Worker Mike Friley removes a table during an eviction in the unincorporated community of Galloway west of Columbus, Ohio, on March 3, 2021. Property management crews have 1 1/2 hours to remove all items from the property under the supervision of the bailiff. (Stephen Zenner/Getty Images/TNS)
When pandemic-era tenant protections expired, rents immediately soared, and in some U.S. cities, eviction filings increased by more than 50 percent last year compared to pre-pandemic levels.
These lawsuits can cast long shadows. Simply being named in an eviction lawsuit, regardless of the outcome, can severely limit future housing options and prolong housing insecurity, according to a recent study from the University of Michigan.
The situation underscores a growing debate across the country: Should eviction records be kept secret from the public to give tenants a better chance of finding new housing?
In recent years, more and more states have said “yes – at least in some cases”.
Eviction notices are public court records. Landlords and property owners can purchase databases of these records to screen potential tenants.
Property owners argue that blocking data on eviction filings – most of which are for nonpayment of rent – prevents important insights into rental history. But housing advocates warn that each filing can unfairly deny tenants access to future apartments because the outcome may not result in an eviction.
An eviction notice doesn’t provide enough information to assess a tenant’s ability to comply with their next lease, says Katie Fallon, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute, a research and advocacy think tank focused on urban policy.
“Given the low quality of this eviction data and the fact that the lawsuits themselves do not produce results, the question of how accurate these lawsuits are and what information they really provide to landlords is completely open,” she said.
This year, Idaho, Maryland and Massachusetts passed laws to protect certain eviction records from public scrutiny and from tenant screening companies.
Last year, Connecticut and Rhode Island also passed laws allowing certain eviction cases to be sealed. Arizona, meanwhile, passed a law in 2022 requiring courts to seal eviction cases when cases are dismissed, dropped or ruled in favor of the tenant.
In total, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have actions to seal at least some eviction records, according to PolicyLink, a national housing research and advocacy group.
Zafar Shah, deputy director of advocacy at Maryland Legal Aid, said lawmakers are beginning to understand how eviction lawsuits can prevent tenants from finding new housing.
“We have clients who know they are going to lose their eviction case, but they want us to keep the information secret so the next potential housing provider cannot use it against them,” Shah said.
“That really was the impetus for foreclosure and sealing across the country. These applications don’t tell us much, but they carry so much weight in the housing search.”
An eviction petition can be resolved in several ways: A case can be dismissed if the landlord and tenant come to an agreement. The judge can rule in favor of the tenant and allow them to stay in their apartment. Or the judge can side with the landlord and evict the tenant.
Regardless of the outcome, the records remain in the online court databases.
Third-party tenant screening companies search court records for eviction cases and then sell the data to landlords who use it to make their rental decisions.
Housing activists say the data is often inaccurate and misleading. In one state — Illinois — fewer than half of eviction filings resulted in actual evictions, according to a 2019 study by the advocacy group Housing Action Illinois.
Alexandra Alvarado, director of education and marketing at the American Apartment Owners Association, a provider of tenant screening services, told Stateline that the group’s database only shows eviction cases with a final judgment filed within the last seven years, 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 settle out of court or the tenant wins, then that will not show up in our reports, even though it is technically a public document,” Alvarado said. “Our members are receiving eviction cases that are legitimate and were not filed in error.”
A scarlet “E”
According to researchers at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, more than a fifth of the 3.6 million eviction court records in the 12 states they tracked from 2011 to 2015 contained little information about the outcome of the case. Ambiguous data can also misrepresent a tenant’s eviction history, which concerns both tenants and academic researchers, according to a 2020 study by the group.
“Many people believe that an eviction petition is evidence of late rent payment, nonpayment of rent or a violation of lease terms, but that is not necessarily the case,” said Fallon of the Urban Institute. “Petitions may contain inaccurate data, such as the parties named in the eviction petition and incorrect spellings of names.”
Alvarado, of the American Apartment Owners Association, said landlords have differing views on laws that allow courts to keep cases that have been dismissed or ruled in a tenant’s favor under wraps. More importantly, she said, landlords need to be able to look back seven years in their review process for problematic eviction cases.
Laws that limit the lookback period – such as in Oregon, where tenants can apply for expungement after five years – would have a greater impact on the tenant screening process, she said.
The system is problematic, Eviction Lab found in a 2020 study of eviction cases filed in 39 states between 2012 and 2016. In addition to the inaccurate information, Black households are overrepresented in eviction cases, Eviction Lab found, as are women — particularly Black and Latino women.
“When landlords say they need to use eviction records to make their housing decisions, which we know is not the most reliable information, we have to disagree,” said Jasmine Rangel, senior housing associate at PolicyLink.
She and other advocates want eviction records sealed as soon as a landlord files an eviction suit. Otherwise, she said, “third-party vendors can still scrape those eviction records from online databases and feed them into their tenant screening algorithms.”
Proponents point out that eviction documents could later be made public if a judge rules in favor of the landlord.
But Shuntera Brown, who lost her Phoenix home in 2021, said in an interview that any eviction record hurts single mothers like herself.
Brown, who has three children, struggles to pay rent despite working full-time. In December 2020, she missed shifts at work due to COVID-19, which interrupted her paycheck and ultimately bankrupted her months later.
“It’s a scarlet ‘E.’ You have this record, you have this eviction thing on your record, but you don’t understand the context or the circumstances behind it,” Brown said. “I remember pleading with the judge that I usually pay on time and that my kids need a home, but he sided with the landlord within about seven minutes and the eviction was immediately put on my credit card.”
Sealing of documents
Laws vary from state to state on the details: In many states, eviction records can be sealed almost immediately if the case is dismissed or dropped, or if the tenant wins the case. In other states, there is a waiting period, often several years, during which the tenant must demonstrate good behavior before the records are sealed.
Under Maryland’s new law, which takes effect in October, courts will have to seal records within 60 days of a resolution that doesn’t result in the tenant losing their home. The state will also increase the fee for filing an eviction suit from $8 to $43.
According to housing activists who testified in favor of the new law, landlords in Maryland filed about 400,000 “rent delinquency” cases in fiscal year 2023. In some cases, landlords filed rent delinquency lawsuits against tenants prematurely and added illegal fees on top of the back rent, according to a report by the Maryland-based advocacy group Public Justice Center.
“The low cost and low barriers to entry have led to a tremendous number of lawsuits, with many cases simply being used to quickly extract rent money from tenants,” said Shah of Maryland Legal Aid. “I think the court as a whole has become more receptive to protecting these cases, recognizing that if a case is dismissed or settled, there is no reason to hold anything against the tenant.”
“This attitude has changed significantly over the last decade,” he said.
In California and Colorado, as well as Maryland, an eviction case can be automatically sealed once it’s filed unless the landlord wins the case within 60 days. In Indiana and Minnesota, a tenant must formally request sealing once a court issues a judgment.
Idaho’s new law protects eviction cases from being dismissed after three years. And in Massachusetts, tenants can request that their case be sealed for a variety of reasons after a period of time ranging from a few months to several years, regardless of the outcome of the case.
In Rhode Island, a tenant can only apply once every five years.
Researchers at the Eviction Lab told Stateline that state laws should continue to allow scientists access to data. For example, Washington, D.C.’s 2022 Eviction Sealing Act specifies that records can be unsealed for scientific, educational, journalistic or governmental purposes.
“The public has an important right to know what is going on in the housing market, and this is one of our data points on the eviction crisis,” said Carl Gershenson, lab director of the Eviction Lab. “A balance can be reached that is in the best interest of renters, and these records can be used as data points to understand the housing crisis.”
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