With over 4,300 evictions, Baltimore County is ‘a significant outlier’ in Maryland

Sherry Gudger’s eviction in August 2025 was scheduled for the same day as her son Eli’s first day of third grade.

The 36-year-old lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a Halethorpe complex that based rents on tenants’ incomes. But after she lost a series of temp jobs, Gudger fell behind and found herself — among thousands of other Baltimore County residents — destabilized by eviction.

She is part of a sobering statistic: Baltimore County evicted more residents than any other jurisdiction during the 2025 fiscal year, state data shows. The county recorded more than 4,300 evictions, according to data compiled by the state’s housing department and the District Court of Maryland.

The reasons are complex. Federal emergency rental assistance from the pandemic era is gone. Access to legal representation and government aid is thought to be more limited than in other parts of the state, experts say. The county is short on housing. Residents in Baltimore County are paying more for rent relative to their incomes than other Marylanders. And the rising cost of everything from groceries to utilities is making it hard for many people to make ends meet.

Danielle Meister, assistant secretary of homeless solutions with Maryland’s housing department, said the state has long harbored concerns about the county’s disproportionate number of evictions.

Baltimore County is a “significant outlier in the wrong direction,” she said.

‘Need is astronomical’

The disparity in Baltimore County exists as statewide evictions have dropped, said Adam Skolnik, executive director of the Maryland Multi-Housing Association, which represents property owners and managers across the state.

Jennie Fumarola, director of programs and operations at Cornerstone Franciscan Ministries, a Baltimore County nonprofit that distributes financial aid to low-income families, said the organization has seen an increase in clients seeking services for the first time.

“The need is astronomical,” she said.

Fumarola said many of Cornerstone’s clients have faced eviction. She knows families living out of cars, sleeping at airports and bunking with friends and relatives. Last year, the organization committed $1.8 million in assistance for families with school-age kids in four weeks and sometimes received more than 100 referrals a day, mostly about people facing eviction or utility shut-offs.

The majority of evictions in the county occur because tenants don’t pay their rent. Only a small percentage in 2025 were for other reasons, such as violating the terms of a lease. About a third of households are renters, according to the U.S. census.

During COVID-19, the county used all of its federal emergency rental assistance funding — more than $115 million — to prevent what would have been 8,500 evictions, said Terry Hickey, the county’s housing director.

“We didn’t fix the underlying problems, though. I’m glad we did it, but it essentially punted the real issues.”

Baltimore County’s median rent is about $1,700 per month, according to the most recent census data — lower than in neighboring counties, but higher than what most tenants can comfortably afford. Rent has climbed nearly 8% in the past decade. And in May, The Banner reported that Baltimore County — which has an agreement with the federal government to provide more housing — has struggled to add 1,000 affordable homes over the last decade. A December 2025 report commissioned by the county found the jurisdiction was short at least 19,000 homes.

Resistance to new housing has led the County Council to regulate where new homes can be built and has stalled other projects, including Lutherville Station — the site of a dilapidated shopping center primed for redevelopment.

The housing shortfall means that if a tenant falls behind on rent in one place, they can’t easily relocate to a cheaper one.

County Executive Kathy Klausmeier’s office did not directly address the fact that the county leads Maryland in evictions in a statement from spokesperson Dakarai Turner.

“She has supported housing development proposals that have come before her and put an additional $5 million in this year’s budget to help create new attainable housing units,” he said.

Turner added that Klausmeier introduced a program last year to improve the county’s permitting system, which he said will get new housing built faster.

In 2024, the county’s median household income dropped to just under $88,000 — an almost 8% decline since 2018. Meister said the state’s numbers also point to a 28% rise in homelessness in Baltimore County over the last two years, an increase that has outpaced the rest of Central Maryland.

“They’re being hauled into court because they’re behind on rent, yet they’re missing the opportunity to earn more money to be able to pay the rent,” said Mary Cox, a staff attorney with the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland who represents people in rent court. “People just can’t afford it.”

Court offers little relief

Tenants have a chance to fight their eviction cases in court. But it’s an uphill battle.

On a late-summer morning in Towson’s District Court, attorneys and representatives for property management companies moved along the carpeted courthouse aisle at a rapid clip. Tenants with eviction cases included a woman anxiously tapping a bedazzled Croc, a couple soothing a fussy baby, a man in a three-piece suit and at least a hundred more crowding the courtroom. The 9 a.m. docket had 735 eviction cases.

Before the judge arrived, landlords’ agents with clipboards and overstuffed manila folders encouraged tenants to check in with them.

Renters who don’t show up or check in before court are not given another opportunity to stand before the judge.

Zafar Shah, advocacy director for the Human Right to Housing program at Maryland Legal Aid, said attorneys at the organization have observed Baltimore County tenants missing their cases because they don’t hear their names called from the overcrowded room, or the court doesn’t check them in.

In Towson, the majority of tenants didn’t show up that morning, and the judge ruled in favor of the property management companies by default.

The human toll

An eviction can be a demoralizing process for the tenants experiencing it.

The morning she was forced to leave her home, Gudger, a single mom, stuffed some belongings into trash bags and planned to retrieve more the following day.

She couldn’t pack everything from the Lansdowne Gardens housing complex in time, but said a law enforcement officer told her she had 24 hours to get everything.

Instead, as Gudger alleged in a lawsuit against Baltimore County, her possessions — electronics, furniture, personal identification documents, clothes — were tossed in the trash.

The lawsuit, which Gudger filed with representation from Maryland Legal Aid in June, argues that she was deprived of her personal property without due process.

Baltimore County’s “abandonment ordinance,” which deems items left behind after an eviction to be abandoned, is one of many kinks that make the process of removing people from their homes especially traumatic.

“Sometimes my energy is not there,” Gudger said. “A lot of times it just kind of gets to the point where I’m just overwhelmed, not sure exactly what’s next.”

Lansdowne Gardens is owned by a Baltimore-based subsidiary of Affordable Homes & Communities — a nonprofit housing developer and property manager operating in the mid-Atlantic.

Jennifer Smith, a spokesperson for Affordable Homes & Communities, declined to comment on Gudger’s case. In a statement, she said that the company strives to treat those who are evicted with respect while following the law.

“At AHC, residents are at the heart of all we do,” she said. “We work to support housing stability and prevent evictions whenever possible.”

‘Just an oddity’

Shah has spent countless hours in rent court. Baltimore County, he said, “is just an oddity.”

Of the four largest counties in Maryland, Baltimore County has a relatively small population of renters, Shah said. Taking population and rent prices into account, Montgomery County should have the highest rate, he said, but it actually has the lowest.

That could be due to local government resources and the amount of nonprofit aid available in the Washington, D.C., suburb, Shah said.

Hickey, the county’s housing director, said Baltimore County has tried to address the indignities suffered by those facing eviction. Last month, the County Council passed a bill updating the county code to provide residents facing eviction with 14 days’ notice instead of six.

“Notice is vital,” Hickey said. “Notice gives tenants a critical window needed to intervene and hopefully prevent the eviction from happening.”

The legislation also removed the county’s abandonment ordinance.

Hickey, housing advocates and landlords have until Dec. 31 to propose recommendations to council members and the county executive about who will store tenants’ belongings following an eviction, who will pay for storage and how long the belongings will be stored.

Baltimore City is considering a similar proposal, and Anne Arundel County recently updated its own version of the law to provide tenants with an extra day to gather their things.

Hickey said his department has worked hard to keep empathy at the forefront of its efforts to build a safety net for those who lose stable housing — particularly by allocating money to the county’s shelter system and nonprofits, like Cornerstone, that serve low-income renters.

Respect, transparency and constitutional compliance are top priorities for the county, Hickey said.

Ideally, he added, the county would build more housing. More supply brings down rents and increases access to housing.

Realistically, the department is limited in what it can control.