Link | Publication: John Henry, WUSA9 | Date: March 29, 2021
Excerpt
The CDC’s moratorium first went into effect in September 2020. But it never stopped evictions in the D.C. region.
“Unfortunately, both the eviction order in Maryland by Governor Larry Hogan and the CDC eviction order don’t go far enough,” Matt Losak, executive director of the Montgomery County Renters Alliance said.
Losak said the CDC moratorium does not address tenant holdovers, which according to the Maryland court system, allows landlords to remove tenants when their lease is over so long as they provide written notice in advance.
Losak said some landlords are evicting their tenants with this method to get rid of renters who cannot pay their rent.
“The irresponsible [landlords] are choosing to give notices to vacate to tenants with a certain amount of notice,” he said. “It’s 30 days in most of Maryland, 60 days in Montgomery County, saying at the end of your lease you have to move out under the tenant holding over [the] process.”
In March, Maryland State Senator Will Smith revealed during a hearing that 2,500 Marylanders had been evicted between July 2020 and November 2020. At the same hearing, Zafar Shah, an attorney with the Baltimore-based Public Justice Center, also shared that 117,000 pending Maryland eviction cases were put on hiatus in the courts when some eviction protocols went into effect last fall.