Ms. M spent every day in a home where she could not breathe. Day in and day out, black mold inched around the corner of her apartment, slithering into the hungry faces of roaches infesting its walls.
As a woman who suffered from asthma and lived with a young child, these conditions were, quite simply, deadly. Despite repeated requests, her landlord had been dragging their feet on decontaminating her apartment, threatening her with eviction every time she dared to ask for help. She did not know what to do. She had nowhere else to go.
This is a tale for many people across Connecticut. Of course, landlords are required by law to provide safe living conditions. However, when their tenants are people who scrape by every month to make ends meet and likely cannot independently navigate the complex legal system to enforce their rights, landlords seem to always have the trump card of “eviction” in their back pockets.
As physicians working in our local community, caring for these individuals, we support H.B. 6899, An Act Concerning Evictions for Cause, because we believe that all tenants should have just cause eviction protection to prevent situations like Ms. M’s from occurring.
Just cause eviction protections have existed in Connecticut for 40 years, offering security for individuals with disabilities and those 62 years or older living in complexes of five or more units. Now, we ask that all tenants receive these same protections against eviction without a cause.
To be clear, just cause eviction protections do not ban all evictions. They simply require that the landlord provides a fair reason for the eviction. Landlords would still have the right to evict tenants who fail to pay rent, engage in illegal activity, or break the lease – among other justified reasons. However, HB 6899 would protect the over 490,000 Connecticut renters, of whom one in ten suffers from eviction without cause. With one of the highest eviction rates of any state in the U.S., Connecticut must get its laws in line with other states, like California, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington which have just cause eviction laws.
H.B. 6889 would protect people, like Ms. M, from fearing retaliatory eviction notices, especially when the result for many tenants is unstable or even no housing. A strong body of research highlights how evictions and unstable housing are associated with poor health outcomes: increased all cause-mortality, loss of insurance, fewer medications refilled, and increased hospital visits for physical and mental health concerns- due to both worse health outcomes for these individuals as well as increased utilization of the hospital as a means of shelter.
As healthcare workers, we have cared for incredibly kind, hardworking people who faced eviction driven by race and sex-based discrimination. While this is clearly illegal, cases of discrimination are nearly impossible to prove, and the legal process is both costly and time-consuming. But we can tell it is happening because Connecticut’s current system of no-cause evictions widen already existing disparities. Black and Latin renters are two or three times more likely to be evicted than white renters in Connecticut, and all-cause mortality associated with evictions is most significant among women and African Americans.
We have seen unprotected tenants who are facing retaliatory eviction, unlawful discrimination, and even merely a lack of other housing options, suffer from poorer health outcomes due to no-cause eviction. However, as the saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
We strongly ask you to contact your state legislators and voice your support for H.B. 6889, which will protect your rights as a renter and help Connecticut’s most vulnerable tenants. Instead of putting the onus on hard-working individuals like Ms. M, with the proposed protections of HB 6889, we can prevent retaliatory evictions from occurring in the first place.
Laboni Hoque, MD; Miranda Savioli, MD; and Jenna Gage, MD are physicians in New Haven.