BUFFALO, NEW YORK — For years, Charlene Redrick worked double shifts to make sure she paid her rent each month. The 64-year-old nursing home caregiver has always paid her rent on time — even during the height of the pandemic.
But in 2022, Redrick’s landlord decided to evict her from the three-bedroom apartment she shared with her granddaughter and infant great-grandson. The landlord wanted to sell the building, Redrick said, and thought it would look better if it was empty.
Redrick initially planned to fight the eviction, knowing she wouldn’t be able to find another three-bedroom apartment she could afford.
“But I just gave up,” she said. “I didn’t want to fight anymore.”
Redrick has since moved into a smaller apartment—and started fighting for something different. This year, housing advocates in New York state launched a fierce campaign for a once-obscure policy called “just cause eviction,” which requires landlords to show a compelling reason—a just cause—such as unpaid rent or property damage to remove tenants. Such policies are intended to boost housing stability and prevent arbitrary, retaliatory or discriminatory evictions.
As of 2019, California, Oregon and Washington had adopted “just” or “good” cause policies, while Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland and New York were considering them. More than 20 cities — including Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington — have also adopted some form of just cause protections, often over the objections of property owners.
Landlords and real estate groups say the policy will make it harder to remove problem tenants and adapt to changing business conditions, and could worsen the housing shortage by forcing some to stop offering rental units altogether.
Just cause protections are likely to be tested as renters lose pandemic-era benefits and housing costs continue to rise. While evictions fell sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, they have since returned to or exceeded normal levels in many places, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which tracks filings in 10 states and more than 30 cities.
Scientists in the lab estimate that landlords filed an average of 3.6 million eviction lawsuits per year between 2000 and 2018.
“That’s a huge number of households that are at risk of losing their homes and all the inconveniences and risks that come with that,” said Peter Hepburn, deputy director of the Eviction Lab and an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark. “The fact that we’ve … returned to the status quo on evictions is deeply disappointing and very concerning.”
Long-term protection
Just cause policies have been around since at least 1974, when New Jersey enacted recent eviction rules as part of its response to a statewide housing shortage. Several states also follow long-standing just-cause eviction laws that apply only to tenants of mobile home parks.
But just cause policies became more common after 2007 and the Great Recession, when recent construction collapsed nationwide and rents soared in many urban centers. The tenants’ rights movement also grew rapidly in the 2010s, fueled in part by concerns about gentrification and displacement.
Against this backdrop, New Hampshire adopted a just cause policy in 2015, followed by Alameda and San Jose, Calif., Boston, and Washington. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred another wave of legislation: At least 19 cities or states have proposed just cause legislation since 2020, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition and local media reports.
“During the pandemic, we have seen how important permanent housing is to the health and safety of our residents,” said state Del. Jheanelle Wilkins, a Democrat who has repeatedly sponsored legislation on the issue.
While state-level legislation has stalled, Baltimore passed a just cause policy in 2021. Similar measures have also been passed in Washington state and several cities in New York and California during the pandemic.
Just cause policies vary widely by jurisdiction, but they typically allow landlords to evict tenants or refuse to renew leases for a list of predetermined reasons. These include failure to pay rent, property damage, disorderly conduct, criminal activity and lease violations, as well as the landlord’s desire to occupy the unit or take it off the market.
Some just cause laws also include rent stabilization measures, which regulate how much landlords can raise rents each year. Supporters say such rules, which have been passed in California and Oregon and proposed in New York, effectively prevent tenants from being evicted if their rents are suddenly raised to unaffordable levels.
Assessing the effectiveness of these policies is challenging, in part because they vary so much across jurisdictions. Different places also experience different trends and types of evictions, depending on the local political landscape and housing market, said Tim Thomas, research director at the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California, Berkeley. That can make it challenging to isolate the effects of specific factors contributing to evictions.
Importantly, because non-payment of rent is always considered “just cause,” “just cause” rules are designed to protect only a minority of tenants.
“It’s a bit of a complicated mess — I liken it to the gun debate,” Thomas said. “There are people on both sides who feel very strongly, and there’s not a lot of research to back up that intensity.”
Preliminary research suggests that forms of just cause legislation reduce evictions, Thomas said — albeit by tiny amounts. A 2019 study published in the Journal of Public & International Affairs, a peer-reviewed journal for graduate students, found that four California cities with just cause protections experienced slightly fewer evictions than similar cities without them.
More recently, a 2022 research report by the Urban Displacement Project found that reasonable protections appear to aid one in 100 extremely low-income households remain in gentrifying neighborhoods when they would otherwise be pushed out.
Housing rights advocates say these effects, while tiny, are significant when combined with other tenant protections, such as the right to legal counsel, legal defense funds and prohibitions on income discrimination.
They also add up to a population of thousands or millions of renters. Violet Lavatai, executive director of the Tenants Union of Washington State, said she believes just cause has kept “hundreds” of Washington tenants in their homes since the law passed two years ago.
The law isn’t perfect, Lavatai acknowledged. Some landlords, she said, have come up with “new, creative ways” to get rid of unwanted people — such as moving tenants to month-to-month leases, which aren’t as tightly regulated.
But Lavatai said she has educated “countless” tenants on the protections provided by the law through the union’s tenants’ rights hotline, which tenants can call with questions about housing and evictions.
“We’ve heard it all: ‘I don’t like the way your voice sounds, you’ve upset me, you haven’t watered the plants properly — now you need to go,’” she said. “We have a lot of landlords who don’t do that. But then there are the bad guys who don’t really care about their tenants.”
Property owners ‘strongly’ oppose regulations
But as just-cause eviction policies have proliferated, they have also faced what Maryland Del. Wilkins calls “strong, well-funded opposition.” Major landlord and real estate industry groups say eviction protections make removing problem tenants more pricey and time-consuming.
Critics also say rent stabilization measures like those in California and Oregon make it harder for landlords to respond to changing business conditions and could prompt some to exit the market altogether.
In 2022, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, vetoed Burlington’s just cause measure over concerns it would worsen the state’s housing shortage. Later that year, council members in St. Paul, Minnesota, also weakened a 5-month rent stabilization measure after the city saw a acute decline in recent construction.
For Chris Athineos, who owns six tiny apartment buildings in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is an outspoken critic of rent control, such harms are a growing concern. New York City has long required “just cause” for evictions from rent-controlled apartments, but statewide legislation first proposed in 2019 would extend that protection to all tenants and impose a cap on annual rent increases.
Athineos and his parents, who bought their first building in the 1960s, have maintained extremely close relationships with their tenants, attending weddings and funerals and celebrating holidays together.
But as just-cause legislation gained momentum in New York, Athineos sold two of its properties and planned to raise rents on the rest of its portfolio. His business had already been squeezed, he said, by rising insurance rates and a series of recent, costly housing regulations in the city.
Record rent increases and low wages are fueling an eviction crisis, a U.S. Senate committee said.
“It’s a use-it-or-lose-it situation—if I don’t take the rent increase now, I won’t be able to make it up in the future if I have to,” he said. “They want to cap rent, but nobody’s capping our expenses.”
New York did not pass a just-cause eviction law this session, much to the relief of Athineos and disappointment of Charlene Redrick.
While legislative leaders fought to include the measure in state budget negotiations and later to pass it as part of a last-minute housing reform package, they ultimately failed to reach an agreement with Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who favors other ways to address the housing crisis.
Similar “own-cause” bills stalled in Colorado and Connecticut last session.
State lawmakers and housing advocates have promised to redouble their efforts next year. But in Buffalo, Redrick said she worries about tenants facing eviction in the meantime: She sees many homeless people sleeping in laundry rooms or hanging out on the streets near her recent apartment.
“Seeing people being evicted and homeless, I still have hope that we can do something to affect what’s happening,” Redrick said. “I’m afraid that other people are going to go through what I went through. That’s my main goal.”
