Help a tenant who is handed a settlement before an eviction hearing understand what it means, whether they can actually pay it, and what help is available before they sign.
This page is the shared target for this situation. Any court, legal aid office, or builder working on it in their own region can take the vision, the blueprints, and the standards here instead of starting over, and set the parts that are local to them. The point is that the same work is not designed from scratch in every county.
A tenant reaches the day an offer is handed across because an answer was filed first. That part is answering an eviction case.
Does this match how it goes where you are? Leave a note on this workflow.
Eviction cases are often settled in the hallway, minutes before the hearing, between a landlord with a lawyer and a tenant without one. People are evicted over late fees. Tenants with limited English often do not come to court at all, and those who do frequently do not know what rights they have or what the agreement they are being handed commits them to.
The help that exists is real but hard to reach in that moment. Nothing in the process checks whether the payment schedule in the agreement is one the tenant can meet, and nothing happens before the court date, when rental assistance or a conversation with the landlord could still change the outcome.
A system here reaches the tenant before the hearing, tells them what to expect in their own situation, and puts a person beside them at the courthouse.
Housing providers at a later workshop said the same thing from the other side of the table: no tool on the tenant side explains what a settlement offer actually commits them to. Housing mediation programs and mandatory settlement conferences are where that help could sit, and at least one court system is already buying a landlord and tenant negotiation tool, which the cohort should read before it designs its own.
A tenant arrives at court, is handed an agreement in the hallway, and signs it without knowing what it commits them to or whether they can meet it. People who cannot read the notice, or who do not know they can appear, do not come at all.
The summons itself says where the help is. The tenant reaches a portal or a phone line before the court date, learns what to expect in their own situation, and has time and a person beside them before any agreement is signed.
This is one vision, taken from what the group wrote in the room. Technology could play out in other ways here, and the cohort weighs them against this one.
Who this serves: Tenants facing eviction who have no lawyer, the community organizations and community justice workers who reach them, court staff who see them on the day, and the courts that decide what a valid agreement requires.
Where this came from: A group at a recent design workshop the Commons team ran worked this scenario through, and this page is built from what they wrote. The cohort for this area picks it up from here.
The step-by-step agenda is open for review now. The cohort writes the functional agenda and the standards from the answers that come back, and this page carries them when they exist.
What a system here has to do, written as the work in order and in plain words, with the question the Commons team wants answered about each part. Start here if you meet tenants on the day and want to say what a tool needs.
Read the step-by-step agenda →What the system must do, including walking a person through step by step, working in the languages people in that county speak, checking a payment schedule against what the tenant can actually pay, and keeping what a tenant enters out of the public record.
How anyone judges whether a builder met the mark. The group asked for a long term study of outcomes, for testing with real people and real cases before launch, for measuring where people stop partway through, and for taking part to stay voluntary.
The rest of the package follows once those two exist. It covers the baseline numbers, the procurement and contract terms, the reference architecture with the split between what any jurisdiction can take as it is and what each place has to set for itself, the stories and materials from teams who have already built something here, and the tests.
The housing cohort is forming now, and this is one of the workflows in front of it. Members bring what they have seen in their own courts, argue about what a tool here has to do, and read the drafts.