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BY: ROBBIE SEQUEIRA - AUGUST 21, 2024
When pandemic-era tenant protections expired, rents immediately soared, and eviction filings surged last year more than 50% over pre-pandemic levels in some U.S. cities.
These filings can cast long shadows. Simply being named in an eviction complaint, regardless of the outcome, can severely limit future housing options and prolong housing insecurity, according to a recent University of Michigan study.
The situation underscores a growing debate across the country: Should eviction records be shielded from public access to offer tenants a cleaner shot at finding another home?
In recent years, more states are saying, “yes — at least in some cases.”
Eviction filings are public court records. Landlords and property owners can buy databases of the records to screen potential tenants.
Property owners argue that sealing data on eviction filings — most of which are for nonpayment of rent — eliminates crucial insights into rental history. Housing advocates, however, warn that any filing can unfairly block renters from future housing because the outcome may not be an eviction.
An eviction filing doesn’t provide enough information to determine a tenant’s ability to honor their next lease, said Katie Fallon, a principal policy associate with the Urban Institute, a research and advocacy think tank focusing on urban policies.
“Given the low quality of this eviction filing data and the lack of outcomes in the filings themselves, it is a very open question of how accurate these filings are and what information they really provide to landlords,” she said.
Idaho, Maryland, and Mass. Acted This Year
This year, Idaho, Maryland and Massachusetts enacted laws to seal certain eviction records from public scrutiny and from tenant screening companies.
Last year, Connecticut and Rhode Island also enacted laws that allow for the sealing of certain eviction cases. Arizona, meanwhile, enacted a law in 2022 requiring courts to seal eviction records if cases are dismissed, dropped or adjudicated in the tenant’s favor.
In total, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have measures sealing at least some eviction records, according to PolicyLink, a national research and advocacy group with a focus on housing.
Zafar Shah, assistant director of advocacy for Maryland Legal Aid, said lawmakers are starting to understand how eviction records can prevent tenants from finding another home.
“We have clients that know they will lose their eviction case, but they want us to shield the information so that the next potential housing provider is not going to use it against them,” said Shah.
“That has really been the impetus for shielding and sealing across the country. These filings don’t tell us a lot, but they carry so much weight in the search for housing.”
An eviction filing could be resolved in a number of ways: A case might be dismissed if the landlord and tenant reach an agreement. The judge might rule in favor of the tenant, allowing them to stay in their home. Or the judge could side with the landlord, evicting the tenant.
Regardless of the outcome, the records live on in online court databases.
Third-party tenant screening companies scan court records for eviction cases, then sell the data to landlords to use in their leasing decisions.
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Our members are getting evictions that have merit and weren’t erroneously filed.
– Alexandra Alvarado, American Apartment Owners Association
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Housing advocates say the data is often inaccurate and misleading. In one state — Illinois — less than half of eviction filings led to actual evictions, according to a 2019 review by Housing Action Illinois, an advocacy group.
Alexandra Alvarado, director of education and marketing at the American Apartment Owners Association, a tenant screening provider, told Stateline that the group’s database only displays eviction records with a completed judgment that were filed within the past seven years, which is the time limit set by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act.
“It can be a monetary or non-monetary judgment, but there must be a judgment. So, if an eviction case is filed, but the parties settled outside of court or the tenant won, then it wouldn’t show up in our reports, even though technically it is public record,” Alvarado said. “Our members are getting evictions that have merit and weren’t erroneously filed.”
A Scarlet ‘E’
According to researchers at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, of the 3.6 million eviction court records in the 12 states they tracked from 2011 to 2015, more than 1 in 5 eviction cases contained little information on the resolution of a case. Ambiguous data can also falsely represent a tenant’s eviction history, affecting both renters and scholarly researchers, according to a 2020 study by the group.
“While many people think an eviction filing is evidence of late rent payment, nonpayment of rent or a violation of the lease terms, this is not necessarily true,” said Fallon, of the Urban Institute. “Filings can include inaccurate data, such as the parties named in the eviction filing and inaccurate name spellings.”
Alvarado, of the American Apartment Owners Association, said landlords have mixed views about laws that allow courts to seal cases that have been dismissed or ruled in a tenant’s favor. What’s more important to landlords, she said, is that their screening process can look back the full seven years for problem evictions.
Laws that limit the lookback period — such as in Oregon, where tenants can request an expungement after five years — affect the tenant screening process more, she said.
The system is problematic, Eviction Lab found in a 2020 study of eviction cases filed between 2012 and 2016 in 39 states. In addition to inaccurate information, Black households are overrepresented in eviction filings, Eviction Lab found, as are women — especially Black and Latina women.
“When landlords say they need to use eviction filings, which we know aren’t the most reliable information, to make housing decisions, we need to push back on that,” said Jasmine Rangel, senior housing associate for PolicyLink.
She and other advocates want eviction court records to be sealed as soon as a landlord files an eviction notice. Otherwise, she said, “third-party services can still scrape that eviction record from online databases and into their tenant screening algorithms.”
Advocates point out that eviction records could be made public later if a judge rules in the landlord’s favor.
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It’s a Scarlet ‘E.’ You have this record, you have this thing on your file of an eviction, but there’s no understanding of the context or circumstances behind it.
– Shuntera Brown, an Arizona resident whose eviction record hurt her housing search
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But Shuntera Brown, who lost her home in Phoenix in 2021, said in an interview that any eviction record hurts single moms like herself.
Brown, who has three children, has struggled to pay rent even with a full-time job. In December 2020, a bout of COVID-19 caused her to miss work shifts, a paycheck disruption that eventually put her over the edge months later.
“It’s a Scarlet ‘E.’ You have this record, you have this thing on your file of an eviction, but there’s no understanding of the context or circumstances behind it,” Brown said. “I remember pleading with the judge that I’ve usually paid on time and that my kids need a home, but he sided with the landlord in, like, seven minutes, and the eviction immediately was on my credit.”
Sealing the records
State by state, the laws differ on the details: Many states allow for eviction records to be sealed almost immediately if the case was dismissed or dropped, or if the tenant won the case. Other states have a waiting period, often several years, during which the tenant must demonstrate good behavior before a record is sealed.
Under Maryland’s new law, which takes effect in October, courts must shield records within 60 days of a resolution that doesn’t end in a tenant losing possession of their home. The state also will increase the eviction filing fee from $8 to $43.
Maryland landlords filed roughly 400,000 “failure to pay rent” cases in the state’s 2023 fiscal year, according to housing advocates who testified in favor of the new law. In some cases, landlords would file monthly failure to pay rent cases against tenants prematurely and tack on illegal fees on top of the back rent, according to a report from the Maryland-based advocacy group Public Justice Center.
“The low cost and low barrier to entry have driven the massive quantity of filings, with many cases simply being leveraged to get rent money out of tenants quickly,” said Shah, of Maryland Legal Aid. “I think that the court overall has become more receptive to shielding these cases, recognizing that if a case was dismissed or settled, there’s no reason to hold it against the renter.
“This attitude has shifted significantly over the past decade,” he said.
In California and Colorado, as in Maryland, an eviction lawsuit can be automatically sealed as soon as it’s been filed unless the landlord wins the case within 60 days. Indiana and Minnesota require a tenant to formally petition for sealing once a court reaches judgment.
Idaho’s new law shields dismissed eviction cases after three years. And in Massachusetts, tenants can request their case be sealed for a variety of reasons, no matter the outcome, after a period of time ranging from a few months to several years.
In Rhode Island, a tenant can only make a request once every five years.
Researchers at Eviction Lab told Stateline that state laws should still allow data access for scientists. The 2022 eviction-sealing law in Washington, D.C., for example, specifies that records can be unsealed for scholarly, educational, journalistic or governmental purposes.
“There is an important public right to know what is going on in the housing market, and this is one of our data points into the eviction crisis,” said Carl Gershenson, lab director at Eviction Lab. “There is a balance that can be achieved that is in the best interest of tenants and how these filings can be used as datapoints to understand the housing crisis.”
ROBBIE SEQUEIRA
Robbie Sequeira is a staff writer covering housing and social services for Stateline. Stateline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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