It’s not cheap or quick to evict a tenant in Connecticut.

It can take months and cost thousands of dollars, and fighting an eviction has a similar price tag. Tenant advocates say renters need more protections because the housing shortage in Connecticut leaves them vulnerable. Landlords say these protections exacerbate the problem.

As pandemic-era policies phase out, evictions are also on the rise. In 2024, there were 20,000 evictions in the state of Connecticut, slightly more than the pre-Covid average, according to the Eviction Lab.

Connecticut is not the only place in the country where the number of evictions has increased since the pandemic. Eviction Lab tracks evictions in 10 states and 36 cities in the U.S. It reports that states like Minnesota and Pennsylvania and large cities like Houston, Miami and Las Vegas, have also seen more evictions in 2024 than the pre-pandemic average. 

Just because more people are being evicted now does not mean it has gotten easier to evict tenants, however.

The same issues that plagued landlords during the pandemic—lengthy eviction processes that allow adverse tenants to stay in their residential units—have persisted and, in some ways, gotten worse.

Sometimes, landlords seek outside help. Flash Shelton is a self-described “squatter hunter.” He goes around the country helping landlords and property owners evict non-paying tenants and “squatters.” He has worked with landlords around the country, including in Connecticut. He claims that the pandemic made people comfortable with not paying rent, and that behavior has persisted years later. 

One of the cases he worked in Connecticut involved a tenant who signed a lease, paid a security deposit and the first month of rent, and then started complaining about housing conditions but never let the landlord access the house. Then, the tenant stopped paying rent. Shelton says he sees these types of incidents across the country.

“It becomes this almost like cat mouse thing, and the entire time they are arguing and going back and forth, the tenants are living rent free,” Shelton said. 

Homelessness, housing prices and the cost of rent have each increased over the past few years against a backdrop of stymied construction. As a result, the housing supply has not kept pace with the demand. While this is happening, the resources that were made available to tenants who wanted to fight evictions during the pandemic are still in place. 

A convoluted process

John Souza knows how hard it is to evict someone. Souza is the president of the Connecticut Coalition of Property Owners (CCOPO) and has been a landlord for 35 years. 

The eviction process costs the average landlord between $5,000 and $10,000 in lost rent alone, Souza estimates. The exact cost depends on the size of the unit, how proactive landlords are in making sure tenants are on top of their rent, and the length of the legal battle. 

Souza, who runs around 200 units, says he is constantly dealing with multiple eviction processes at the same time. Since he is on top of his residents—he starts the process of eviction after the first month they do not pay rent—he usually only loses $5,000 to $6,000 in rent when he needs to evict someone.

“The real problem is that our eviction system is so slow, it’s so cumbersome to use,” Souza said. “If it took two weeks to get my justice, people aren’t going to fight you too hard, because they know they’re going to be out in two weeks.”

The first thing a landlord needs to do to evict a tenant is send a warning letter. This letter explains how the tenant violated the terms of their lease contract and gives them 15 days to resolve that problem. 

If the problem is not fixed within 15 days, then the landlord sends a Notice to Quit. The notice needs to contain, among other things, a reason for eviction and a date that the tenant needs to move out by. The date must be at least three days after the notice is served. 

A landlord can’t just give a piece of paper to a tenant either, or leave it under their door. They need to get a state marshal to serve the notice and pay a $35 to $45 fee.

If the tenant does not leave on time, the landlord must then go to a clerk’s office and schedule a Summons and Complaint date. A state marshal needs to serve this paperwork as well—which will cost the landlord another fee. This one costs between $45 and $60.

Then there is more paperwork that needs to be filed and submitted after the summons is determined. The landlord must pay $175 to submit these documents. 

The tenant can choose to not appear in court. If they do this, then the landlord needs to file a CARES Act Affidavit of Compliance with the court and mail a copy to the non-paying tenant or, if they have one, an attorney. Then the tenant may answer, which could lead to a trial or a settlement. The trial date will be shared with the landlord and tenant through mail. If a witness doesn’t want to go to court, then the landlord can have a state marshal issue a subpoena—for another fee. This one is $50. 

If a judgment is made in favor of the landlord, then the tenant will have to move out in five days, unless they file for an extension. If the defendant doesn’t file an extension and doesn’t move out, more documents may be filed so the landlord can file an execution to a state marshal, which the tenant can challenge, and a hearing will be scheduled. 

The whole process usually takes around five or six months, according to Souza. By the end of it, a landlord can pay as much as $330 in state fees on top of lost rent and the cost of an attorney, which for Souza is usually around $1,500 to $2,000. 

Many of these expenses go both ways. If a tenant wants to fight the process, then they also need to hire an attorney. The Vice President of the Connecticut Tenants Union Luke Melonakos-Harrison, estimates that, like landlords, attorneys cost tenants around $2,000. 

But, while landlords feel like the laws skew in favor of the tenants, tenants often feel that the convoluted nature of the process works against them. 

The State of Connecticut has a Right to Counsel Program, which provides free legal assistance for low-income tenants in residential buildings. There are limits on who has access to this free legal assistance: the resident needs to make 80% or less than the state’s median income, and have to live in a covered town, and, depending on the town, may need to live in subsidized housing. Legal Aid is available in parts of New Haven, which is where Melonakos-Harrison lives. Veterans do not have the geographic constraints that non-veterans do.

According to EvictionHelpCT, which facilitates free Legal Aid to people facing eviction, people are 49% less likely to be evicted if they have an attorney. Before the EvictionHelpCT program, only 7% of tenants statewide facing evictions had lawyers, and only 6% in the zip codes where legal aid is available. In 2023, EvictionHelpCT reported that 14% of tenants in the eligible zip code areas have access to legal aid. 

According to Melonakos-Harrison said. “Other than Legal Aid-funded attorneys, most tenants do not have attorneys, whereas most landlords do. Navigating the complicated process of eviction is sort of, just by virtue of that fact, weighted in the landlord’s favor.”

Pandemic problems

The pandemic was a low point for the renting industry. 

The number of eviction filings in Connecticut decreased by over 60% from 2019 to 2020, during the federal eviction moratorium. In 2019, around 19,100 eviction filings were made, and in 2020 there were only 6,400, according to the Connecticut Data Collaborative. The number increased to 9,400 in 2021, when Connecticut had a statewide moratorium for the first half of a year, and spiked in 2022, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, before falling to pre-pandemic averages again in 2023.

The eviction mortarium hit landlords hard. Property owners with destructive tenants were not able to evict them, even when their actions incurred tens of thousands of dollars in damage. 

Rick Bush owns R&M Property Management Solutions and is also a landlord. He owns 41 housing units and manages 300 in Connecticut. 

Bush has his own experience with evicted tenants leaving behind extensive property damage. During the pandemic, he had a tenant who did not pay rent for an entire year. Bush tried to help him get resources from UniteCT and, eventually, he did pay all the rent he owed. However, he stopped paying rent after that. After a year, Bush made moves to evict them. 

Then, the tenant complained to the East Hartford Housing Authority that his apartment wasn’t getting necessary repairs and maintenance. Bush says he tried to send maintenance people to his apartment, but the tenant was either not there or did not open the door. Bush believes that all of this was done so the tenant could prolong the eviction process and not move out.  

Finally, they made a stipulated agreement, which the tenant did not follow. Just days before a follow-up lawsuit, the tenant claimed that the mirror in the bathroom broke and he was so injured he needed to go to the hospital and then filed what Bush calls a “frivolous lawsuit.” 

“When he finally moved out, the apartment was completely destroyed, and it cost me $17,000 to fix it,” Bush said. “That’s the biggest screw I’ve ever had: two years, no rent, $17,000 in damages and a frivolous lawsuit that I had to hire my insurance company to cover.”

Bush never got the rent from the second year. However, the ordeal is not over. Since the tenant filed a lawsuit against the property, Bush obtained his new address and counter-sued him. It’s been three years, and the lawsuit is still ongoing. 

There was one woman in a single-family home that Bush managed that “screwed the landlord” out of $18,000 in rent and left the house a mess. It took three dumpster trucks to empty her trash left behind and cost $35,000 to get the house in decent enough shape to sell.

These aren’t stand-alone stories. Bush says it’s “extremely common” for tenants to stay in a house or an apartment, not pay rent, and then move in the middle of the night. And, if tenants don’t file counter-lawsuits like the man in East Hartford did, it’s hard to track them down.

“If a tenant moves and does not provide a forwarding address, we have no way to go after them for the money. A tenant could literally not pay, not pay, not pay, get evicted, not pay, and then at the last minute, just move out to a new place and not tell anybody where they’re going,” Bush said. “And we have no way to collect on their background, no way to sue them, no way to find them, because most of them are off the grid anyway.”

In some cases, landlords and tenants seek outside help to find a resolution.

Flash Shelton started “hunting” squatters in 2019, when a person moved into his parents’ home after his father died and his mother moved in with him, hours away from that house in California. His mother was trying to sell the house, but when realtors came by, they saw that someone had been living in it. 

That person turned out to be a woman who approached them, asking to rent in the past, but was turned away. She moved in anyway. 

Despite never signing a lease, nor making a verbal agreement, the law required that this woman be evicted the same way a contracted tenant would be. Neither Shelton nor his mother were allowed to visit the property, even though they owned it and were paying the property taxes.

Souza has had similar experiences in Connecticut. He’s had incidents when a tenant leaves an apartment, but a guest—a friend crashing on the couch, a boyfriend, a relative, etc.—stays behind or won’t move out, even if the tenant wants them to. If they can establish residency, which can be as simple as having a piece of mail sent to the address, he still needs to go through an eviction process, even though they never signed a lease. 

For Shelton, the legal process took too long, he took matters into his own hands. His mom owned the property, not him. He got on the property, installed cameras and security systems, and then let the woman know what he did. She left within a day.  

He videotaped this process and posted it online in 2021. A few months later, the video blew up in popularity and people were asking him for help with their own non-paying tenants and squatters.

“Most landlords at one time or another are going to have a non-paying tenant,” Shelton said. “But, I’ll tell you what, the whole COVID thing certainly increased (this), because it gave people that never would have thought of not paying their rent, the idea.”

The federal and state, eviction moratoriums have ended, but the market is still changed because of those pandemic era policies. There are fewer housing units than there used to be, and renting is more expensive. In 2024, home sales fell to their lowest level since 1995, another twist in the housing landscape.

The cost of rent in Connecticut has increased by 30% across the board since 2021, CT Mirror reports. 

“[Rent] is most people’s biggest monthly bill, so the fact people’s rent is going up that amount, on top of the inflation of everything else, has been very economically painful and is the main driver behind the increase in eviction,” Melonakos-Harrison said. “More and more people are just falling off the cliff.”

Shelton is not a lawyer, but he still mediates conversations between landlords and tenants. He worked on five “cases” in Connecticut, where he convinced tenants to either pay or move out after speaking with him and the landlords over Zoom. 

On average, he can get an adverse tenant out of a house in three weeks, he says. His trick? Remind them that, in most states, eviction processes are public. Shelton has every right to attend hearings and, if he wants to, air dirty laundry. 

Things have gotten a lot better for landlords across the country since the end of rent moratoriums, Shelton said. 

However, the rental market has changed substantially in Connecticut since the pandemic and there has been a push to implement tenants’ rights laws that landlords argue will be disastrous.

Nowhere to go

There are three types of people Souza says he has had to evict since he became a landlord: tenants who stop paying rent, tenants who stay past their lease, and guests of tenants who moved out who refuse to leave themselves. 

Souza says he tries to be generous with the first group.

“The state of Connecticut is pretty good, they do have some money to help people that just had a tough time. I’m happy to work with people that just had a rough patch, and they need to get back on their feet,” he said.

In Souza’s experience, half the time, these people catch up on their rent.  

There are multiple federal, state and local rental assistance programs that Connecticut residents have access to, including the Eviction Prevention Fund, which can provide people with a $8,500 one-time payment to help keep up on rent. The average monthly rent in the state is $1,463.

In Bush’s experience, almost all evictions are due to tenants who stop paying rent. Most of the time, the tenants just don’t have the money. 

“It’s a very, very poor person who has no resources, who has no help moving, who can’t afford to hire a moving company, who can’t afford to buy boxes to pack their stuff, who has no one to help them move, and who really is abandoning a lot of their stuff that they probably would want to bring if they had a nice new place to go. So they’re fighting it because they literally can’t afford to get a new place that’s, that’s been my experience lately,” Bush said. “It’s tragic.”

The resources for tenants who are behind on their rent are dwindling, according to Melonakos-Harrison. During the pandemic, the state set up a UniteCT fund to help tenants who were facing eviction stay in their apartments. UniteCT was established with $235 million from the taxpayer-funded federal Emergency Rental Assistance program. While the fund was established to help renters during the pandemic, it still exists today. The program will continue until the money runs out. 

“Despite its many flaws and failures of implementation, it definitely kept a lot of people housed, thankfully, during the pandemic,” he said. “That has been whittled down to what’s called the Eviction Prevention Fund… You can access that one time if the landlord is amenable to it. I’ve definitely seen landlords who also are just like, nope, won’t accept the money you got to get.”

But, since the pandemic ended, the resources are closer to being depleted, and Melonakos-Harrison is worried that soon, the fund will run dry, and tenants will be left with even fewer options. Already, many tenants cannot defend themselves when they get eviction notices. 

“Most tenants do not fight their evictions, because they don’t have the time or resources to go to court over and over again, and they don’t even have an attorney to know what to do,” he said. “Most tenants, once they get the notice to quit… if they have the resources to move or can move in with family, most people just do that, instead of just face the intimidating process of court.”

Renting during a housing crisis

It can be hard to rent in Connecticut.

“Being a tenant in Connecticut is really challenging. Between the cost of rent, period, and how difficult it is for so many people to find something that they can afford that’s not, you know, super run down and in bad conditions,” Melonakos-Harrison said.

A report published by Consumer Affairs, which was based on data compiled from the U.S. Census, ranks Connecticut as the worst state to be a renter in the country because of the high cost of rent and lack of housing. That same report found that the average Connecticut residents spend almost one-third of their yearly expenses on rent.

Since there is a severe housing shortage in the state, and since rent is so expensive, renters don’t have many options: they can’t afford to move out, and there aren’t many places to live in to begin with, Melonakos-Harrison said. Once they find a place, they must stay there. 

Melonakos-Harrison is experiencing this himself. He lives in New Haven and is currently renting an apartment from one of the largest residential property owners in the city. He has run into issues with this company multiple times as a leader in the Connecticut Tenants Union. He doesn’t want to rent from them, but he has no other options. 

On the books, there are robust tenant protections, but these laws aren’t always enforced in practice, he said. 

“The agencies tasked with housing code enforcement in many municipalities all over the State, and, pretty much without exception, health departments or blight agencies are slow to respond to tenants, (and are) often lacking in providing tenants with any kind of paper trail about their inspections or the results of those inspections, or what they can expect or how they can use those inspections legally to have their right to be enforced,” Melonakos-Harrison said. “A lot of these departments and agencies, until the Tenant Union starts agitating them and organizing around them, have often lacked any enforcement powers at all. So they will be sending notices to landlords about lack of heat or moldy ceilings or whatever, but there’s behind-system to back it up, or if there is, the towns are very reluctant and it’s slow to use them.” 

And then there are the increases in rent. Any meaningful reform plan would have to go hand-in-hand with rent stabilization, he said. 

“Certainly the shortage of housing is a contributing factor to the cost of rent, because supply and demand,” he said. “But also, to me it seems like it goes both ways, because as rent rises unchecked, the overall cost of rent for everybody is just getting higher and higher and higher.”

Melonakos-Harrison attributes a large part of the rent increases to the business practices of out-of-state land buyers who buy property, push out tenants, renovate and then increase the rent.  

Bush agrees with this.

Recently, Melonakos-Harrison has been working with tenants in Woodstock. The New York-based real estate company, UpRealty, bought a 14-unit apartment complex in the town and began issuing evictions to people once their leases were up. 

“The only people who were able to stay were people who were who fit into the current just cause protection category, and also kind of like had the gumption to stick it out and risk a lengthy court battle,” Melonakos-Harrison said. “It’s touching parts of the state that I do not think have felt the crisis of rental housing until post COVID.”

Being evicted can significantly impact a person’s life. 

“On the tenant side of things, eviction can be so earth shattering, and just have such extensive ramifications for people’s futures,” he said. “The landlord doesn’t see that. They just see a missed rental payment, or they see an opportunity to raise the rent on a tenant. They’re not seeing like the sleepless nights and the anxiously scrolling Facebook marketplace to find an apartment that might consider you even though you have an eviction record. That’s the kind of experience.., and it’s traumatizing.” 

Recently, Melonakos-Harrison was working with a formerly homeless woman was having trouble with the property she moved into immediately after she left a shelter. She was renting an apartment, and her 20-year-old daughter, who was in college, co-signed the lease. There were errors in their paperwork, Melonakos-Harrison said. She tried to work with her property manager to fix the errors, but he wouldn’t meet with her and instead tried to evict her. The property’s tenant union was able to negotiate with the property manager’s boss to get the eviction rescinded.

“Basically, because of some technicalities, and just particularly inhumane property manager, this woman and her college student daughter would have been homeless again,” he said. “This 20-year-old would have had… a permanent eviction on her record, which was just so such a heartbreaking thing. And that’s that is what eviction looks like.”

Legislative battle over evictions

One thing that Melonakos-Harrison, Bush and Souza all agree on is that the eviction process in Connecticut takes too long and is too convoluted. However, Melonakos-Harrison thinks this benefits landlords, who are often more able to afford attorneys or already have them. Bush and Souza think that the system gives tenants a leg up, because they can extend their stay for many months.  

Melonakos-Harrison thinks the way forward is to have more tenant protections. His Connecticut Tenants Union is advocating for an end to lapse-of-time evictions, which is how UpRealty was able to evict people in the Woodstock apartment complex it bought. He blames that incident on a lack of regulation, both over evictions and buying land. 

In the state of Connecticut, landlords are not allowed to evict someone without reason, but they are allowed to not a renew lease when it comes up, even if that tenant has not broken—or been caught breaking—their contract. This is called a no-fault or a lapse-of-time eviction. In the state, it is already illegal to issue a no-fault eviction to senior citizens and disabled people, or people who are living with immediate family or grandparents who are 62 years old or older or have a disability.

However, Melonakos-Harrison believes these protections should be extended to almost everyone. He argues for one exception: landowners who have small rental units and live on property, Melonakos-Harrison said. 

“No fault evictions specifically, are becoming a larger share of evictions over time, and we, we think that’s because of the way that they are used by large real estate companies that are speculating on a piece of land, essentially displacing all of the existing tenants in order to dramatically raise rents for a new cohort of renters,” Melonakos-Harrison said. “That’s a practice that we’re observing and basically all parts of the state. And no fault evictions make that easy because, (landlords can) buy the property, not renew anyone’s leases, not respond to anyone when they try to renew their lease, and then issue a bunch of notices to quit.”

Melonakos-Harrison also wants to see the state adopt the Tenant Opportunity to Purchas Act (TOPA). TOPA would give tenants the right to match a third-party offer. These tenants could partner with an “affordable housing purchaser or assign such a right to purchase a nonprofit or local housing authority.” 

Melonakos-Harrison would also like to see either tenants or “trusted community partners” have the first opportunity to make an offer when a landlord decides to sell their property. 

The end goal, in Melonakos-Harrison’s eyes, would be working toward establishing situations where tenants collectively own the building and, eventually, form a community land trust. 

For Bush, these lapse-of-time evictions are important for both the landowner and the renter. 

“The esoteric reasons are that, you know, it becomes a seizure of private property where a person who owns a piece of property does not have control over it… It takes away all control and all power from the landlord, and it gives it to a tenant who, at that point, becomes a squatter, whose rights supersede the rights of the landlord,” Bush said. “There’s practical reasons, and the fact that there’s a lot of times that tenants are just bad people. They have disharmonious relationships with other tenants. They’re dirty, they smoke, they do drugs, they do other things that are not so easy to prove they’re just a nuisance, and landlords need to have the opportunity to be able to remove those people whenever they want, without having to evict them for non-payment of rent.”

Bush, personally, only refuses to renew a lease if the tenant is causing problems with the community. If a landlord or a property manager cannot catch people violating the terms of their lease, it is very hard to evict them. Non-renewal at the end of a contract is a way out for both the landlords and other tenants in the buildings.  

Not only that, both Bush and Souza say that these rules are only making it harder for people with lower income or difficult life circumstances to find housing. 

There are only so many risks a person can take when correcting mistakes are this costly, according to Souza. 

He wants to give people second chances right after they leave prison or come off the streets, but it’s difficult—he knows that if something goes wrong, he’ll be stuck with a laundry list of legal fees and losses. 

Bush agrees. He recently changed the way he determined tenants to avoid getting into a bad situation. He’s done more thorough background checks and is no longer taking chances on “substandard” applicants. Since he’s made these business choices, the number of evictions he has had to deal with has decreased. 

“There needs to be a more robust system to help people who are homeless or going to become homeless are going to be evicted, other than putting the onus and the burden on the landlord. It should not be the landlord’s responsibility to be a charitable organization,” Bush said. “It should be the state and local municipalities that are increasing funding to provide assistance for people who are facing homelessness and not to go after landlords, because it’s not the landlord’s fault most of the time.”

This legislative session, the Housing Committee is proposing a bill that, if passed, would expand protections from no-fault evictions to include people who resided in the building, complex or mobile home park for at least one year. There are a few exceptions: if the landlord decided to take the rental unit off the market or intended to move into the unit and use it as their primary residence, they could evict a tenant when their lease lapses, and buildings with four or less rental units would be exempt from this law. 

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