Baltimore’s bane
for substandard living conditions, when it is the legal responsibility of landlords to provide habitable housing.
“It’s very discouraging,” said David A. Super, a professor of law at Georgetown University who has written extensively on landlord-tenant law.
Super said The Sun’s findings indicate the court is failing low-income tenants. In the decades since escrow laws first emerged, he said, outcomes favorable to landlords have become increasingly common nationwide.
“Landlords are not going to be deterred from letting their places run down,” he said. “And tenants have little incentive to go to court.”
The challenge is particularly great in Baltimore, because a disproportionate number of the city’s residents rent rather than own their homes. Nearly 53 percent of the city’s more than 297,000 homes are rentals, according to Census figures. Nationwide, rentals make up 36 percent of homes.
In the Census Bureau’s most recent American Housing Survey, in 2013, Baltimore’s renters had the unhappy distinction of receiving more court-ordered eviction notices per capita than any other city. More than 67,000 notices that year led to more than 6,600 evictions.
Last year, nearly 70,000 eviction notices led to nearly 7,500 evictions.
Each case is decided separately, on its own merits, Scurti said. He “would hope” that previous cases or a landlord’s reputation doesn’t “create a bias.
“I have to take each case as it comes before me,” he said.
Landlords have experience and resources that tenants generally don’t.
Renters who are behind in rent can rarely afford attorneys. But state law limits their options: Tenants may be represented in court only by an attorney or an attorneysupervised law student. Without one or the other, tenants are left to fend for themselves.
Landlords generally arrive in court with a property manager or an agent who specializes in the process. Under the same state law, neither has to be an attorney to represent property managers in the court.
“There are some inequities there,” Scurti said.
Baltimore’s housing court meets in the District Court building on Fayette Street downtown. The view from there is grim. Judges hear of aging and unaffordable rentals, indifferent landlords, deadbeat tenants and a bureaucracy that’s struggling to bring substandard housing up to code.
Small dramas with big consequences play out. A tenant who can’t prove he paid his rent says he has been diagnosed with dementia. A lawyer attributes delays in fixing up a bank-owned property to “zombie-like” squatters who caused $100,000 in damage. A mother tells a judge that rats ate the tips off her baby’s bottles.
Judges have been hearing landlordtenant disputes for centuries. For most of that time, they proceeded under the assumption that tenants were responsible for the conditions of homes they rented.
It wasn’t until the late 1960s that state courts began to recognize an emerging legal right: If landlords violate the legal obligation to provide livable homes, tenants could withhold rent.
Baltimore, with its long history of slums, was already well ahead of the nation on tenants’ rights.
In 1947, the city became the first in the United States to establish a housing court in which health and housing inspectors could hold landlords accountable for fixing problems.
Two decades later, the Maryland General Assembly established the state’s first rent escrow court in Baltimore. Tenants could now seek help for conditions that “constitute a menace to the health, safety, welfare and reasonable comfort of its citizens.”
Today, the court mainly hears two types of actions: Tenants seeking repairs or other fixes to problems, called rent escrow court, and landlords seeking unpaid rent or eviction — simply, rent court.
A rotating roster of 28 District Court judges hears nearly 152,000 cases each year. Some 151,000 are complaints by landlords that tenants failed to pay rent.
Tenants file some 850 complaints each year.
The Sun analyzed 5,500 of these tenant complaints and hundreds of criminal housing cases from 2010 through November 2016 in a database of state electronic court records maintained by the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service.
The Sun filed a request with the Maryland Judiciary under the Public Information Act to obtain the case records directly from the state. The judiciary rejected the request. Officials said the request would require the agency to create a new public record from information that is already publicly available online.
The Housing Authority of Baltimore City, which owns and manages more than 9,000 public housing units, received the most complaints from tenants, according to The Sun’s analysis. Next were the large property management companies that handle hundreds or even thousands of rental units.
A spokeswoman for the city housing authority said the number of complaints represents a small fraction of the total number of public housing units. Federal regulations require annual inspections for public housing beyond those conducted for escrow cases.
“Given the age of the public housing inventory, significant maintenance problems can occur between inspections,” spokeswoman Tania Baker said. “As indicated by the data that was obtained, the number of these type of cases represent less than 1 percent of HABC’s current inventory.”
Reporters spent months sitting in hearings, visiting tenants in their homes, witnessing evictions, interviewing dozens of people and sifting through hundreds of court and inspection documents.
The Sun’s findings give weight to a complaint long expressed by tenants and their advocates: that the court works more as a collection agency for landlords than as a tool to correct housing problems.
Landlords typically receive favorable judgments in failure-to-pay-rent cases in mere minutes, allowing them to start the eviction process.
Surveys of tenants have shown that many renters are unaware of their right to challenge their landlords in court over unhealthy or dangerous living conditions.
When tenants do take action, they face a drawn-out process over multiple court appearances, with inspections, re-inspections and other delays.
Cases that involved serious code violations — meaning those that affect the life, health and safety of the tenants — took an average of 102 days from filing to resolution, The Sun found.
That’s “too long for the tenants,” Scurti said. But he added it “makes sense” given the legal requirements of formal notice to landlords, and the recurring problem of missed inspections.
The court is challenging for tenants, who in many cases take time off work and find child care to represent themselves in hearings that ultimately end in the landlords’ favor.
University of Baltimore professor Michele Cotton has studied housing court and proposed reforms. “It’s up to tenants to assert their rights,” Cotton said. “But we’ve made it very difficult. It’s no wonder our housing stock in low-income communities is in such poor shape.”