015, and bringing clarity to a contentious local issue.

San Mateo County eviction data is not available in any centralized, publicly accessible database, making this report the first integrated source of information to reveal the full scale of the eviction problem in the heart of Silicon Valley, and to bring to light a number of startling trends: 

• A 59% increase in the number of evictions for people unable to pay rent on time
• A 300% increase in the number of "no-cause" evictions, where the landlord gave no reason for the eviction
• 70% of the households that sought legal services to help with eviction issues had children 
• Evictions disproportionately impact Hispanic and African American households 

"My hope is that the San Mateo County Eviction Report will be used by officials, decision makers and the general public, all of whom are well aware of the housing crisis, but lack data to inform debate and make decisions," says Shirley Gibson, a Legal Aid housing attorney with nearly a decade of experience working in San Mateo County, and one of the authors of the report.