A recent report in The Daily Yonder highlights the limited access rural Californians have to legal services. For California’s rural communities, the nearest provider is rarely nearby. The majority of the state’s attorneys are based in metropolitan areas. Housing in rural communities is widely assumed to be less expensive than in metropolitan areas. But some of California’s rural communities feature the least affordable housing in the state and nation.

Nationally, rural households spend a quarter of their income on housing. In California, some 36 percent of rural households spend upwards of 30 percent of their income in the same way. Without access to attorneys, tenants struggle to represent themselves during an eviction or foreclosure process. Ninety percent of landlords are represented by counsel nationally, while the figure for tenants is just 10 percent. Many evictions in rural areas are informal, making the true figures hard to count.

To combat the problem, the report calls for California to fund legal aid in a fashion that is geographically equitable to rural residents and at the same quality level as their urban counterparts.

To read the full article, you can go to The Daily Yonder here: https://www.dailyyonder.com/analysis-in-housing-crisis-rural-californians-need-greater-legal-protections-and-access-to-legal-aid/2020/02/06/