Maryland State House by Craig Fildes licensed under Creative Commons.

Housing issues have taken on new urgency in Maryland during the COVID-19 pandemic, with unemployment threatening stable housing at the same time as people are being told to stay home. As the pandemic drags on to its second year, Maryland lawmakers are faced with moving beyond coronavirus stopgap measures as well as addressing pre-existing issues such as affordability, safety, and evictions.

As the Maryland General Assembly session gets into full swing, many lawmakers are pushing bills meant to protect tenants. Below, we compiled some of the bills to watch this session.

But Carol Ott, a longtime Baltimore tenant advocate at the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland, offered a caveat. There are bills Ott is watching, but regardless of what gets passed, the real problem, she said, is that many of the laws already on the books aren’t being enforced, and landlords often get away with blatant violations.

“You could introduce the greatest law that would change lives,” Ott said. “But if there’s no enforcement and you choose to ignore it, it doesn’t do any good.”

One bill trying to address that problem is the “Right to Counsel” bill, which would guarantee low-income households the right to legal counsel during eviction proceedings and other landlord-tenant cases.

The bill cites a report by advisory firm Stout finding that only 1% of renters in a sample of Baltimore City proceedings were represented by an attorney, while 96% of landlords had some kind of representation.

“This levels the field,” said Sen. Shelly Hettleman, the primary sponsor of the Senate bill, during a committee hearing.

The Stout report pointed to studies in other jurisdictions that implemented a right to counsel for tenants finding that representation helped tenants stay in their homes and avoid eviction and displacement. Such a law in Baltimore City, the report found, could save millions of dollars in costs from displacement, such as homeless shelters and healthcare. Following that report, Baltimore signed a right to counsel law in December.

The state Right to Counsel bill would create a coordinator position in the Attorney General’s office that would contract with nonprofits to connect low-income tenants with representation. Hettleman said the bill could result in as much as $90 million in savings to the state.

Hettleman said that while evictions have always been a problem, the pandemic has intensified the issue — and that even with state eviction moratoriums, thousands of Maryland renters have been evicted during the pandemic.

“I think COVID-19 has shined a light on the cracks that exist within our housing system, and this is definitely one of them,” Hettleman said.

Other Maryland housing bills to watch this session include:

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Tagged: eviction, housing, maryland

Libby Solomon was a writer/editor and Managing Editor for GGWash from 2020 to 2022. She was previously a reporter for the Baltimore Sun covering the Baltimore suburbs and a writer for Johns Hopkins University’s Centers for Civic Impact.