Sen. Edwards Secures Passage of the HOMES Act in the Senate’s Economic Development Bill

Last week one of the few housing policies that made it into the Economic Development bill, the HOMES Act Housing Opportunity and Mobility Eviction Sealing) and passed the Senate, supported by a bipartisan group of Senators. “For the second time, the Senate has passed this bill to ensure that hundreds of thousands of people will get a second chance. This bill does many things but most importantly it takes a giant step towards social, racial, economic, and gender justice.  Many people have been waiting for this day, and I am so excited to add another tool to our housing toolbox, that allows people greater access to housing” said State Senator Lydia Edwards

The Homes ACT allows individuals to petition to have records of certain evictions sealed. It protects personal identifying information from commercial use and makes sealed records only available at the discretion of the court for public safety, scholarly, educational, journalistic, or governmental purposes. Pre pandemic there were over 1 million eviction records in the Commonwealth. On average there are 40,000 evictions filed a year. This act would help those who were no fault evictions or who satisfied their judgment to seal their records. 

“In this this moment, we are called to do more, to ultimately challenge the way the system works. This is one of those changes that does that, by allowing hundreds of thousands of people to have a second chance and remove the scarlet “E” from their records, we are making our system more just and equitable. I want to thank Representative Mike Moran, and Former Senator Joe Boncore, and MLRI especially, you will see on the Homes Act website that the coalition includes over one hundred organizations, from unions, to activist networks, as well as cities and towns” said State Senator Lydia Edwards.