Evictions reveal America’s rental housing crisis: In 2022, over half of renters spent more than a third of their income on housing. Millions of tenants missing rent payments face eviction annually.
Evictions have severe consequences. Families may lose possessions, children might switch schools, and eviction often leads to job loss and depression.
Recent data from 2018 shows 3.6 million evictions filed, or 7.8 per 100 renter households, according to Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
Unfortunately, court records on eviction filings vary by county and rarely include detailed outcomes. Informal evictions, such as changing locks, often go unrecorded.
“There’s virtually nothing on anything that might happen outside of the court system, like more informal evictions where it’s maybe just a threat, and the person moves out,” said Jill Naamane, a director at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Researchers and housing advocates urge better eviction data to address the affordable housing crisis. They call for federal collection and standardization of data, including demographic details.
Collecting data
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development collects data on public housing tenants but not on private housing evictions. Although Congress directed the agency in 2020 to study creating an evictions database, it remains nonexistent.
In the absence of a federal database, Eviction Lab is a primary source of eviction data. Despite aggregating over 99 million records, it lacks reliable data for counties housing a third of renters.
“In one county, they use one software and track it digitally, and literally the neighboring county could be something completely different,” said Camila Vallejo, a researcher at Eviction Lab.
Property owners typically evict tenants for nonpayment or lease violations. Court filings help researchers determine eviction frequency but are an unreliable measure of actual evictions.
Informal evictions, such as changing door locks, occur outside the court system.
Carl Gershenson, director of Eviction Lab, said the group is working to fill data gaps. “A lot of this involves linking the eviction records to other sources of address data,” he said.
Artificial intelligence may aid these efforts, according to Tim Thomas, director of the Urban Displacement Project at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley.
Thomas noted that limited eviction data significantly impacted policy, prompting the CDC’s eviction moratorium during the pandemic, cutting filings by more than half in 31 cities tracked by Eviction Lab.
Who is most affected
Studies show that Black women, infants, and young children are disproportionately affected by evictions, influencing state legislation to guarantee tenants’ right to counsel in eviction proceedings.
The National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel estimates that 83% of landlords have legal representation in eviction cases, compared to 4% of tenants. This has led to just cause laws limiting eviction reasons or lease renewals.
Colorado Democratic state Rep. Javier Mabrey, an eviction lawyer, sponsored a just cause measure inspired by personal experience of eviction at age 15, leaving his family homeless.
Mabrey brought House Speaker Julie McCluskie to eviction court, earning her support for the bill after initially opposing it. “When you peel back the curtain on the eviction process, it highlights the need for these protections for tenants,” Mabrey said.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, part of States Newsroom.
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