Get ready for a change in terms.Bye bye Forcible Entry and Detainer Act and hello Eviction Act. Public Act 100-0173 was passed into law and signed by the Governor on August 18, 2017 and will be effective on January 1, 2018. Is this law a sweeping change? Did we finally get some eviction law reform? Not at all.
Yesterday, Rep. Monique Davis filed a third amendment to her proposed legislation to add a small, but meaningful, reform to the Forcible Entry and Detainer Act and the way that evictions are handled in Cook County. The law started out as an attempt to thwart the Cook County eviction moratorium and has morphed via two wholesale amendments of the suggested statute into a pretty fair, in my opinion, proposal to change to reduce the Sheriff’s eviction backlog and speed eviction enforcement.
Columnist blasts suburban cops as he rails against legislator rather than recognizing systemic problemsChicago Sun Times columnist Mark Brown does not get it. Back in February, I wrote about a law proposed by state representative Monique Davis, allegedly inspired by the legislator’s distaste for the annual winter eviction moratorium, that would eliminate bad weather as a valid reason to delay evictions.
Is she right or is she doing damage to landlords?A news article in the Chicago Sun Times yesterday indicates that state representative Monique Davis (Democrat) introduced a bill this week to “eliminate weather as a factor in enforcement of eviction judgments”. Readers of this blog are well aware of the current significant delay in eviction order enforcement in Cook County cause, in part, by the winter eviction moratorium and the recent inclement weather. Apparently Rep. Davis is a landlord herself and is not pleased with how “some of them [tenants] know how to play the game”.
For our office, the beginning of the “eviction” season started out a bit slow (it is not a bad thing that landlords are, hopefully, collecting rent and doing better screening so that we do less evictions!). However, for us, things in the eviction courts are starting to heat up. I am predicting, based only on anecdotal evidence from my office’s caseload and a few of my attorney friends, that the eviction lawyers, judges, and courts in Cook County will be busily processing forcible entry and detainer cases in the next 60 days and that, if the fall/winter weather is uncooperative, this will lead to a major backlog in eviction case enforcement early in 2014.
I have discussed roommate, guest, and family member evictions in the past, however, based on the number of recent questions I receive about Illinois evictions of family members and close relatives, I thought a refresher might be in order.
The most common notice to terminate a tenancy is a five day notice. This is the notice that is generally required when a tenant fails to make timely payment of rent. The requirements for a demand for rent are contained in Section 9-209 of the Illinois Forcible Entry and Detainer Act. The act provides in part:
Under the “common law”, it was lawful for a landlord “with force and arms” to retake possession of real estate and retain such possession by force from a tenant who failed to pay rent or breached a lease. “Self-help” such as this was prohibited by statute in the Illinois Forcible Entry and Detainer Act.
The Illinois Forcible Entry and Detainer Act, at 735 ILCS 5/9-101 provides: