Lawyers Can Help Revitalize Neighborhoods

Episode Notes

Transcript

Peter Hoffman:

We will see the overgrown weeds or the trash or the sagging gutters or the broken windows. There is this physical blight, but what people don’t often see is underlying that is this legal blight.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ron Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today we’re talking about improving neighborhoods. Now, lawyers probably aren’t the first people that come to mind when you think about neighborhood revitalization, but we’re about to hear from some folks in Missouri who have made a big impact in several St. Louis neighborhoods through legal services, partnerships, legal services of Eastern Missouri has received two LSC Pro Bono Innovation Fund grants to help support the work of their neighborhood advocacy program. And I’m excited to dig into and hear more about the important work with our guests. Joining us today, we have Dan Glazier, executive Director of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, Peter Hoffman, managing attorney of the Neighborhood Advocacy Program, and Tonnie Glispie-Smith, the St. Louis City West and Neighborhood Leader and Neighborhood Advisory AmeriCorps Vista member. Dan, let’s start off with you. Can you tell us about the general state of things in St. Louis that led you to want to initiate the neighborhood advocacy program six years ago in 2018?

Dan Glazier:

Well, thank you Ron, and thank you for having us to talk about this program that we’re excited about. As in with many major cities, the urban core of these cities have been, for many reasons, greatly depleted and diminished. And sadly, St. Louis is very much part of that. At one point, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the country. In 1950, there was almost a million people in St. Louis. Now, sadly, the populations down to less than 300,000. And because of that, there are a lot of vacancies and abandoned buildings in our city. And in fact, there are over 24,000 vacant in our city. And we saw this and we’re in our communities each and every day, and we’re helping our clients with all these various concerns and issues of education and schooling and benefits. And we saw what it was doing to our communities.

Imagine a child walking to school every day past vacant buildings. It’s not safe. It affects property values that has an enormous amount of negative effects. And the neighborhoods, to their credit in the St. Louis area, have a wonderful organizing entity, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations. And they pulled together and they actually brought together some of the great minds to talk about how do you resolve this, how do you deal with this? And one of those great minds they brought together was Peter. Peter came into St. Louis. Peter is a former St. Louis in, but had been in Kansas City for a number of years at the wonderful legal aid of Western Missouri program and had been doing an outstanding neighborhood legal advocacy project. The neighborhoods heard about what Peter was doing, wanted to see something like that here. We wanted to see something like that here. We wanted Peter, Peter hopefully wanted to come back to St. Louis. And there you go. There’s your ingredients to launch a neighborhood advocacy program.

Ron Flagg:

Well, that’s a great segue, Peter. I think you’ve just been introduced better than I did. Just talk both with regard to your work in Kansas City and St. Louis. We as people in a community in a city walk past buildings that are no longer inhabited. And 99% of the time we walk by and shrug and wish it was better and keep walking. Why did you, as a legal service provider and as legal service providers on a team in Western Missouri now in St. Louis, what prompted you to feel the need to intervene and tell us why neighborhood revitalization is a project that lawyers can actually do something about and even play a significant role in?

Peter Hoffman:

Sure. Lawyers are critically important. When I went to law school knowing I wanted to do public interest work, I didn’t really know what that meant. So I took the opportunity in law school to try a bunch of new things. And my second year of school, I started interning with Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Economic Development Unit, an attorney there, Michael Duffy, had started kind of a neighborhood advocacy program in the eighties, and I was fortunate to have that internship, which grew into a full-time career for me. And it’s hard to believe, I’ve almost been doing this for 15 years now, and I just saw the enormous impact that lawyers can have to help improve the quality of life and the neighborhoods where our clients live. And so most legal services is focusing on providing direct services to individual clients on specific legal matters. But what happens to our clients when they go home?

What is their day-to-day life like as Dan said, is it safe for them to walk their kids to school? Is there safe and secure housing? Are they worried about what’s going to happen in the building next to them? So all of these things are, it might be hard for people to see, but these are legal problems. And we will see Ron, as you mentioned, the overgrown weeds or the trash or the sagging gutters or the broken windows. There is this physical blight, but what people don’t often see is underlying that is this legal blight? Sometimes an owner of these property is deceased or it’s owned by a shell company who’s out of state or increasingly out of the country there are liens from lenders who have long gone out of business. There are clouds on title. All of those, we call it title blight. And as opposed to the physical blight, it’s this legal blight that really makes it impossible to get that property back to a position where somebody can fix it up and make it a home again. And fixing that legal blight is almost always a precursor to fixing the physical blight. And because of the complexities of that, the fact that this is America and property rights are sacrosanct here, lawyers have an enormous role to play, and the legal system has an enormous role to play and helping untangle these tangled titles, getting property back to productive use. So there’s an enormous role for attorneys to play in doing this community revitalization work.

Ron Flagg:

Thank you. And again, a great segue because as important as lawyers are, collaboration is indispensable really to all legal aid work, but particularly in the context of neighborhood revitalization, most of us lawyers walking along and seeing blight in our neighborhoods might not have a good idea of what to do. We need partners. So I’d like you to collectively talk about the role of collaboration in this project. What has it been like engaging across organizations and building community trust? And Tonnie, I’d love to hear your perspective first on that because you’re our non-lawyer on the group, but I suspect you’ve played an indispensable role and your colleagues and community neighbors have done so as well.

Tonnie Glispie-Smith:

Yes. The collaboration with legal services has been so great in my neighborhood. I’ve lived here for 17 years and we would get together and have National night out gatherings and we would do cleanups in our alleys and cleanups on vacant lots, but as soon as we cleaned it up, maybe two weeks would go by and someone would come and dump on it again. And another problem with just how the vacant lots looked were the abandoned houses, and they were either owned by someone or like Peter said, by another company that was out of state. And we just didn’t know if there was anything that we could do about it. And then through my research, I found out that there were laws that said that you could do something about it, and my neighbors didn’t want to go with a loan. So then that’s when we start working.

We say, well, if we’re an association or a group of us are working together so it doesn’t look like one person is taking on another person. So we wouldn’t receive pushback or any animosity. It’s like it’s the group of neighbors that are coming together to address this issue and then just really learn what the experience has given me is learning about the harms of vacancy. Because like you walk past an abandoned house, yes, it doesn’t look good. But then just the education that I’ve received, just learning about our mental health is affected, and it’s not just about property values, it’s those other things. So being able to team up with legal services has really shown the neighbors, we can do something about these issues. And we’ve had some really great successes with that because we’ve tried to, before we got involved with Peter, there was a house, a duplex on my block that had been causing issue after issues, like there were people that were on drugs, squatting in the house, so many multiple police calls from them, from drug overdoses and different things like that.

The city would board the house up, but they would come up and climb up a tree and go through a window upstairs. And so they were still entering the property and it was just not a safe environment. And three neighbors and I, we went to a court to talk to the person because he kept getting these fines and then he never showed up. Then another incident happened and I had started talking to Peter and he could tell something was wrong because my voice must’ve just sounded off. And so I told him what was happening and he said, okay, if the person is a senior citizen that owns it, I can help him. And so we were able to do that, and now the house has been, he sold the house and the house has been renovated and it looks beautiful.

Peter Hoffman:

If I could add Ron, one thing there, the specific legal intervention was it was a title issue that was preventing this senior from selling the property. He wanted to sell it. He had a buyer who was willing to make him an offer to sell the house. He was tired of getting dragged to housing court. And so Tonnie and the neighbors there connected him with our office. We helped clear that title issue. We identified it. We had a volunteer attorney work on it. We sorted out that title issue, and he was able to sell that property. And as Tonnie said, it’s now productive, it’s resided in, it was fully rehabbed, and all the issues have gone away. So that’s one example of hundreds of positive outcomes we’ve had through these collaborations.

Ron Flagg:

Well, and I think another key building block to legal aid, and for that matter, many human endeavors is leadership. And Tonnie, obviously in a couple of instances here, you really showed leadership and it made a difference. Somebody had to be the first one to make the call to step up and say, we’re not going to put up with this any longer to ask the question, what can we do to make things better? And would that every community have a leader like you to take that first step, make that first call. Dan, going back to the collaboration building block, there were other partners in this effort. Could you talk about the pro bono partnership your program has with private firms in connection with the neighborhood advocacy program?

Dan Glazier:

Absolutely, Ron, thank you. And as you said, talking about partnerships, I’ll just start by saying our partnership with you with LSC, the Pro Bono Innovation Fund grant program is just a terrific program, which we appreciate having, and we saw that as a real funding opportunity to develop and grow this partnership, this critical partnership with our private law firms in our community in this area. Obviously, we partner with private law firms in many areas, but this funding gave us the vehicle to do that with our primarily large local law firms. And what happens is these law firms, they basically sponsor a neighborhood, and of course we’re with them every step of the way, and they come in and they pretty much do what that neighborhood needs to help ameliorate the vacancy challenges and the challenges that come along with that. And that can go in two different ways, and it’s been alluded to, but it can be transactional.

And of course in large law firms, that’s beauty of it. You got transactional lawyers and you’ve got litigation lawyers, right? And we offer opportunities for both, and we make sure that we’re able to have the chops to do both. And so in the transactional area that has already been addressed, helping to cure a title problem, one of the things that Peter showed me early on was that one of the key ways to fight vacancy is through something that I’ve always knew about and the beneficiary deed, the idea of making sure that the property can pass before the person passes or that will pass upon the person’s dying. As you think about it, grandma always had this house and the kids and the grandkids, they always thought knew that when grandma would pass, God forbid it’d be their house, but none of the legal work was done.

And grandma passes, all of a sudden they find out there’s all these taxes owed, there’s all these problems, and they don’t have legal ownership. And so ultimately, what happens to these properties that was in the family for so many years, they got to walk away. They don’t have the legal means or the funding means. So that becomes a vacant property. So these lawyers come in and we do beneficiary clinics and we do all that kind of work in the transactional arena. But then the other arena is, well, there’s two arenas. The second arena is in the litigation arena. And there is a really good, a couple of statutes in Missouri that has been already referred to, allows for a neighborhood association to come in when the property has been abandoned, neglected, and the owner is not being responsive and allows them to have legal standing in court to potentially get that property. And we, along with our pro bono partners, do the legal work to get that property in the hands of the neighborhood associations. And then the third and final piece where we engage the pro bono partners is, you know what? Showing up at neighborhood meetings, being there being on the ground, these neighborhood associations, they see that these lawyers are coming into their neighborhood and that they care and they’re there for them. And so on all three fronts, it’s been a wonderful partnership.

Ron Flagg:

So we’ve talked about two key building blocks for many initiatives, but certainly legal aid, collaboration, leadership. A third building block is strategic thinking. Now, as Peter alluded to, often people in their lives, the clients served by civil legal aid are confronted by immediate emergencies. It could be domestic violence, it could be an eviction filing, and the clients in legal aid are in a reactive posture making it harder to be strategic. Here again, as Peter and Dan and Tonnie have described, the neighborhood advocacy program provides the opportunity for a more strategic approach to providing services and to thinking about how to improve a community based on the constellation of issues facing the community and the people living there. Does that ring true to you? And talk about this project and sort of the strategic, how acting strategically empowers both all of the collaborators really including people in the community?

Dan Glazier:

Well, I’ll just start and then Peter can jump in. And Tonnie purposefully going into a community with the intent to work with, not just for, but with the community is an important strategy. Community lawyering is, we think a vital part of what we do at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri and what is most effective to connect with those we serve. One of the key elements of that kind of work is trust and being in that community and being there at the neighborhood meetings and being there, as you say, when things pop up and that you don’t expect, that builds trust. With the neighborhood association, with the clients and with the lawyers, the lawyers, it goes both ways. So that intentionality of showing up and being in the community and being responsive, I think is paid dividends. And Peter and Tonnie can certainly elaborate on that.

Peter Hoffman:

We learned so much from those neighborhood meetings about what people’s lives are like, what issues they’re facing, and we will often have somebody pull us aside after a neighborhood meeting and say, Hey, I’ve got one of those specific legal questions you were talking about, Ron, and that’s an opportunity for us, even if it’s something outside of this specific program or partnership. Lawyers are good at issue spot and we’re trained to do that, and we can hear, okay, somebody’s got, maybe somebody has a public benefits issue, or maybe somebody has a landlord tenant issue, or the client will come up to us and say, I have a consumer issue. These are all other types of services offered at legal services, and it’s an opportunity for us because now we have that trust and that relationship. Okay, I’m going to get you into our central intake system. And even though it’s not a case that our program might be able to help with, we have attorneys at our office here in St. Louis that specialize in that type of assistance. And we’re going to make sure you’re get connected with the help you need. So it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of late nights and evenings and weekends, but it is critical to advancing our mission to serve the St. Louis community, to be there and be present and help issue spot and come up with solutions to some of these problems.

Ron Flagg:

Tonnie, could you talk for a moment about empowerment and the empowerment and what it means to you and to your neighbors and members of your community by being part of this collaboration and having at some of your meetings if you want them there, the others with whom you’re working, how has that empowerment evolved for you?

Tonnie Glispie-Smith:

So many times people think it’s someone else’s job to do something or someone should be paid to do these things. And yes, people should be paid, but I always tell my neighbors, this affects you. Do I want to be in the alley cleaning up trash that I didn’t put there? No, but it’s affecting me, so I’m going to clean it up. I don’t want nails in my tires, so I’m going to sweep the alley. And those things, and some of the conversations that I’ve had with owners or realtors that don’t think that we can do anything about it, it is a good feeling to say, yes, we can. Here are these laws that you should read up on. And they’ll say, well, I have a lawyer. It is really good to say we have a lawyers too, and we’re not trying to take someone’s house or put someone out.

And that’s a good thing. It’s really holistic and the education of just because I live in my mother’s house doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to pass to me. I need to get the paperwork in order because like Dan said earlier, when he was talking about that, I remember in 2015 I went to a ward meeting and a neighbor was there saying that she had to move out of her mother’s house who had just passed away. She had lived there for 40 years her whole life, but she just assumed it would go to her, but it did not. And she had to move into an apartment, and she said she doesn’t like apartment living. And so I said, oh, that’s terrible. And so then a few years later, meaning Peter and him telling me about beneficiary deeds and you have to have the paperwork has to be in order, just doesn’t automatically pass to a relative.

That’s been very beneficial because it talks about, it addresses displacement, and it also addresses generational wealth and being able to pass that asset along. So it’s not a burden on someone, it’s an actual asset that can improve your family’s lives for generations. So knowing that and just being able to know that there’s someone on our side that’s advocating for us has been just, I can’t really have a word for it, but just knowing that we are doing something about this and we have a partner until this problem is no longer a problem, has been just wonderful.

Ron Flagg:

What a great example of legal aid keeping people in their homes. Peter, maybe you could walk us through a case study, a particular story that comes to mind that exemplifies the program’s work. And you could maybe tell us how you or the community identified the issue and the path to resolution.

Peter Hoffman:

Well, yeah, I think Tonnie alluded to, we call it the Veteran’s House earlier. This was the senior who he had a property that he had purchased years ago, didn’t have the resources, didn’t want to own it anymore, but couldn’t sell it because he had a title issue. That’s just one of hundreds of cases. When we started this project in 2018, we really just had two neighborhoods that we were focused on, and we partnered with two large law firms. Today we have over a dozen neighborhoods that we serve in the city of St. Louis, and we have a half dozen pro bono partners. And that number is growing all the time. If any St. Louis law firms are listening to this and they want to get involved, contact us, there’s opportunities to support neighborhoods. And so we we’re getting positive outcomes every day. In just our first six years, we’ve been able to return more than 300 units of formerly vacant housing back to productive use.

This has opened the door to more than $36 million and often unsubsidized investments in neighborhoods that have been under invested for decades. Dan mentioned our population in St. Louis City peaked in 1950, and we’ve been steadily declining since then. What we are doing by transforming these vacant properties back into safe and affordable housing is creating opportunities for our city to thrive again, to grow again, for people to have safe and prosperous communities where they can walk to the corner store and get food for the day or walk their kids to the school down the block and not have to worry about being dragged into a vacant house or having something terrible happen to them. So we have so many great stories. We’ve actually compiled a book of before and after photos. Many of those are cases in the West End neighborhood where Tonnie lives and works, and people can go to our website and take a look at that book. It’s www.lsm.org. You can click the neighborhood advocacy link and take a look at some of those before and after pictures. And we’ve got more of those coming online every day. So we’re really proud just of the scale of good we’ve been able to do in St. Louis and in the neighborhoods that need the help the most.

Ron Flagg:

And I would make a pitch not only to lawyers and law firms in St Louis, but lawyers, law firms, community groups, legal aid programs around the country. This is a great model and probably nearly any city in America could benefit from a program like it. Tonnie, let’s go back to St. Louis and the West End. What’s changed because of this program? How has the community, your community, responded to those changes?

Tonnie Glispie-Smith:

For the most part, everyone sees the changes and likes the changes and knows, and knows that we can do something about these. During the same time. We, and this really was a catalyst to apply for a grant through what’s called Invest STL, to get a neighborhood plan and adopted by the city of St. Louis. So it’s a neighborhood revitalation plan, and that one was resident led as well. And Peter had meetings with the planners that we hired to talk about the housing effort. And then the neighborhood vacancy initiative or the neighborhood advocacy initiative was put into the plan. So that’s what we are going to do and have those guidelines. And so it’ll talk about what development we want and where we want it and how we want it. And if someone or an organization or a developer wants to come into the neighborhood, we know that we can talk to them about what it is that we want and what we don’t want.

And this program helped kind of shepherd that piece in to really show us we need to be organized and be an organized body. We can do this. If we can do this, we can do other things and we can have a say. So now I see people out at night walking their dogs, having their kids out. People come up to me and thank me for the work that we’ve been able to get done. And in general, we’re still working towards the neighborhood that we know we deserve. But it has gotten a lot better myself, my daughter, she’s 20 now, so when I started this neighborhood work, she was around 12 years old and there was a lot of things happening. So you can’t walk our dog a certain way, or you can only go down so far, and then you have to come back and walk on the other side.

It’s like now I see people walking fully down the street and going around. So it’s like it’s now, the vacancy has been reduced. We have more eyes on the street and just vacant lots had been turned into pocket parks, legal services was able to help with the title work to purchase that lot. It’s now an asset and just things like that. So it’s really, I would encourage yes, everyone, if this could be done in every neighborhood and in every city across, it really empowers the residents and shows like we can be involved and get things done and get them done in the way that we want, or at least have a huge say in them.

Ron Flagg:

Wow, that’s so impressive. I hope Tonnie’s description of empowerment and improvement inspires people across the country to think about how they could better you could better your own neighborhoods. So with that in mind, I’d like to finish by asking each of you to offer one piece of advice or guiding principle to listeners who, whether they be legal aid lawyers, private attorneys, community organizers, people just looking to make an impact on their communities like you all have. What’s your advice? Dan will start with you, turn it over to Tonnie and then give Peter the last word.

Dan Glazier:

Sure. Well, look, we at Legal Aid, we overwhelmingly provide that individual representation to our clients, to those who are in such great need, removing barriers and doing this work. But there is a lot to be said also for group representation. And as Tonnie so aptly and appropriately talked about what that has meant to her neighborhood, to everyone to be involved, to do this holistically and to represent a group of wonderful, caring, committed people who are trying to make a difference. And we are important avenues and partners, we legal aid lawyers in that regard. So I guess my one piece of advice would be to look as well as our individual cases, look at some group representation. It can be done and it can certainly be done appropriately and combine with that individual work. These are very, very powerful tools to make a difference.

Ron Flagg:

Tonnie, if there are people around the country listening in who want to improve their community, what advice would you give them?

Tonnie Glispie-Smith:

Two pieces. I’d say first, learn about the harms of vacancy, our mental health, safety and proper values, and then spread the word, talk to other people, and then hopefully you can find a few caring people that care about the same things that you do and then get started. I know it can be overwhelming. It’s like I wanted to just take on the whole entire neighborhood, and Peter’s like, we can’t do that. So not at the same time. It’s like, I want to bring 50 cases. And so I was like, but just start small. So then you’ll see those successes and then those successes will lead other people to want to be involved with what you’re doing. And then everyone will say, well, what about this house and what about this house? And then you’ll have groups of residents throughout where you live to be able to help you with it. And then you’ll see those and it’ll just spread and other people will want to join in.

Ron Flagg:

Great practical and strategic advice. Peter, you get the final word.

Peter Hoffman:

I think the most common thing that I get asked is how to get started. So if a legal aid organization doesn’t have any existing connections to community groups, what are ways to get started to get connected? And the first thing I would suggest is to look at your own service data. Where do your clients live? Are they concentrated in certain neighborhoods or a neighborhood? Does your city recognize place-based organizations? Some do, some don’t. So that might be a good place to start. I’d also look to some of the umbrella organizations or other nonprofits working on these types of community development issues in that area. Are there what’s called CDCs or community development corporations working to create affordable housing that could connect you with more grassroots or resident led organizations? And then once you’ve made that initial contact, be reliable. We’ve got to move at the speed of trust.

And I said it before, sometimes that means attending meetings on weekends and nights. That’s part of the job. That’s part of our calling. That’s what we should be doing is showing up. It doesn’t always need to be legal work, and this is something we’ve really tried to encourage the pro bono partners to do. Let’s participate in a cleanup, an alley cleanup, or a trash pickup or a gardening day. Find other ways to get involved to support the community. What’s the saying? 99% of life success in life is just showing up. It really can go a long way to building trust in the relationship you want to have with your community. So that would be my advice to other legal aid organizations looking to follow in our tracks.

Ron Flagg:

Well, we’ve just heard the dedicated voice of a legal aid lawyer and a better statement we couldn’t hear. Tonnie, Peter, Dan, thank you all so much for coming in on our podcast and sharing your fantastic program. Thanks to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And all. Stay well

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Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporations views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decisions based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.