Hello, friends,
Amid all the news these days, it’s easy to forget that we are still on the brink of an eviction crisis. Last month, the Trump administration issued a federal eviction moratorium aiming to protect renters until Dec. 31, 2020.
But the moment the moratorium expires (or earlier in some cases), 29 million Americans may be at risk for eviction, according to an analysis by the Aspen Institute.
It’s hard to envision the sheer scale of such a homelessness crisis in the United States. But the rise of big data and tenant screening algorithms has ensured at least one thing: The potentially millions of people who face eviction are likely to have trouble getting housing in the future.
All it takes is one strike on your record—even an erroneous one—and landlords shy away from renting to you, The Markup investigative reporter Lauren Kirchner has found in her series “Locked Out” this year on landlords’ rising use of tenant screening software. (Nine out of 10 landlords say they run background checks on prospective tenants.)
The problem is, the software landlords rely on often makes hasty, sloppy matches that can mix up people’s records and wrongly identify rental applicants as criminals or sex offenders, Lauren and Matthew Goldstein at The New York Times found in their investigation published in May.
But the software doesn’t mistake only people’s identities. In many states, any housing court record or debt to a past landlord can be scraped up by data brokers and sold to future landlords—even if the eviction case was settled or dismissed.
“We’ve seen over the last few years a big uptick in landlords who will deny rental applications just because a tenant has had an eviction filed against them, regardless of what the outcome is,” Korey Lundin, a staff attorney at Legal Action of Wisconsin told Lauren in August.
And this week, Lauren reported that even when people think they have gone through the often lengthy process of getting their records expunged, the blemishes can live on as “zombie data”—popping up in reports years later.
But there appears to be some hope for killing off zombie records—from technology, ironically. In 2018, Pennsylvania passed a “Clean Slate” law that automates the expungement process for criminal records. It automatically seals arrest records after charges are dropped and seals some minor conviction records after 10 years.
The law is enforced by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, which since 2010 has had a process in place to ensure that data brokers have the most up-to-date court records. The court sells its records to data brokers, including weekly updates to the cases, in exchange for the data brokers agreeing to quickly update their own databases. The court also does random audits to ensure data brokers comply.
“In Pennsylvania, we’re really lucky—we actually don’t see a ton of errors with expunged or sealed cases coming up on private background checks,” Seth Lyons, a supervising attorney at the nonprofit Community Legal Services of Philadelphia told Lauren. “It successfully forces them to update their information.”
The Clean Slate law reminds me of Europe’s right to be forgotten law—which gives individuals the right to request the removal of their data. And it made me wonder if we need a clean slate for the eviction records that are racking up during the pandemic, too.
Because without some sort of automatic erasure, the worst moments of our lives will likely be fossilized in amber and routinely unearthed every time we try to make progress.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Julia Angwin
Editor-in-Chief
The Markup
P.S. This week the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust released its long-anticipated report on Big Tech. As expected, the report declared that Big Tech companies have abused their monopoly power and called on Congress to strengthen antitrust laws and enforcement agencies to break up the monopolies. The report cited The Markup’s reporting on how Google advantages itself in search results:
