Maine Equal Justice testifies in support of LD 913, a bill to prevent tenant blacklists from coming to Maine

Maine Equal Justice testifies in support of LD 913, a bill to prevent tenant blacklists from coming to Maine

by Frank D'Alessandro

On May 4th, Frank D'Alessandro, Litigation and Policy Director for Maine Equal Justice, offered this testimony to the Committee on Innovation, Development, Economic Advancement and Business.

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Good morning Senator Curry, Representative Roberts, and distinguished members of the Committee on Innovation, Development, Economic Advancement and Business. My name is Frank D’Alessandro, and I am the Litigation and Policy Director of Maine Equal Justice. We are a civil legal services organization, and we work with and for people with low income seeking solutions to poverty through policy, education, and legal representation. Thank you for the opportunity to offer written testimony to you in support of LD 913.

Maine Equal Justice supports LD 913 because we must prevent tenant blacklists from coming to Maine. The benefits of moving court records online shouldn’t come at the expense of housing opportunities for low-income Mainers.

Maine’s court records show when legal actions have been filed against Mainers for eviction or debt collection, but they are often misinterpreted. When it comes to evictions, the moment a case is filed, the tenant has a permanent eviction record. It doesn’t matter if a tenancy lasted decades, ended amicably with a court agreement, or if the court ruled in favor of the tenant. An eviction record can burden a tenant’s housing search for life.

LD 913’s simple protections will ensure that online court records don’t unfairly prevent Mainers from finding housing.

What This Bill Does

As amended, this bill prevents certain eviction and debt collection court records from being accessible by the public online: cases with complaints for eviction based on a “no-cause notice”; cases resolved by agreement; cases dismissed or resolved in favor of the defendant; cases where the judgment is set aside or vacated; cases where the judgment against the defendant is entered by default; cases older than three years; cases where the judgment was entered during the COVID-19 public health emergency; and cases where the parties agree or the court has ordered that the records will not be accessible by the public online.

All of these records will still be accessible by the public in person at the courthouse as they are now.

Why Maine Equal Justice Supports LD 913

Online Court Records Lead to Tenant Blacklisting, Housing Instability, and Homelessness

Studies show that many landlords look at the existence of an eviction record as evidence of wrongdoing, regardless of the basis or legal outcome.(1) This creates unfair barriers to housing, and the experience of other states shows us that the problem will grow quickly and exponentially when Maine’s court records become available online.(2)

Online court records can become a “free tenant screening tool” to landlords who deny applicants simply because their name appears on a court filing, without understanding the context or outcome of the case.

Right now, the only way prospective landlords can access eviction records is going to the courthouse to look at the paper file or paying a tenant screening service that aggregates court records. There are many problems with this process, including misinterpretation and inaccuracies in using court information, but the problems will become far worse if eviction records are available online.

Maine’s online court records will allow anyone to quickly search court records using only a person’s name. Clicking on an individual eviction record leads to the case information. Unlike in the paper file, which includes the eviction notice, the reason for eviction is not displayed online, so there’s no way to distinguish between the different reasons for eviction. It leaves it up to the viewer to imagine or assume whether the person was evicted for damaging the apartment, owing rent, or with a 30 day no-cause notice because the landlord wanted to rent the apartment to their niece. The record uses legal jargon to explain what happened, which is challenging to understand, and the final outcome can be difficult to find and impossible to interpret. Finally, all the landlord’s actions are documented in the online court record, but the tenant’s defenses to the eviction are not.

Court records simply do not tell a complete story of a tenancy. Someone may have been a long-term tenant who never missed a rent payment but faced eviction because a new owner wanted to sell the building. A landlord may have filed the eviction because the tenant could not move out within the 30 days’ notice, but then the case gets dismissed because the tenant moved out before the court date. Having one dismissed eviction case online can create the mistaken impression that the tenant was evicted by the court, and prospective landlords may deny that tenant just because their name appears in the court records.

In other states, this has caused tenants to be rejected by landlords over and over, effectively barring them from the rental market and increasing their risk of homelessness. This is often called a tenant blacklist when landlords apply a blanket policy to deny applicants with eviction records.

Massachusetts provides an example for Maine of the consequences of publishing eviction records online without a plan to protect low-income citizens. In 2013, the Massachusetts Trial Court released access to its court records at MassCourts.org.(5) In 2019, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute conducted a study on how online eviction records were creating a new barrier to housing called Evicted for Life.

The barriers led to tenants’ repeated rejection by landlords unwilling to rent to them. This led to prolonged periods of homelessness, losing housing vouchers because of time limits, and being locked out of the rental market even if the tenant had never been accused of any wrongdoing.

The study’s key findings were that patterns of significant harm result from the unrestricted, online availability of eviction case record information:

  • Tenants are rejected for housing solely because eviction cases have been filed against them, no matter what the outcome was.
  • Landlords and property managers assume tenants with eviction records have done something wrong, even when they have not.
  • Tenants mistakenly believe that if they make an agreement with their landlord, they will not have an eviction record.
  • Tenants are denied housing based on mistaken identity because they have the same name as someone else whose record appears on the court’s website.
  • Dismissals and judgments against tenants are regarded equally by landlords, with no distinction made between two very different outcomes.
  • Errors in the court records make it difficult for tenants to find new housing.
  • Tenants are denied housing based on old eviction cases that were put online, some from decades earlier.
  • Children are named on their parents’ eviction complaints, leaving them with eviction records that will follow them into adulthood.
  • Landlords use the threat of online eviction records to pressure tenants to move out or dissuade them from going to court to defend their cases.

The State of Maine invests significant resources to help families facing eviction stay in their homes or find new housing. We should not, through online court records, make it much more difficult for those tenants to access new housing.

LD 913 will help preserve the status quo when the Maine Courts move all court records online. Of course, there are benefits to the State to having online access to court records. But we shouldn’t let those benefits come at the expense of housing opportunities for low-income Mainers. We can learn from other states’ experiences with the new barriers online court records create for low-income tenants and act now to prevent tenant blacklists from coming to Maine.

Online Court Records Will Result in Discriminatory Barriers for Black Mainers and other Tenants of Color

Having an eviction record creates a devastating, lifetime barrier for tenants looking for housing, and one group bears this burden more than others. Studies across the country have shown that eviction disproportionately burdens tenants of color, and, in particular, Black women and their families are disproportionately harmed by tenant blacklisting practices.(6)

Black women are especially vulnerable to eviction for many reasons, including staggering pay disparities and wealth gaps. Racial discrimination often compounds other forms of discrimination—such as discrimination against families with children and domestic violence survivors—that disproportionately impact women. As a result, eviction and tenant blacklisting policies often exacerbate and reproduce conditions of economic insecurity for low-income women of color.(7)

In Maine, Black women renters are filed against for eviction at double the rate of white renters.(8) A study by the ACLU showed that these disparities along race and gender lines affect Maine just as they do sixteen other states where eviction data was available. Indeed, Pine Tree Legal Assistance has reported that 12% of the tenants they represent in evictions identify themselves as people of color, though only 5% of Maine’s population is non-white. Similarly, Maine Housing data shows that 26% of Maine’s homeless population is Black or African American even though only 1.4% of Maine’s population is Black or African American.(9)

The barriers created by online eviction records will disparately harm Black Mainers and other tenants of color. Disparate impact discrimination occurs when protected classes suffer disparate outcomes from seemingly neutral policies, i.e., a landlord’s policy to deny applicants with eviction records. Regardless of a landlord’s intent, a policy of refusing to rent to tenants with eviction records disparately impacts non-white tenants, women heads of household, and families with children. Such policies can shift low-income tenants into substandard housing in poor neighborhoods and perpetuate segregation, which works against our national fair housing laws that envision communities with truly integrated and balanced living patterns.

This is an unacceptable discriminatory consequence of putting Maine’s eviction court records online when we have the knowledge of this problem evidenced by countless studies nationwide. This is especially urgent at a time when Maine’s communities of color have been profoundly and disparately harmed by the COVID-19 public health crisis. (10) During the pandemic, many Black, Indigenous and people of color in Maine did not have the luxury of working from home. Many make up Maine's essential workforce—seafood processors, dairy workers, cleaning staff, health care workers, grocery workers, homecare workers, public servants, and more. Yet, as described above, these same essential workers face significant housing instability and housing barriers. In Maine, we must root out discrimination wherever we find it.

The Maine Legislature has the power to enact protections for low-income tenants to avoid the discriminatory result of putting eviction records online by enacting LD 913.

Mainers Need Safe, Stable Homes to Thrive

Finding an affordable place to live has become extremely difficult in Maine, and the pandemic has only made it harder. Even before the pandemic, Maine’s rental housing market has been among the least affordable in the nation, and our state has not done enough to protect people who are being priced out of their homes. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities data from 2019, 2 in 10 Mainers with low incomes are either homeless or pay over half their income on rent.(11) While rental costs have risen across the state, wages haven’t kept pace.

It’s no surprise with renters’ tight budgets and high rent burdens that of the 5,000 households in Maine who face eviction each year, 73% of cases are for non-payment of rent and in 46% of those cases, tenants have only missed one month’s rent or less.(12)

The pandemic has just exposed housing insecurity in Maine and pushed it to a crisis point, showing us how vulnerable our state is to a wave of evictions: the number of Maine households that have fallen behind on rent and face eviction has risen to at least 20,000.(13)

All this means that when tenants receive an eviction notice, for whatever reason, most cannot simply move to another apartment and must use their best effort to remain housed in place for as long as possible.

If they are finally evicted, the fallout is often a traumatic and highly consequential event. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, a leading team of researchers working to highlight the prevalence, causes, and consequences of evictions nationwide, describes the disastrous fallout of eviction this way:

Eviction causes a family to lose their home. They often are also expelled from their community and their children have to switch schools. Families regularly lose their possessions, too, which are piled on the sidewalk or placed in storage, only to be reclaimed after paying a fee. A legal eviction comes with a court record, which can prevent families from relocating to decent housing in a safe neighborhood, because many landlords screen for recent evictions. Studies also show that eviction causes job loss, as the stressful and drawn-out process of being forcibly expelled from a home causes people to make mistakes at work and lose their job. Eviction also has been shown to affect people's mental health: one study found that mothers who experienced eviction reported higher rates of depression two years after their move. The evidence strongly indicates that eviction is not just a condition of poverty, it is a cause of it.

Clearly, eviction causes financial losses to families who often lose their possessions and lose their jobs when they’re forced from their homes and communities.(14) It also causes enormous personal trauma with significant repercussions to economic and personal well-being. Research in the wake of the foreclosure crisis has tracked how housing instability negatively influences adult and children’s physical and mental well-being including increasing the risk of depression in mothers.(15) Eviction also increases suicide and anxiety.(16) For children, it results in emotional and educational decline.(17)

Tenant blacklisting against tenants with eviction records compounds these problems. When housing providers screen families out of the application process based on the existence of an eviction filing in a tenant’s name, regardless of the basis or legal outcome, families who have been evicted are often forced into poorer neighborhoods and substandard housing.(18)

Mainers’ health, wellbeing, and economic stability all start at home. Landlords are the gatekeepers of housing and get to decide where families live, where they work, and where children go to school. Discriminating against low-income tenants with eviction records has effects well beyond the walls of housing. To promote housing stability and opportunity, Maine must protect tenants from the unfair stigma that comes with eviction records. The only eviction records that have a bearing on whether an applicant will be a good tenant are eviction cases in which a landlord alleged and proved that a tenant did something wrong, and those are the cases that LD 913 will allow landlords to see online.

LD 913’s simple protections will ensure that increased access to court records online don’t unfairly prevent Mainers from finding safe homes when they haven’t done anything wrong.

Conclusion

Maine Equal Justice hopes the Committee will vote ‘ought to pass’ on LD 913 to reduce barriers for low-income renters to find housing stability and opportunity; prevent disparate harm to Mainers of color; and ensure that the benefits of putting Maine’s court records online doesn’t come at the expense of the safety and wellbeing of low-income Mainers. The cornerstone of Maine’s economic recovery in the wake of COVID-19 will be a safe, affordable place to call home for all Mainers.

We thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony and am happy to answer any questions.

Maine has an eviction problem--and we need federal resources to help us address it
Maine has an eviction problem--and we need federal resources to help us address it
December 7, 2021

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