Renters deserve housing justice

A version of this column originally appeared in The Alpena News.

Our legal system is supposed to ensure justice for all. Families facing eviction, however, are often at a dramatic disadvantage compared to their landlords. The Michigan League for Public Policy’s new brief highlights opportunities for our state to improve fairness in the legal system when it comes to safe, stable housing for renters.

House Bill 5237, sponsored by Rep. Emily Dievendorf, would establish a statewide right to legal counsel for tenants in housing court. Senate Bill 801, sponsored by Sen. Rosemary Bayer, would provide for the sealing and expungement of eviction records under certain circumstances.

While landlords almost always have attorneys to fight for them in housing court, tenants rarely do. Renters with low incomes typically don’t have the time, expertise, or money to effectively fight an unfair or illegal eviction. Worse yet, eviction filings are public records and many landlords will not rent to families that have ever had a complaint filed against them, no matter the circumstances or outcome of the case.

The single greatest predictor of eviction is the presence of a child in the home. The lopsided eviction process also perpetuates housing discrimination and economic disparities based on race, gender and disability.

Eviction disproportionately affects families of color — particularly Black households — who are more likely to rent because of long-standing discrimination in housing policy and the real estate and lending industries.

Women face thousands more evictions than men every year, and landlords file eviction cases against Black women at nearly twice the rate of white women.

Landlords may also try to evict tenants who call the police or emergency medical services for help during a domestic violence incident or health crisis, disproportionately subjecting women and disabled people to housing instability and homelessness.

Evictions occur for a variety of reasons, but they’re not always fair or even legal. These bills would protect renter families from being forced unjustly from their homes and tarnished indefinitely by court records that may not tell the whole story when it comes to landlord-tenant disputes.

For example, landlords can evict tenants on month-to-month leases with only 30 days’ notice — even if the tenant has done nothing wrong. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such “no-cause” cases reached 1 of every 3 evictions filed in Detroit. Tenants can also be evicted when the landlord sells the property or loses it to foreclosure — even without the tenant’s knowledge.

Some landlords have even filed evictions in retaliation against families when their children have been poisoned by lead in the home, or renters have complained about substandard property conditions or rejected landlords’ sexual advances.

Eviction is linked to homelessness, job loss, dangerous housing conditions, food insecurity, decreased life expectancy, poor mental health and suicide. It’s particularly harmful to children, leading to low birthweight, infant mortality, setbacks in school, negative impacts on cognitive development, and family separation and foster care placement. 

Eviction and its resulting stigma carry costs for the larger community, too. When families are forced from their homes and can’t find new ones, local and state governments face millions of dollars in added expenses for emergency shelter, healthcare, foster care, education and corrections. 

Measures to reduce evictions are a much wiser use of public money. For example, once fully implemented, every dollar invested in Detroit’s new right-to-counsel program is expected to save $3.52 in eviction-related social costs.

Everyone deserves a safe, stable place to live and a fair shake in the legal system. We can balance the scales by ensuring that every tenant has access to a lawyer in housing court and by placing some limited, reasonable restrictions on public availability of court records.