Imagine for just a moment that you don’t get paid until Friday, but your rent is due on Wednesday.
Depending on who your landlord is, you could, barely past the stroke of midnight Wednesday, have an eviction petition filed against you.
And so you explain to your landlord that payday is two days away. Your landlord understands and pulls the filing.
In South Carolina, this amicable turn of events means nothing. Not as far as your information on the public index goes. That’s the official court record, available online, for anyone to browse.
And if that browser is a data broker – a company that mines (scrapes) the internet for phrases like “rule to vacate” or “ejectment,” the formal term for when someone is evicted from their premises – then that company can compile records about you and sell them to landlords as a background check.
And even if your eviction filing was resolved, by dismissal or voluntary termination by the landlord who filed it, the fact that it was ever on your rental history stays on your rental history
“That information,” says Ken Kolb, chairman of Furman University’s sociology department, “never goes away. It taints and stigmatizes people whenever they’re going to try and rent new places.”
Two years ago, the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP won a First Amendment case that opened access to the public index. This, according to ACLU of South Carolina, gave housing advocates “access to all of the public docket information it requires to provide services to tenants in eviction proceedings, and to engage in advocacy to enforce fair housing laws.”
It also opened the door for researchers like Kolb to scrape the public index to find out how big the problem of eviction filings without ejectments really is. He found roughly 150,000 eviction proceedings that were either forgiven or dismissed. Many were serial filings – by the same landlords against the same tenants.
That becomes a big problem for tenants who end up with rental histories pocked with eviction proceedings.
“ I've been doing this work for a little over five years and I just started noticing people were having a really hard time,” says Macaulay Morrison, assistant director of the Carolina Health Advocacy Medicolegal Partnership (CHAMPS) Clinic at the University of South Carolina. She is also a practicing attorney.
“Looking into why it was so hard for a lot of these folks to move on and move into a new place,” Morrison says, “we were realizing it's because they would have evictions on their records from 10-plus years ago. Sometimes they couldn't even remember the specifics of the situation.”
One of Morrison’s clients was a tenant who couldn’t figure out why she kept losing out on finding a new apartment.
“ She had 11 eviction actions over the course of 12 years,” Morrison says. Not ejectments, just eviction actions. The landlord that Morrison's client had been renting from for eight years filed most of these actions as a way to compel her to pay rent – which in South Carolina costs a landlord $40 to do.
“What [my client] didn't realize,” Morrison says, "and what [the landlord] maybe didn't realize, was that it was creating this very, very long record that made it appear as if she had been evicted 12 times. That obviously was going to make it pretty impossible for her to ever move on to a different housing situation.”
As Kolb describes, renters with troubled histories end up in “ the alternative rental market. The rental market that is available only to renters with some type of eviction record.”
This is the market characterized by poor conditions, less-safe neighborhoods, and outsized demand that keeps rental prices high.
Kolb says demand, and, by extension, prices, could drop if even some of those 150,000 non-ejectment eviction actions simply went away.
“If you could wipe clean people's records if they had a dismissal,” Kolb says, “then it wouldn't count as any type of eviction history and [troubled renters] could then compete for just standard units. Then you're decreasing the demand for this select small subpopulation of units that will consider tenants with eviction records.”
Such is the aim of State House Bill 4270, a 10-sponsor, bipartisan effort to seal eviction records after six years and seal records with filings that have been dismissed or otherwise settled in 30 days.
The bill’s lead sponsor is Carla Schuessler (R, Conway), who is the former executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Horry County.
“I know just from my exposure with Habitat that even if you file for bankruptcy, that rolls off your record after seven years,” Schuessler says. “It didn't make sense to me that an eviction stayed on your record permanently.”
She says that the bill – filed last year and currently with the House Judiciary Committee – is bipartisan because legislators on both sides of the aisle see how quickly South Carolina’s housing markets are escalating.
“The whole House and Senate know that there's a housing crisis in South Carolina and want to help, and do something,” Schuessler says.
The bill will likely get some tweaking, as lawmakers want to be fair to tenants and to landlords, who Schuessler says need to be able to see genuinely problematic potential tenants.
She doesn’t pretend that 4270 is the answer to South Carolina’s eviction issues – which are among the worst in the nation, according to data compiled by Eviction Lab. But, she says, it’s something.
“I think an initial step will get people thinking about other ways we can do it and maybe get the ball rolling,” she says. “I don't see it as a one and done kind of thing.”
For tenants like Quentoria Jones, a measure along the lines of Bill 4270 is welcome news.
Jones and her four children – her “Fabulous Four” – sought to move from their rented house in Greenville following a sewer backup into her tub and sinks. A battle with her landlord resulted in six eviction filings for the vaguely worded “lease violations.”
All those actions were either dismissed or settled, and Jones was never evicted. And yet, on her rental record is a list of eviction actions taken against her that she says has kept her from getting into a better house.
“ I went through pretty much my savings,” Jones says. “My intentions was to buy a home when I moved from that house”
But she didn’t have the money because application fees for other housing bled her savings dry.
“Sixty dollars here, $100 here, $75 here,” she says.
In all, she estimates she lost between $5,000 and $7,000 applying for almost 100 places to live.
“And they all knew they weren't going to rent to me because of [my eviction history,” she says.
Jones likes the landlord she has now, whom she says was generous and didn’t worry about the eviction filings. But she doesn’t love the neighborhood, which is in a high-crime area and is not light on roaming (big) dogs that she says chase her and her children when they’re outside.
The children, Jones says, have not adjusted to the new neighborhood and miss their friends from their previous school.
“They're at Title I schools and they’re not the best,” she says. “So, their behavior has been up and down. And it broke my heart because we had so many memories in that house.”
She rattles off a list of memories she and her family had before the tub backed up with sewage and feces. Her youngest daughter was born into that house; learned to walk there, she says. There were Easter egg hunts and holiday parties.
“The most hurtful thing,” Jones says, is that her children asked her an obvious question for which she had no good answer: "Mommy, why we gotta leave our house?”
