In a quiet hearing room at the S.C. Statehouse this week, 19-year-old Mikel Burns, a college student and full-time teacher at a faith-based preschool in downtown Charleston, told lawmakers a story that housing advocates say they hear every day.
In 2018, he and his family were living in a run-down rental unit in rural Huger. It had chronic heating and cooling problems, no insulation, holes in the floor. But when his parents requested repairs, the answer went well beyond a simple no.
“Instead of fixing those problems,” Burns told lawmakers, “our landlord evicted us.”
And because South Carolina eviction records currently are permanent — they remain in a searchable online public index forever — his family has struggled with housing ever since.
“That eviction record followed my mother for years, making it harder to find housing, harder to move forward and harder for my parents to provide stability for us as kids,” Burns said. “Still years later, that filing sits on their record.”
But a new bipartisan bill that’s won the support of tenant advocates and landlords aims to ease that burden by removing evictions from the public record after five years, as long as there have been no additional eviction actions in the interim.
Supporters call it a second chance for people who’ve put their problems in the past, comparing it to bankruptcies that are eventually removed from consumer credit reports.
What’s more, they say, the change is particularly urgent in S.C., given the more than 600,000 eviction filings in the state since 2020, according to the Legal Services Corporation’s Civil Court Data Initiative.
A broad array of cooperative support
Horry County Republican Rep. Carla Schuessler, the bill’s chief sponsor, told Statehouse Report that the legislation emerged after conversations with renters, landlords, advocacy groups and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“It’s been a great experience to work with people who are willing to sit down at the table from opposing sides and really be committed to figure out a way to be supportive,” she said.
That willingness was on display in the Capitol hearing room where Burns told his story on Feb. 10, when advocates agreed to amend the bill to win unanimous subcommittee support.
The amendment removed language that would have deleted records of eviction filings that didn’t lead to an actual court-ordered eviction after 30 days.
“Everybody came together and nobody got everything they wanted,” Charleston Democratic Rep. and bill co-sponsor Spencer Wetmore said in a Feb. 12 interview. “I really liked how the bill initially got rid of some of the filings, but if that was going to kill the whole thing, then that’s what compromise looks like.”
In explaining her determination to make the compromises necessary to get the bill passed, Wetmore described an increasingly automated world where one line in a public record can have life-altering consequences.
“A lot of times now, rental applications are being reviewed by AI, which automatically rejects them if there’s been an eviction,” Wetmore said. “And even if you can get past that, the rent is higher, the security deposits are higher. That’s why we worked so hard to come up with a bill that works for everyone.”
Like Schuessler and Wetmore, S.C. Tenants Union executive director Ginny Cummings told Statehouse Report she was struck by the spirit of cooperation among lawmakers, landlords and housing advocates.
“We’ve built a real coalition for this bill across the state — faith leaders, tenants, service providers and people with expertise in evictions,” Cummings said, noting that no one testified against the bill during the subcommittee hearing. “It was just people prepared to explain why this matters so much.”
That broad coalition was apparent when Meredith Oh, a property manager from the Greenville area, testified in support of the bill, telling lawmakers that her job is to determine whether applicants can and will pay their rent — and that one eviction from many years ago doesn’t help her answer that question.
“The primary objective when screening for a candidate is to utilize the data from income, credit score and rental history to assess their ability to pay their rent throughout the term of the lease,” Oh said. “However, what someone’s financial situation looked like … five years ago does not help me in predicting the risk of default.”
Looking forward, Schuessler said she hoped the legislation will get a hearing before the full Judiciary Committee this session.
“Everybody’s under the gun, working very hard to get their pieces of legislation moved forward, so there’s a challenge there,” she said. “But I do think this bill is very important. And with more than 30 co-sponsors, we’re just going to keep trying to move the ball forward.”
On the other side of the Capitol, Democratic Sen. Russell Ott, who filed a similar bill in the upper chamber earlier this year, said he’s prepared to work with the House bill as long as it protects the legitimate interests of landlords and tenants.
“To me, if you had a bad situation a long time ago and you’re able to show that it was a one-off, it makes sense to allow that to be removed from your record,” he said. “So no pride in authorship from me. If they’re able to send a balanced bill over from the House, I’ll work to get it passed in the Senate.”
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