Abbey Kim file photo
The city's newest tenants union members, on Goffe St. in February.
HARTFORD – A proposal to expand eviction protections for rent-paying tenants took a big step forward as state legislators voted to advance a “just cause” bill out of committee.
The Connecticut General Assembly’s Housing Committee took that vote Thursday as part of an 11-hour meeting held at the State Capitol in Hartford.
An amended version of the proposal, called House Bill (H.B.) 6889: An Act Concerning Evictions For Cause, now heads to the full state House of Representatives for debate and a potential vote.
If passed and signed into law, the bill would prohibit a landlord from evicting a rent-paying tenant simply because their lease has expired, so long as that tenant has lived in an apartment building with five or more units for at least 13 months. The same protections have existed for four decades in Connecticut for disabled and elderly tenants. A similar bill received a vote of support from the Housing Committee last year, but ultimately died in the state House.
The eviction-prevention bill has emerged in recent months as a top legislative priority for Connecticut’s New Haven-grown tenants union movement, which has boosted the proposal as a way to prevent “greedy” landlords from mass-evicting tenants in order to bring in new residents at higher rents. Landlords have pushed back on the bill as essentially requiring landlords to house problem tenants so long as they continue to pay rent.
During Thursday’s Housing Committee hearing, Wolcott Republican State Sen. Rob Sampson led the charge in opposing the bill.
He held the floor for hours on end. He proposed amendment after amendment, engaged in friendly debate with Committee Chair and Bridgeport Democratic State Rep. Antonio Felipe, and reached back to the origins of American history to bolster his arguments. He proclaimed that this bill isn’t just bad for landlords and tenants; it’s also bad for freedom, property rights, and private contracts, which he said form a legal and philosophical bedrock for what makes this country great.
“This is not about protecting someone from safety,” he said about the anti-eviction bill. “This is about altering an agreement that both parties entered into with their eyes open.”
“The state is effectively forcing property owners into a contract,” he continued, by this bill’s restrictions on a landlord’s ability to evict a tenant for “lapse of time,” or an expired lease.
Sampson argued that “putting restrictions on the marketplace for landlords” will mean many landlords will leave the marketplace altogether, resulting in fewer housing providers and higher prices.
“This bill scares me,” he said, as both a lawmaker and a landlord, because he interprets it as meaning that “the government would be taking my property from me.”
What is the “compelling state interest” for this bill? Sampson asked Felipe.
“A 30 percent increase in rent and 13 percent increase in homelessness” across the state, Felipe replied. He stressed that he does not consider landlords to be “evil,” and he does not see the landlord-tenant dynamic as one that is “black and white.” But tenants have testified again and again to the state legislature that landlords use “lapse of time” evictions to drive up rent costs, and he takes that concern seriously.
The final committee vote on the a “Joint Favorable Substitute” version of the bill was 11 to 8, with Democratic lawmakers Minnie Gonzalez and Larry Butler joining Republican committee members in voting against the proposal. “I believe a hammer is being used on an entire industry,” Butler said about his opposition to the bill. “We want to address the bad actors,” but there are “good [landlords] acting in good faith who we’re punishing” if this bill passes.
In a press release sent out Friday morning, the Connecticut Tenants Union celebrated the bill’s favorable vote out of committee as “a win for the tenant movement.”
The group included in the press conference excerpts from a dozen different supporters of the bill who wrote in during the February public hearing held by the Housing Committee.
“The tenant movement is here to say,” Connecticut Tenants Union President and New Havener Hannah Srajer wrote in one such testimony. “We’re organized across race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, age, and ability — and we’re not raising new problems. We’re just making the precarious conditions of renting in this state visible to our elected officials, and we’re expecting them to do something about it — to fulfill their duty to represent their people.”