Tenant advocates and Pa. lawmakers want to seal eviction records, which can be barriers to future housing

Past attempts to seal eviction records have gone nowhere, but tenant advocates think now is the time. About 189,000 Pennsylvania households are behind on rent, says a report by CLS and PolicyLink.

A "For Rent" sign is displayed outside a building in Philadelphia in 2022. Tenant advocates and Pennsylvania lawmakers are pushing for legislation to seal eviction records to prevent landlords from denying housing to rental applicants with past eviction filings.Read moreMatt Rourke / AP

by Michaelle Bond

Published Oct. 31, 2023, 3:39 p.m. ET

By far the most common question that attorney Holly Beck hears from the Philadelphia renters she represents in eviction cases is whether the outcome will go on their record.

She has to tell them that an eviction filing tied to their name will follow them and likely will make finding another home — especially one that is safe and affordable — more difficult, “whether you lose or you walk out of court with your landlord hand in hand.”

“And that’s hard news for people to hear,” said Beck, divisional supervising attorney in the housing unit of the legal aid nonprofit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.

Even if a tenant wins an eviction case or the case is thrown out, the court filing remains. The internet and automated screening practices have made record searching easier as landlords sort through rental applicants to try to find the best tenants. But records that landlords receive from tenant screening services can be incomplete or incorrect, lack context, or be from a decade or longer ago.

Tenant advocates and Pennsylvania lawmakers are attempting to shield the state’s renters from the effects of having an eviction on their records. State Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El (D., Lancaster) said he plans to introduce legislation in the coming months that would limit access to eviction court records, addressing an issue he called “both bad and easy to fix.”

He said he met a Pennsylvania woman a couple of years ago who applied for and was rejected at more than 30 apartments. The landlords who gave a reason pointed to an eviction on her record from four years before — when she had escaped an abusive boyfriend.

Smith-Wade-El said he knew that eviction records followed people, but that until talking with this woman, “it was not clear to me how dire of an issue that this was.”

Previous versions of the legislation in the state House and Senate never advanced. But State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D., Philadelphia), the prime sponsor of a 2020 bill and a cosponsor of the latest version, said she is “optimistic that our leadership in the House is focused on housing as a priority” and that the legislation will move forward.

For the last two years, Philadelphia has restricted how landlords are allowed to screen potential tenants. As of July, 15 states, including New Jersey, had implemented policies to seal or expunge eviction records or to restrict how landlords can screen tenants, according to PolicyLink, a national research institute with a mission of advancing racial and economic equity.

“This is about clearing away unfair and, I think, unintentional barriers to people securing stable housing,” Beck said. “We see tenants every day who face eviction because of a temporary setback in life, such as a medical emergency or a family member’s immediate care in a way the household couldn’t predict.”

Past temporary challenges, she said, don’t predict the likelihood of a tenant paying rent on time in the future. And evictions are disproportionately filed against Black and Latina women.

Advocates point to the state’s Clean Slate law, passed in 2018, as a model for eviction-sealing legislation. Pennsylvania allows certain criminal records to be sealed and was the first state to automatically seal those records. Both criminal and eviction records, no matter how minor or long ago, can keep people from jobs and homes.

In the last year, more than 113,500 evictions have been filed in Pennsylvania, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Roughly 189,000 Pennsylvania households are behind on rent and owe an estimated total of $367 million, according to a report from Community Legal Services and PolicyLink published in October.

“A statewide eviction record-sealing policy is a commonsense, immediately impactful way to prevent eviction records from haunting tenants for years and protect them against discrimination and long-term housing insecurity,” Beck and the report’s other authors wrote.

Philadelphia’s eviction record restrictions

City Council passed legislation in 2021 to prohibit rental property owners from denying applicants solely because of factors such as evictions filed four or more years earlier, cases a landlord didn’t win, and cases that were resolved. Landlords are required to individually assess prospective tenants and give tenants an opportunity to dispute or explain information.

At a 2021 hearing, Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project, told Council that the legislation set Philadelphia apart as a leader on a national issue.

“The challenge, as you can imagine, is in implementation,” Beck of Community Legal Services said in a recent interview. The protections need to be enforced, and landlords and tenants both have to know about them — but most tenants don’t, she said.

Andre Del Valle, vice president of government affairs for the Pennsylvania Apartment Association, said the organization “did see a lot of value in” the legislation, and members haven’t faced any major hurdles with it.

Since getting a court date for an eviction in Philadelphia can take six months or more, landlords think that they are under a lot of pressure to make sure they get qualified tenants, he said. Landlords still are able to evaluate applicants within the parameters of Philadelphia’s two-year-old tenant screening regulations, he said.

The association wants to make sure its members are following the law and to “prevent these bad actors from giving the industry a bad name,” he said.

Members understand that people’s financial situations can change over time, Del Valle said, and before Philadelphia’s rules, the association took the position that landlords shouldn’t look at records older than seven years. And he said a best practice among members is to not consider applicants’ financial difficulties during hard times for the economy as a whole, such as the pandemic.

“We don’t deny anyone based on one thing solely,” Del Valle said. “We look at an applicant holistically.”

Under Philadelphia’s law, landlords still have access to eviction records. With state legislation, advocates want to keep them from seeing these records at all to make sure landlords can’t deny rental applicants because of them.

Negotiations over record sealing in Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Apartment Association has some reservations about that. “Our members do need the ability to look at an applicant through a 360[-degree] lens,” Del Valle said.

The association is continuing to meet with Smith-Wade-El, sponsor of the latest legislation.

“I do think there is a pathway,” Del Valle said. “We just need to hammer out those negotiations and hopefully find some common ground.”

Smith-Wade-El said hearings and town hall meetings about his bill will come next year. He called the legislation “a commonsense thing that’s going to make it easier for working-class Pennsylvanians to access housing.”