The Strip District woman would feel a lot more confident about apartment hunting if her tenant history was not marked by three recent court complaints filed against her by her current landlord.

“Honestly, it makes me feel like a criminal,” she said.

The tenant, whose name is being withheld for privacy reasons, faced a health crisis last year and an ongoing disability that slashed her income, even prompting a GoFundMe plea for help with medical bills and living expenses. 

Her landlord filed to evict.

With temporary rental assistance and short-term work, she cobbled together funds, and two 2023 complaints filed by her landlord were withdrawn or dismissed.

But in January, after her lease ran out, the landlord filed again, saying she still owed more than $4,700 in back rent and that the company wasn’t interested in allowing her to pay the balance and stay.

The tenant still had rent relief funding available, which she said the landlord would not accept. Landlords can file for eviction if a tenant doesn’t pay rent, stays beyond the lease expiration or violates any other lease term.

A district judge last month granted the landlord’s third complaint. The woman appealed, but doesn’t know if she’ll prevail, nor what the odds are of finding a new place.

“I don’t know what to do, and when I’m applying, I’m holding my breath,” she said. “Are they going to see the [eviction] filing? Will it show up on a background check? Will they ask me about it?”

Today, anyone with web access can type a name into the state’s Unified Judicial System web portal and see if the person is, or has been, the subject of a landlord-tenant complaint. The online docket shows how much rent was allegedly owed and whether the district judge approved the tenant’s ejection. It does not provide the tenant’s side of the story.

Legislation emerging in Harrisburg would curtail public access to such records.

“There are people in the Commonwealth being denied housing for evictions that in fact did not occur,” because the landlord-tenant complaint was dismissed or withdrawn or is still pending, said state Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El, D-Lancaster, who has authored one of the emerging bills. “A case that is not yet settled should not make someone homeless.”

Landlords, though, intend to defend their right to access court records, according to Craig Kostelac, co-founder and president of the Irwin-based Pennsylvania Landlord Legal Defense Fund.

“As the real estate investment industry,” he said, “you need to know who is a professional bad tenant, somebody who gets from landlord to landlord to landlord, who has become very proficient at understanding the eviction procedure, milking it for all that it’s worth and then moving on.”

The Strip District woman said she “paid rent for 20 years of my life,” and strives to stay current. “I’m doing everything I can other than robbing a bank to try to pay [the landlord] rent,” she said. But she doesn’t have enough money to find a new place. Rent relief doesn’t cover rent payments during the appeal process or the initial costs of a new apartment, so she has few options.

“Do you have any evictions or bankruptcies? That’s the first thing they ask,” she said of some landlords. “It’s just an immediate red flag and an immediate no.”

Most eviction records would go offline

A 2023 report by Community Legal Services [CLS] of Philadelphia indicated that from mid-2022 through mid-2023, more than 114,000 Pennsylvanians were the subjects of landlord-tenant complaints, citing research that eviction actions “affect the overall health of children” and can lead to depression and suicide in people of any age. 

Shortly after a landlord-tenant complaint is filed, the bare bones docket appears on the state court portal. The landlord’s full complaint is available upon request at the district judge’s office.

The filing triggers a hearing in open court, before a district judge who can decide to grant the landlord possession of the unit, potentially leading to the forced removal of the tenant. The tenant can make an argument, but nothing they say appears in any court record at that level.

The CLS report cited American Bar Association guidelines issued in 2022 calling on courts to shield the names of defendant tenants from the public unless judgments were entered against them. CLS found that California, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona have taken measures to restrict public access to information about eviction filings, and noted that Pennsylvania set a potential precedent when it enacted, and then expanded, so-called “clean slate” legislation sealing dated criminal records.

Under the proposed landlord-tenant legislation, hearings on eviction complaints would still be open to the public, but most case information would be under wraps. Key provisions:

  • Nothing would appear on the court’s portal unless the district ruled in favor of the landlord.
  • Cases in which the landlord wins would populate into the portal after 30 days, unless both sides agreed that it remain concealed or a judge finds that continued limited access is warranted “in the interests of justice.”
  • Older landlord-tenant cases that did not result in judgments against the tenant would be removed from public access.
  • Even cases in which the landlord prevailed would be removed from public view after seven years, much as bankruptcies eventually disappear from credit reports.
  • If anyone (except the tenant) disseminated information about landlord-tenant cases that weren’t publicly available, they could be sued.
  • Nonprofit organizations researching eviction could access records, but would not be allowed to publish tenant names.

“The mere fact of getting an eviction notice should not preclude you in the future from ever getting a rental agreement, and that’s often what happens,” said state Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Washington County. 

She said she’ll cosponsor the bill, but will also be open to amendments if concerns emerge.

Constitutional concerns

Landlord advocate Kostelac says a tenant who has faced a complaint isn’t automatically blackballed. “Just because you can’t pay your rent on time doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you temporarily poor,” he said, adding that he and other landlords often work to connect struggling tenants with social service programs that can help them get caught up.

But a pattern of landlord-tenant complaints can, he said, be telling. “They sweet talk their way into the apartment, and then once they’re in, the bad tenant thing starts with promises to pay that never happen, bad behaviors, drug dealing, letting unauthorized people into the unit.”

The state can’t take a class of court records and remove it from public view, added attorney John Corcoran, who represents the Pennsylvania Landlord Legal Defense Fund.

A view of residential buildings with a steel arch bridge in the background.
The view of housing from the South Side Slopes neighborhood of Pittsburgh on Mar. 21. (Photo by Pamela Smith/PublicSource)

Under the state Constitution, courts are presumed to be open, he said. “It goes to the various fundamental First Amendment principles.”

Courts can bar public access to some information, but must have good cause and use “the least restrictive means,” said Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. For instance, the names of minors who are victims of abuse can be removed from records available to the public.

Removing the bulk of the landlord-tenant docket from the eyes of the public, though, doesn’t meet the standard, Melewsky said. She suggested legislators look for another remedy. “If there’s discrimination in housing, then you change housing law, not public access.”

A layer of stress

Look up Haley Passione in the state’s online court case portal, and you see two matters.

The first is a 2020 landlord-tenant case filed by her then-landlord, seeking to evict her and other tenants unless they made good on a debt approaching $4,000.

A woman in a green sweater standing against a brick wall, looking away thoughtfully.
Haley Passione, an employee at RentHelp PGH, poses for a photo in the South Side Slopes on Mar. 21. (Photo by Pamela Smith/PublicSource)

The second is a case filed 12 days later by Passione and her fellow tenants against the landlord, about which the portal provides little detail, other than that the tenants sought more than $9,000 in damages. Passione said in an interview that the tenants sought reimbursement for rent they paid while the landlord failed to repair a leaky roof, address the lack of heat in three rooms, oust mice and fix plumbing and other issues.

A district judge denied the landlord’s bid to evict the tenants and awarded them $75 in their case against the landlord.

She said that initially she “did have some issues” finding a new apartment, but “never had a landlord say it was due to the landlord-tenant case.” She adopted the strategy of immediately revealing the case in discussion with prospective landlords.

“Finding a landlord that I’m comfortable renting with, after having this experience, is difficult,” she said. “And having that filing on my record adds an additional layer of stress to the process.”

Since July, she has worked as a court resource navigator with RentHelp PGH, an organization that tries to fight housing instability. She testified in support of the proposed legislation before a General Assembly committee.

“There’s little to no legislation that makes it through the General Assembly that provides rights to tenants,” said Aaron Zappia, director of government affairs for the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania. “There’s business interests that are involved. I don’t mean to vilify those interests. We’re talking about issues of property rights, and that’s to be expected.”

With some bipartisan support emerging, he’s willing to talk with landlord interests and optimistic that passage is possible. If a bill becomes law, he said, “that’s going to take an enormous burden off of many thousands of Pennsylvanians.”

Editor’s note (3/29/2024): The Strip District tenant’s name was removed after publication at their request for privacy reasons. Additional information about their situation was added.

Rich Lord is the managing editor at PublicSource and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.

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Rich is the managing editor of PublicSource. He joined the team in 2020, serving as a reporter focused on housing and economic development and an assistant editor. He reported for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette...