May 7, 2025

Berkshire residents can now seal their eviction records, if they meet the requirements of a new state law

BY Clair O'CallahanBerkshire Eagle

For decades, past eviction records have kept many Berkshire residents from accessing stable housing, advocates say. Now, thanks to a new state law, renters have a tool to overcome that barrier.

The law, passed as part of the Affordable Homes Act and effective as of Monday, allows eligible tenants across the commonwealth to seal their eviction records for the first time. Until now, landlords have been able to view prospective tenants’ eviction records regardless of how old the record is or why the eviction was brought.

Peter Beck, a staff attorney at Community Legal Aid in Pittsfield, said the law is an important protection for tenants.

“This is the result of a lot of advocacy from many different organizations and lots of different people,” Beck said. “Part of it came out of the awareness that people’s eviction records can be a barrier to their ability to find stable housing or new apartments in the future.”

As housing inventory remains at historic lows and rents rise across the Berkshires, finding an affordable and stable place to live is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for people living on lower incomes. Hundreds of people are on waiting lists for subsidized housing, and often remain on them for years.

When people do find an affordable apartment or rise to the top of a waitlist, they may face additional hurdles, depending on their credit score, past involvement with the prison system and their eviction history.

Eviction records are publicly-accessible court records, which landlords can currently use to deny housing to prospective tenants. Records are public even if there was no cause for the eviction or if the court dismissed the case, Beck said.

“It’s been a little more than a decade since the Mass Courts website went online making it much easier to search for a tenant’s eviction history,” Beck said. “It became very easy to immediately ding someone’s application for having ever been involved in housing court, including cases where the tenant may have won or where the tenant might have sued the landlord for violations of the law.”

Private landlords and public housing providers in the Berkshires have said they place the most weight on eviction history when evaluating prospective tenants.

Eviction sealing is not an automatic process under the new law. Tenants who win their case, have a case dismissed or had a no-fault eviction case can petition the court to have their records sealed immediately after the appeal period ends. Tenants with a non-payment of rent or fault-eviction record need to wait four and seven years, respectively, to petition the court.

The law also blocks credit and consumer reporting agencies from including information from sealed eviction records in their reports.

In 2021, the Center for American Progress released a report recommending that states adopt eviction sealing, which it said is essential to halting the cycle of poverty that eviction records perpetuate for individuals and families across the nation.

“Just in thinking about how someone’s eviction record may or may not be relevant, it’s too easy to come up with example after example where an eviction history might have absolutely no relevance on someone’s current suitability as a tenant,” Beck said.

People who are interested in petitioning the court to seal their record can do so by filling out this form and filing it with the court, or by using the Eviction Sealing Guided Interview on the state’s website, which is free of charge.

Staff at Community Legal Aid in Pittsfield are also brainstorming how they can educate renters about this new resource, and help guide them through the process.

“Right now we’re working with current and former clients to figure out how the eviction sealing process works for them and how we can help them,” Beck said. “The hope is that sometime in the near future, once we get a handle on that, we’ll be able to host some kinds of clinics or workshops or walk-in hours.”