Updated Dec 10, 7:00 AM; Posted Dec 10, 7:00 AM
By Star-Ledger Editorial Board
Few people realize that even if you win a court case against your landlord, its very existence will continue to haunt you.
It could be that you didn’t pay rent for legitimate reasons, like having no heat or water. But tenants are still getting blackballed from future rentals, as if even asserting your rights against a landlord is offensive.
“It’s wildly unfair,” Jessica Kitson of Volunteer Lawyers for Justice says. “We have clients living without heat, without hot water. They can’t find a new place. They have an eviction filing on their record that is being used against them.”
A renter is forced to relocate with her two children. (Beth Nakamura | File Photo) Oregonlive.com file photo
This is a huge deal right now, given that about half a million New Jerseyans are behind on rent because of COVID job losses. When the governor finally lifts his moratorium on evictions, we could see more than 300,000 filings in just a few months. In a normal year, New Jersey sees about 160,000.
We’ve got to give people a fair shot at decent housing, by making more of these records confidential. The Legislature should act, and the court might well do it on its own, as advocates like Volunteer Lawyers for Justice, Legal Services of New Jersey and Sen. Cory Booker recently urged.
Already, at least 32,000 cases have been formally filed since April – tenant names that will be compiled by private data-mining companies and sold to landlords. Nine out of ten landlords now use these blacklists to exclude people, even if they have enough income to rent. They are being punished just because a prior landlord decided to file a case.
Getting your name removed is nearly impossible. And the racial disparity is alarming: Six out of ten Black households rent their homes, and they’re twice as likely as white households to face eviction, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University found. Black women especially are evicted at high rates, much like Black men are disproportionately incarcerated. As Matthew Desmond, the lead investigator of the Eviction Lab wrote: “Poor Black men are locked up while poor Black women are locked out.”
Now, Black workers are more likely to have lost jobs and income due to COVID. Many can’t afford their rent and can’t find anyplace else to live either.
One Essex County client has no heat or hot water and bathes her young children in a freezing apartment, Kitson says. A client in Morris County has a stove so badly damaged it leaked carbon monoxide, sending the family to the ER – but still no replacement oven. Another woman from Gloucester County has rain pouring through a hole in her bedroom ceiling.
It’s a vicious circle, their lawyer says: They are likely to end up in uninhabitable apartments because they had a previous eviction filing and couldn’t find someplace safer.
Only about 40 percent of court filings in New Jersey result in a judge’s order to evict, so making all other court records confidential would help many people. Some advocates want to go further, arguing these records should be public only when someone is actually removed from an apartment – since even after a judge’s order, tenants and landlords can still amicably work it out in a settlement. And under one proposed bill, if you were evicted more than three years ago, then landlords can’t look at it.
The landlords argue they still need access to eviction records to protect their properties, and no one is suggesting that actual recent evictions be hidden. But this much is obvious: We can’t have a system so skewed in their favor that they can screen out anybody ever involved with a court action.
When this pandemic is finally over, we’ll still be a state of hundreds of thousands of people, blacklisted for perpetuity.
SOURCE ARTICLE: https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/12/nj-must-ban-the-tenant-blacklist-editorial.html