Rachel Garland

Rachel Garland (she/her) is the co-managing attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services, where she where she co-leads a team of 40 lawyers, paralegals, social workers, and other staff members in litigation and advocacy to prevent evictions and homelessness. Under Ms. Garland’s leadership, CLS’s Housing Unit has made huge strides in strengthening legal protections for renters so they can assert their legal rights and remain safely in their homes. Ms. Garland and the unit have worked to design and implement Philadelphia’s Right to Counsel program to provide representation for tenants in their eviction proceedings, grow the Philadelphia Eviction Prevention Project, and envision, build and support the implementation of Philadelphia’s new Eviction Diversion Program.

Ms. Garland began her career at CLS as an Equal Justice Works fellow in 2008 with a focus on the intersection of housing and domestic violence. In her role as a staff attorney in the unit, Ms. Garland represented subsidized housing tenants facing a wide variety of housing issues including eviction, repairs, termination of subsidy, illegal evictions, criminal barriers to housing, rent calculations and disability accommodations. Ms. Garland’s focus on subsidized housing tenants has allowed her to represent high volumes of public housing, Section 8 voucher, section 8 project based and Low Income Housing Tax credit tenants.  She is well versed in the intricacies of subsidized housing law and the many barriers subsidized housing tenants face in maintaining their subsidies and stable housing.  Ms. Garland has worked closely with PHA’s Resident Advisory Board in advocating for implementation of best practices at PHA and represented the RAB in lease negotiations and in providing comments on PHA’s annual plans and changes to their policy documents.

She also worked extensively on the intersection of housing and domestic and sexual violence, providing representation, community education and legal advocacy in this area. Initially, Ms. Garland worked on implementation of the Violence Against Women Act’s new provisions granting protections from eviction and denial of admission to subsidized housing for survivors of domestic violence and sexual Assault. Ms. Garland then expanded this work to collaborate with other advocates to achieve major victories for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault living in non-subsidized housing, including changing the laws in Philadelphia in 2011 to prohibit discrimination against survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in private housing and establishing a procedure for victims to terminate their leases early.  Ms. Garland worked to train advocates, social workers, landlords and judges on the new laws and how they played out in practice to ensure that tenants would not be denied housing due to their protected status, nor evicted due to their protected status.  Ms. Garland also worked closely with Regional Housing Legal and the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency to amend the policy documents for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program to extend these same protections state-wide.

Ms. Garland has also worked extensively on the preservation of affordable housing, both by working directly with tenants facing displacement from their homes when the subsidy contract for their property ends.  In her direct representation Ms. Garland represented a case in federal court on behalf of tenants at a formerly subsidized property that resulted in a Third Circuit en banc precedential decision requiring that landlords of tenants with Enhanced Vouchers renew their tenants’ leases unless there was good cause to evict them.  Based on this experience and other experiences working with tenants facing displacement from their homes due to their private landlord’s decision to end the subsidy contract, Ms. Garland joined the Philadelphia Preservation of Affordable Housing Coalition to work on legislation that would preserve affordable housing as long-term neighborhood-based resources for tenants.  Ms. Garland along with the Coalition worked on legislation introduced in 2019 and reintroduced and passed in 2022 to support this effort.  Ms. Garland continues to focus her representation on tenants facing mass evictions when their landlords end subsidy contracts, illegally shut down entire buildings or allow their properties to fall into such disrepair as to significantly impact the lives of their tenants.

Ms. Garland received the Pennsylvania Legal Aid Network (PLAN) Excellence Award in 2019, the Rutgers Law School Mary K. Philbrook Public Interest Award in 2021and the Community Legal Services Equal Justice Award in 2023.

Ms. Garland earned her J.D. from the Temple University Beasley School of Law in 2007. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2001, with BA in politics.