Missouri lawmakers approve bill banning local governments from halting evictions
Missouri lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill to block local governments from issuing eviction moratoriums as lawmakers target housing laws in Kansas City and St. Louis.
The legislation, filed by Rep. Chris Brown, a Kansas City Republican, is backed by landlord and realty groups, such as the Missouri Association of Realtors. It would ban county and local governments from imposing or enforcing a moratorium on eviction proceedings unless approved by state law.
“It just simply says that municipal governments, local governments are not going to be able to enact a pause on evictions, eviction moratoriums,” Brown said from the floor.
While the legislation has drawn staunch opposition from tenant advocacy groups, it passed the House on a nearly unanimous vote of 145-1 on Thursday. Several provisions were added to the bill in the Senate earlier this month, including a measure allowing counties to establish land bank agencies to acquire, manage, and sell vacant property.
The bill now heads to Republican Gov. Mike Parson’s desk after previously passing the GOP-controlled Senate earlier this month.
“This is one of those times when I am going to vote with my district because I am a good legislator. But I don’t agree fully, with my heart, with this policy,” said Rep. Jamie Johnson, a Kansas City Democrat, who voted in favor of the bill.
“We talk about how we need to represent the owners, the landlords, but let’s say we actually do evict the tenant. Where are they going to go?” she added.
Rep. Ingrid Burnett, a Kansas City Democrat, and the sole “no” vote, said the bill would “tie the hands of our local officials.”
“We can’t anticipate the kinds of disasters that could require some extraordinary rules,” she said.
The legislation has been a priority for Missouri Republicans roughly four years after the Jackson County Circuit Court temporarily halted evictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar bills in Missouri have long faced resistance from tenant advocacy groups that argue the legislation places landlord profits over renters’ lives.
Health Forward Foundation, a Kansas City-based health care advocacy group, testified against the legislation earlier this year, saying that it would halt local governments from meeting the needs of their communities during public health crises.
“Because of the moratoria across the US in place during the COVID-19 outbreak, people who may have been otherwise exposed to the virus were safely sheltered in homes,” the group said in written testimony. “It had real, beneficial outcomes for people’s health.”
The organization said that eviction moratoriums were also a key tool to help reduce health disparities by race.
More than 124,000 eviction filings have been made in Missouri since mid-March 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. There have been more than 34,000 in the last year.
The legislation targeting eviction moratoriums comes in response to local agencies such as the circuit courts in Jackson County and St. Louis that temporarily halted evictions in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March 2020, Jackson County Circuit Court temporarily suspended the issuance of writs for two months to protect the health of the public and court employees.
In landlord-tenant cases, writs are delivered by process servers to tenants requiring the tenant to be evicted from the property, according to previous reporting.
St. Louis Circuit Court suspended eviction proceedings from mid-March 2020 through July 2020. The St. Louis City Council later passed a 15-day eviction moratorium in December 2021.
Missouri never implemented a statewide eviction moratorium.
