Study finds self-help assistance caused harm for AZ tenants

A 2025 Arizona study of housing court sought to provide self-help services in order to reduce the instances of default and improve case outcomes, based on the theory that “some of the hundreds of thousands of tenants that default each year (or settle rather than contest their case) do so because critical information is not sufficiently salient”, especially given the asymmetry of representation between landlords and tenants.   The assistance consisted of “a link to an eviction website where tenants could look up case information, investigate defenses, sign up for text-message reminders, download arguments to raise in court, and auto-populate answers and counterclaims.”  However, the researchers found that not only did the self-help intervention fail to have an impact on attendance or case outcomes, but it increased Hispanic tenants’ likelihood of  receiving a writ of restitution while reducing the likelihood of tenants with corporate landlords obtaining a voluntary dismissal by the plaintiff.  The authors note that these results conform to prior self-help studies relating to letters or texts sent to civil litigants.

With respect to Hispanic tenants, the authors note that prior to the self-help assistance,

Hispanic tenants experience[d] more positive eviction outcomes relative to non-Hispanic counterparts, such as an increased likelihood of case dismissal and a decreased likelihood that a writ of restitution will be issued … Our self-help may [] have challenged tenants’ mental model that they should respond to an eviction filing by paying pay rent or entering into a settlement agreement, and made tenants aware of options for participation and resistance.  After receiving the materials, some tenants may have taken action that, although insufficient to win their court case, provoked some landlords to retaliate by taking the most aggressive action possible: a writ of restitution to remove tenants from the contested unit.

For tenants with corporate landlords, the authors explain that prior to the self-help assistance

Tenants with corporate landlords were 5 percentage points (18.6%) more likely than tenants with non-corporate landlords have their case dismissed, and 6.2 percentage points (30%) more likely to do so by means of an out-of-court settlement. While our sample is not long enough to identify corporate landlords as serial evictors, the higher rates of dismissal suggest that these landlords are using the judicial process of eviction to collect rent, not only to remove tenants … self-help resulted in worse observable outcomes among tenants with corporate landlords, making them less likely to have their case dismissed, more likely to receive writ of restitution, and owe landlords more
rent …  given the robust literature analyzing the different eviction strategy used by corporate landlords, a change in eviction strategy for treated tenants may at least partially explain the effect.