Evictions, rising after rent assistance ran out, back near pre-pandemic levels in Maryland

Several times a week these days, the woman who helped keep a roof over people’s heads during the pandemic gets a similar email from residents: “Do you have any rental assistance money? I need help.”

Julie Peters, now the chief communications officer at SHORE UP Inc. and formerly the program manager for the rental assistance program at the Salisbury-based organization, helped her agency, in a few years, administer more than $8 million to more than 1,200 renter households on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The money came from the federal government, which provided more than $46 billion nationally to support housing those in danger of eviction during a period when restaurants were closed, jobs were lost and the demands of life continued. And while the federal money has largely stopped flowing, those demands have not — and neither have the requests asking for help.

“We have not had any funds for rental assistance since May or June,” Peters said. “We are still getting, if not every day, at least three or four times a week an email (asking for help).”

Evictions, under 200 each year in Salisbury’s Wicomico County during 2020, 2021 and 2022, have returned above that mark as rental assistance funds have receded. The county registered 295 evictions from January through September 2023, still below the 408 evictions in 2019 — the last year before the federal eviction moratorium began in 2020 and two rounds of assistance in 2021 — but close to the pre-pandemic annual level.

Previously: Maryland's eviction numbers are falling with federal help, but relief's running out

‘The eviction filing rates in Maryland are very high’

A similar occurrence with evictions is happening on the other side of the state, in Washington County, where CEO of the Washington County Community Action Council Tim Fisher calls the housing landscape a “crisis.”

In the first nine months of 2023, according to court data, there were 464 evictions in Washington County. The county had under 450 evictions each year during the period from 2020 to 2022. That 2023 figure, too, is below the 801 evictions in 2019. But with federal rental assistance funds gone, so too is a prediction for an immediate reduction from the total of the past couple years.

“From my perspective,” said Fisher, “that trend will continue to rise.”

Statewide, there was a total of 23,567 evictions combined in 2020, 2021, and 2022 — an average of about 8,000 per year. The last year before the moratorium, 2019, Maryland registered 21,676 evictions in just 12 months. This year, through nine months, there were 16,325 evictions in the state. And those figures represent a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of eviction filings that take place in the state’s district courts each year.

“The eviction filing rates in Maryland are very high,” said Jacob Haas, a senior research specialist at The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. More than 400,000 “failure to pay rent” cases were filed in Maryland in the state’s 2023 fiscal year. Haas, providing the figures for Virginia and Pennsylvania, indicated the annual filing totals for those two states combined are still less than in Maryland.

Related: With Salisbury's Jake Day confirmed for cabinet, what’s next for housing statewide?

How much does it cost to file an eviction?

Maryland Legal Aid has 60 people handling that load of hundreds of thousands of cases, said Zafar Shah, the organization’s assistant advocacy director for tenants’ right to counsel project. He indicated less than a third (fewer than 20 attorneys statewide) are full-time eviction counsel.

A 2021 state law provided tenants’ the right to counsel in eviction cases and required landlords to provide a 10-day notice before an eviction.

“Eviction filing fees do play a very significant role in eviction filing rates,” said Haas of The Eviction Lab. Nationwide, the median filing fee for an eviction case is about $100, he said, and in Maryland that fee can start as low as $15.

Shah said there’s a “very strong correlation” between the right to counsel coupled with the strengthened notice provisions and the fewer filings, a number reduced by hundreds of thousands in a few years. In 2019, there were 674,575 filings. One reason for the high levels — the fee.

Out in Hagerstown, Fisher, who came to the Community Action Council earlier this year, is looking to Annapolis and the General Assembly for “middle ground” on legislation for renters. The Maryland Legislature is scheduled to return for its 90-day session on Jan. 10. Fisher suggested a new bill of rights for those who rent, calling that “an incredibly important first step.”

Also a sociology professor at a local community college, he pointed to the response to the 2008 housing crisis and made a comparison to the housing market that many renters are facing today.

“We don’t have the same sense of ‘something must be done,’ that we do for folks who rent in the same manner that we do for folks who purchase homes,” he said.

Dwight A. Weingarten is an investigative reporter, covering the Maryland State House and state issues. He can be reached at dweingarten@gannett.com or on Twitter at @DwightWeingart2.

This article originally appeared on Salisbury Daily Times: Maryland's rising eviction rate renews call for tenants' rights