An Opaque System Keeps Tenants In The Dark
By: Indigo Null
In a continuation of their filings the previous week on May 17th, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City had almost 200 more cases scheduled to be heard at the 10:45 am docket on Wednesday, May 24, 2023.
A little after 10am, BRU Advocates and Volunteers began to set up out front of the courthouse in preparation for the HABC eviction hearings scheduled that day. They’d alerted city and state officials that there were multiple problems with the filings they’d seen in court the previous week, including lack of proper notice, HABC not informing tenants of their rights, and tenants not being allowed to access their right to counsel. Advocates had sent notice and a list of demands to the Mayor, City Council, HABC, and HUD about their concerns, along with a list of demands including voluntarily dismissing all eviction cases against tenants in public housing and RAD buildings.
As tenants began to show up for the docket, BRU advocates spoke with each to take record of their situation, inform them of their right to counsel, and point them in the direction of legal aid groups like Public Justice Center, Maryland Legal Aid, Homeless Persons Representation Project, and Disability Rights Maryland, who had come to support tenants. Bailiffs attempted to kick two BRU Advocates out of the courthouse, telling one explicitly she was not allowed to inform tenants of their rights and then telling another she couldn’t be “interviewing” tenants despite the fact that she was clearly just handing tenants informational Know Your Rights pamphlets and pointing them in the direction of the lawyers.
Again and again tenants told BRU Advocates the same stories - some were being dragged into court for balances they’d already paid, others had requested and filed the proper paperwork for rent adjustments based on their incomes and had never heard back from the Housing Authority, or had been assured it would be taken care of. Many had only recently fallen behind and some had been filed against over balances under $100.
The bailiff announced the docket would begin soon. Tenants, advocates, and observers packed into courtroom 2 as soon as the doors were opened. The whole front row of the courtroom was taken up by legal aid attorneys and their paralegals.
As the docket began, an announcement was made - all HABC cases for the docket were being dismissed!
It was clear that HABC’s new attorney (Melissa Frentz’s replacement) and other HABC representatives - like the leasing managers for each project and the person in charge of ledgers at HABC - had known the cases were going to be dismissed because they hadn’t even shown up for court at all…so why were tenants not informed and still made to come to the courthouse, and why had HABC not responded directly to BRU? Advocates would eventually find out that all of the cases filed in the bulk filing, over 900 cases total, would be dismissed.
In a TV interview with WMAR2, HABC President and CEO Janet Abrahams denied that the cases were dismissed in response to BRU organizing and said “it was a technicality on the notice” that caused the cases to be dismissed, and clarified that HABC would be refiling them. This contradicts their actions a week prior to these dismissals, when HABC had gone through and received judgments for failure to pay rent against several hundred tenants from the same housing projects and during the same time period. HABC gave no further explanation for this sudden reversal that coincided with the BRU actions.
The news report says HABC’s side of the story involved “late payments pre-dating the pandemic” and Abarahams said “What has happened is the residents, although we filed those paperworks for them, and they received the funding, they still stopped paying their rent.” Abrahams goes on to say “Right now, the Housing Authority is about $4 million in arrears, and so we have no choice,” although she does not claim that that $4 million balance is the result of unpaid rent, nor explain how evicting tenants will resolve the issue.
HABC tenants tell BRU organizers differently. Most tenants BRU talked to had balances from 2022 or 2023, and some had balances as low as $24 or had already paid their balances months ago. As with most people during COVID, tenants had stopped paying because of lost jobs or illness during the pandemic. Many had applied for rental assistance and been denied, or, as in at least one tenants’ case, had put in the application through the HABC rental office with no response or action completed on it from the office. HABC had sent a letter to City Council on May 22 in response to BRU’s messages to City Officials earlier that day, and in it Abrahams even admitted “there are a number of families who are behind on rent that do not meet the eligibility criteria for ERAP [Emergency Rental Assistance Program] funds''.
In her letter to the City Council, Abrahams also says “It has been our experience that when evictions are filed, most families are able to find a way to make a payment and remain housed.”
Ultimately HABC’s sudden dismissal of these filings raises more questions than it answers. Tenants are left in the dark with no explanation of which cases will be refiled and when, and no answers on how to get procedural issues with their living situations corrected.
As of June 15th, HABC had sent out another press release “urging residents” to apply for the “remaining $3M Emergency Rental Assistance” but that press release did not address tenants who were ineligible for those funds, nor tenants who had evictions filed against them because of clerical and procedural errors at HABC.