Maryland could pass two big tenant protections in this General Assembly session

The Maryland General Assembly will wrap up April 10, meaning that potential state laws have one week to get passed. But two bills with important tenant protections stand a strong chance of becoming law and would do a lot of good to make lives better for renters in Montgomery County and the rest of Maryland.

HB691, the Tenant Safety Act, passed the House by a decisive margin and reforms the rent escrow process. Rent escrow is where tenants pay their rent into a court controlled fund, rather than to a landlord, to legally withhold rent due to failure to make appropriate repairs to a building. The bill would make it easier for tenants to take this measure collectively for the same building-wide issue, rather than needing to set up their own individual escrow accounts.

This change to allow tenants to act collectively may seem basic, but it is a powerful measure. It is easy for landlords to divide and conquer with individual tenants acting on their own, retaliating and forcing them to mount their own individual legal cases. Tenants are at risk of being overwhelmed, running out of resources, and not getting their rightful day in court.

The Tenant Safety Act has already passed the House and awaits passage in the Senate. Another key piece of legislation, HB36/SB100, would stop unlicensed (and thus illegally operating) landlords from using a streamlined rent court process to evict tenants. The main principle behind this bill, versions of which have passed both houses, is simple: If you are going to use the standard legal process to evict tenants, you should be operating legally.

If unlicensed landlords are treated the same as those with a license, it incentivizes all landlords to simply ignore licensing requirements. This impact is not limited to the eviction process either, as it’s not hard to envision a landlord who doesn’t have a license ignoring other requirements, including basic safety measures and mitigation of health hazards.

HB36 seeks to close a loophole opened by a recent Maryland Supreme Court case, Velicky v. Copycat, that said landlords do not need a license to bring “tenant holding over” cases (where the landlord allows a lease to expire and does not extend a new one to the tenant) to eviction court. In a dissent to that decision, judges noted that “this loophole presents an obvious risk of danger to tenants, as unlicensed landlords may now use tenant holding over actions…to recover rent and possession of property and lease the property again, with little incentive to eliminate hazards on the premises and obtain licenses.”

But HB36 does exempt the licensure requirement in cases where the landlord can show they don’t have a license due to a building failing to meet standard from the wrongful acts of a tenant. That’s a long way of saying that if the only thing keeping a landlord from getting a license is their tenant, that will not keep them from using the eviction process.

Why these bills matter

These laws will make a difference, and be a major step in correcting the power imbalance that often exists between renters and their landlords, something I’ve seen firsthand. I’ve canvassed in a building with long-neglected repairs. I’ve attended meetings with groups who spend day after day trying to compel landlords to make repairs on basic items that jeopardize their tenants’ health. As a member of Renters United Maryland I’ve been to an event in support of this legislation, where a man who uses a wheelchair explained how every time a fire alarm goes off in his building, he makes peace with the fact he might not make it out alive if it’s not a drill because the elevator in his building has been broken for months.

There is always some fear that renter protections have a potential negative impact on the development and general availability of housing for people to rent out in the first place. However, the Tenant Safety Act doesn’t add broad new areas of opportunity for tenants to sue over, it just allows them to do it collectively, and HB36 simply makes it harder for landlords that are operating illegally to use the legal system to enforce their desired legal course of action. If that is too big of an ask, I don’t even know what we’re doing here.