AIDS Legal Referral Panel’s fight endures as it hits milestone

By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer

Matt Foreman, executive director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel: “A lot of people have succumbed to the myth that HIV is kind of a thing of the past … and now we’re beyond it.

Photo: Michael Kerner

Ryan, who has been living with HIV since 2012, was shocked to find this year that he and his partner were facing eviction from their San Francisco apartment after their housing-subsidy provider had failed to pay its portion to the couple’s landlord for several months.

“I just don’t know how the snafu began,” said Ryan, who asked to go by his first name for this story, as the settlement for his case is still being processed.

Residents of their apartment for nine years and of The City for nearly 20, Ryan and his partner had successfully applied for and received a housing subsidy a few years ago after losing their car in an accident. Both Uber drivers, the car was key to their main source of income, and Ryan said they were at risk of losing their housing fast.

The provider worked well initially, but a different organization started managing the subsidy in November. Then, payments to the landlord stopped.

“It was by March or so that we were facing three-day notices,” Ryan said.

That was when he reached out to the AIDS Legal Referral Panel for help.

The San Francisco legal nonprofit just marked its 100,000th case this month, more than 40 years after its founding during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Within a matter of weeks, Ryan’s case reached a settlement. He and his partner were able to stay in their home.

“This was a situation that was literally beyond my direct control,” he said. “Being able to have ALRP as a resource was instrumental — and absolutely the reason that we’re still housed.”

Matt Foreman, ALRP’s executive director, said Ryan’s case is not an uncommon one — he said the majority of ALRP’s cases now deal with housing and evictions. The organization’s 100,000th focused on an individual living with HIV in a skilled-nursing facility who was abruptly discharged without alternative support services available.

While Foreman wasn’t able to comment on that case while it’s still ongoing, he said that the facility has a “history” of doing this to clients.

“At the moment, his discharge has been held off,” Foreman said of the client. “I think that we’ll be able to continue to have it postponed until he finds a place where it’ll be safer to be discharged to.”

Foreman said protecting San Franciscans living with HIV has become even more vital in recent months as the federal government has changed policies that affect the LGBTQ population through executive orders and Congress has proposed cuts to benefits that many living with HIV often rely on, such as Medicaid.

In San Francisco, an estimated 15,544 people were living with HIV at the end of 2023, according to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. New diagnoses have declined since 2013, but the population is aging: 74% of residents living with HIV were at least 50 years old when the report was published.

“A lot of people have succumbed to the myth that HIV is kind of a thing of the past, something that came out in the ’80s and ’90s, and now we’re beyond it,” Foreman said. “It’s extremely upsetting and disheartening to say that no, we’re not.”

Aging residents living with HIV face a litany of other health concerns, such as increased susceptibility to disease due to the virus’s effects on their immune systems and the long-term side effects of certain antivirals. Foreman said 61% of his organization’s clients live in isolation and in poverty, with more than half living on just $15,000 a year.

“And there’s a long-term trauma that goes with seeing your entire social network of friends die,” he said of those who lived through the height of the epidemic in the ’80s.

Foreman said that when the ALRP was founded in 1983 as the nation’s first dedicated provider of legal services for those living with HIV, the vast majority of its cases were estate planning and creating and executing wills as people were on the verge of death.

Now its cases focus on housing, immigration, insurance and benefits, Foreman said. Allison Pruitt, who has been with ALRP for seven years and handled Ryan’s case, said that “far too many” of her cases are like his.

“Housing insecurity is a very real, big problem for the majority of our clients,” she said.

Pruitt said that when she started working with the organization, the average number of eviction-defense cases on her plate was around 10 to 12 at a time. However, in recent years, that number has been closer to 20.

“At any given time, while I will have 20 eviction cases, I’ll have 40 other different legal cases that I’m handling,” Pruitt said.

Some are just consulting or referrals, but the workload is still indicative to Pruitt and Foreman of just how much support the community requires. Foreman pointed to the trouble San Franciscans who “make a decent income” have making rent, not to mention his clients who make no more than $15,000 annually.

Ryan said he’s grateful he and his partner are able to stay in their home. He continues to take medication managing his HIV, and he said his lab tests earlier this year didn’t detect the virus in his system.

“The eviction process … it really damages the resident moving forward,” he said. “It’s really a mark on their record, and the physical realization that where you’ve been staying is lost.”

Foreman said ALRP’s clients face additional challenges that those in the general population do not, and that he’s constantly impressed by their resilience.

“If I had those conditions — isolation, poverty, fragile health — I’m not sure that I would have the kind of optimism and courage and fortitude that I see so many of our clients exhibit,” he said.