District residents with prior eviction records could soon have the option to get those files sealed thanks to a new bill introduced by Councilmember Mary Cheh.

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Under legislation introduced at the D.C. Council, it would be harder for landlords to deny housing to renters based on prior evictions.

The “Eviction Record Sealing Authority Amendment Act” would give District courts the power to seal eviction records, require all eviction records to be sealed after a period of three years, and mandate that landlords give written notice 30 days prior to filing an eviction claim.

“We have a huge affordable housing crisis,” said Ward 3 Councilmember Mary M. Cheh, who is sponsoring the bill. “The last thing we want is for people to fall off the ledge, but if they do we want to have some possibility of redemption or a fresh start. Otherwise, they’re just going to be hopeless because they can’t overcome what’s on their record.”

Cheh first introduced the bill in the last legislative session. She re-introduced it on Tuesday along with Ward 6’s Charles Allen, Ward 1’s Brianne Nadeau, Ward 4’s Brandon Todd, Ward 5’s Kenyan McDuffie, and At-large councilmembers David Grosso, Anita Bonds, and Elissa Silverman.

District courts currently don’t have the power to seal eviction records, even when an eviction complaint is found to be unwarranted. That leaves many low-income tenants exposed, Cheh said.

The proposed bill amends the Human Rights Act of 1977 to ensure that landlords cannot legally deny housing based on a person having a sealed eviction record. It also prohibits leases that are conditioned on the disclosure of a sealed eviction record.

“I think it’s going to make a huge difference for tenants in D.C.,” said Leigh Higgins, an attorney for the D.C. Tenants’ Rights Center, a law firm that provides low-cost services for District residents. “Both proactively so they can avoid having to deal with landlord-tenant court, as well as aiding tenants in cleaning up their records.”

Higgins said that because eviction records are public and easily accessible online, they can present a serious obstacle for people looking to sign a lease.

“Any landlord can simply run a search of a prospective tenant’s name and see if anything has been filed,” said Higgins, adding that many landlords make decisions based on the existence of an eviction record alone, rather than digging deeper to see whether a case was warranted, and whether it was dismissed or not.

“It’s very hard for tenants to make that clear,” said Higgins. “Those records go back years. There’s no cut-off like there is for bankruptcies or other types of issues.”

In 2016, there were 4,537 evictions across the District, according to data from Eviction Lab, a housing research center at Princeton University. That adds up to more than 12 household evictions every day.

Here’s another way of looking at it: there were 2.59 evictions for every 100 households in D.C. That put the District at 115th on the group’s ranking, which looked at eviction rates in large cities across the country (D.C. had a higher eviction rate than New York City, but fared much better than nearby Richmond, VA, which had the second worst rate in the country with 11.44 evictions per 100 households.)

Higgins said she was particularly excited by the provision in the bill that requires landlords to provide tenants with a written notice at least 30 days before filing an eviction claim.

That would allow tenants to correct problems that can easily be fixed, such as a rent payment that did not go through due to a technical problem, before their legal record is affected, she said.

Eviction filings in the District have significantly dropped by more than 35 percent in the last 15 years, according to a 2018 report by the Urban Institute. But the report notes that the downward trend in eviction filings may be deceiving, as it is most likely tied to rising rents and a shrinking number of housing units for low-income residents, who are disproportionately affected by evictions due to their financial insecurity.

In most U.S. jurisdictions local police departments are responsible for carrying out evictions. But in the District of Columbia, they are performed by federal law enforcement agents from the U.S. Marshals Service.

In August 2018, the U.S. Marshals Service made changes to their evictions protocol in the District to “ensure that they are carried out in a safe, compassionate, and professional manner.” Tenants should now be notified of an eviction at least two weeks ahead of time and personal property should no longer be thrown out onto public streets, according to the agency’s website.

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