Massachusetts state Rep. Alan Silvia keeps a storefront office on Fall River’s Main Street. Some days, he says, as many as four people cross under his red, white and blue awning seeking help fighting an eviction.
For the first year and a half of the pandemic, Silvia, a former landlord, said he offered them easy assurance.
“I was telling people don’t worry,” Silvia said. “There’s a moratorium in place. Just stay put, you’re not going anywhere.”
What Silvia didn’t realize is that renters in his neighborhood fight their evictions in the toughest housing court for tenants in Massachusetts.
An investigation published by The Public’s Radio in September found the Southeast Housing Court — a regional jurisdiction stretching from the South Coast to Plymouth, Cape Cod and the islands — was twice as likely as the state’s five other housing courts to approve an eviction.
Prompted by the investigation, Silvia and six other legislators from the region are seeking answers from court administrators about the Southeast’s exceptional eviction rate.
The legislators sent a letter requesting a meeting with the chief justice of the state’s housing courts, Timothy Sullivan, saying “The Southeast Housing Court needs to better connect people with the resources available to them rather than moving to evict…The fact that this does not appear to be the case in our cities needs to be addressed immediately.”
Silvia and state Rep. Antonio Cabral, whose office drafted the letter, plan to meet with Chief Justice Timothy Sullivan on Monday to address further work that can be done to reduce evictions.
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal moratorium on evictions in late August, the impact on local renters was profound. Silvia’s hometown of Fall River saw more evictions executed while the moratorium was in place than Boston, a city six times its size. Tenants facing an eviction in Boston go before judges in a separate housing court.
The letter went on to criticize the Southeast’s initial efforts to reduce evictions for not going far enough. After receiving questions from The Public’s Radio and other news outlets, the Southeast opened a free legal clinic for tenants and landlords on Sept. 14, bringing it into parity with the state’s other courts.
“The ‘Lawyer of the Day’ program in the Southeast Housing Court was only recently reinstated and will only be available on Tuesdays,” legislators said in the letter. “The first change must come here.”
After refusing to discuss evictions in an interview with The Public’s Radio during the investigation, the court did not respond last week to an interview request.
The upcoming meeting could escalate into a broader inquiry. State Rep. Christopher Hendricks, a New Bedford Democrat, floated the possibility of a hearing before the legislature’s housing committee, of which he’s a member.
“Whenever you see disparities like that, it’s always the responsibility of any relevant committee to look into that,” Hendricks said.
As part of the investigation, The Public’s Radio conducted a review of eviction cases filed in February, a typical month for eviction filings during the pandemic. It found that the federal moratorium on evictions, which empowered tenants who lost income during the pandemic to stay in their homes, was virtually unused by tenants representing themselves in court.
“That should never have happened,” Silvia said. “These folks should have been informed that there was a moratorium.”
Ben Berke is the South Coast Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio. He can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org.
