Massachusetts eviction protection policy that was enacted to help residents during the coronavirus pandemic expired on Friday, with evictions already on the rise.
Chapter 257, as the law was called, prevented people from being evicted from their homes if they had applied for rental assistance and were waiting for it to come through. Advocates had pushed for the measure to be extended but state legislators didn't move a bill that would do so.
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Eviction filings were far below average during much of the pandemic, fluctuating along with the implementation of state and local laws limiting whether proceedings could be filed, Princeton University's Eviction Lab. Filings returned to roughly average historic levels in Boston in October, then exceeded them the following three months.
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A recent analysis of Massachusetts Housing Court data by The Boston Globe found that eviction filings have almost doubled from last year ahead of the expiration of Chapter 257, with state landlords filing nearly 5,000 cases in January and February 2023, compared to 2,554 the year before.
"The reality is that if the state does not extend Chapter 257, there will be vulnerable families that will end up on the street, when with just a little more time, their case could have been resolved with rent assistance that kept them in their home and made the landlord whole," said Isaac Simon Hodes, director of Lynn United for Change, has told NBC10 Boston.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley on Friday joined the calls for the Legislature to extend Chapter 257.
"With COVID-19 health emergency declarations sunsetting and evictions in the Commonwealth rising to pre-pandemic levels, failure to extend Chapter 257 would only exacerbate our growing housing crisis. We must move with urgency and use every tool available to keep families safely housed and affirm housing as the human right that it is," Pressley said in a statement.
Mitch Matorin, a landlord and attorney who filed a lawsuit challenging Boston's eviction moratorium in 2021, has told NBC10 Boston that people who aren't eligible for further funding still claim Chapter 257 protection — he said he went a year without receiving rent from a tenant during the pandemic due to the state moratorium.
"What happens is that everything drags on for months more and the landlord continues going without the rent, because nothing is being paid. And at the end of the day, they're left holding the bag for this," Matorin said.
