There’s an old public health principle: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. OK… maybe that’s not exactly a public health mantra, but you know what I mean.
Pima County has been proactively putting that principle to work for five years with its Emergency Eviction Legal Services program (EELS), and the results are promising.
More recently, the County has expanded that prevention approach through a much broader initiative called One Pima.
The two efforts are related, but they’re not the same thing. EELS is designed to prevent and respond to evictions.
One Pima is a broader public safety and homelessness-prevention initiative that includes housing aid along with addiction services, jail reentry work and cleanup of public spaces.
Let’s start with EELS.
Intervening When an Eviction Is Filed
Emergency Eviction Legal Services started in 2021 after the Board of Supervisors directed federal COVID relief money to help tenants facing eviction. But what began as an emergency response has evolved into a pretty effective prevention system.
When an eviction case is filed in Pima County Justice Court (which by the way in Arizona can happen if the tenant is just 5 days late on rent), the County gets with the tenant and lets them know how they can get help.
Their EELS team then connects them with a trained navigator.
The navigator can explain the process and decide whether the tenant qualifies for free legal help. They often also connect tenants with rent assistance, help with rehousing and plug them into employment services through the County’s One-Stop system.
Before EELS, less than 1% of tenants in Pima County eviction cases were represented by an attorney (meanwhile landlords almost always have access to a lawyer).
By FY2022–23, EELS had served 6,000 households since its launch. That year alone, navigators helped 2,953 households, 809 received free legal services and 287 received full representation. About half of those fully represented tenants had a good outcome — dismissal, settlement or judgment for the tenant.
In FY2022–23, EELS provided rental help to 1,748 landlords who agreed to pause the eviction process, preventing those evictions from moving forward.
For families who couldn’t avoid eviction, the County provided emergency bridge housing with case management, housing counseling, food, health care and other services.
In FY2025–26, EELS provided legal services to 432 households, hastened rent help for 651 households, and bridge housing and case management for 107 households.
Represented tenants achieved a favorable court result 54% of the time, while 94% of households leaving bridge housing went to a positive housing destination.
One Pima: Taking the Prevention Idea Broader
Separate from EELS — but based on much the same idea of intervening before problems become more expensive and harder to solve, Pima County launched the One Pima Initiative in November 2025.
County touts eight months of housing, public safety effort
One Pima is a two-year public health and safety initiative focused more broadly on housing instability, homelessness, addiction, jail reentry and public spaces. Housing prevention is a big part of it.
Through One Pima and the County’s broader housing work, more than 3,300 households received housing-stability and homelessness-prevention services in FY2025–26.
The County also completed 486 units of gap-funded affordable housing and is launching a Homeless Prevention Hub, backed by a two-year, $2M Garcia Family Foundation grant, which will give residents a single-entry point for rent assistance, utility help and other housing services.
So while EELS catches people when an eviction case lands in court, One Pima goes upstream to find and solve housing instability before somebody gets to that point in the first place.
Rather than waiting until somebody is sleeping on the street and then asking how we’re going to fix homelessness, Pima County is building systems that intervene earlier — when the rent is overdue, when the eviction notice arrives, or increasingly, before the housing crisis reaches either point.
That’s good public policy and good public health.
Kudos to the Pima County Board of Supervisors, Community & Workforce Development staff, the Justice Court, Constables and the community partners who have built and sustained this work.
P.S. A broader – more universal intervention would be to completely overhaul and modernize the antiquated Arizona Residential Landlord and Tenant Act. Passed in 1972 – and hardly revised since – it tilts heavily toward landlords fueling easy evictions, homelessness, and heat deaths.
More in this blog: Evictions, Homelessness & Heat Related Deaths: Is Arizona’s Antiquated Landlord & Tenant Act Part of Our Problem? – AZ Public Health Association
More information
Pima County Emergency Eviction Legal Services (EELS)
EELS Year 1 Report — FY2021–22
