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Image courtesy of Вячеслав Думчев via Adobe Stock
Matthew Desmond began studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008. As he lived and worked with poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he blended fieldwork with original data analysis and found that eviction was rampant in low-income communities – it was a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
Desmond wrote Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City in 2017 and founded Eviction Lab (EL) soon after. EL is based at Princeton University and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Ford Foundation, The JPB Foundation, and Princeton University.
EL’s work, data, and consultation are being sought more than ever as shelter costs increase. According to a July 5, 2023, article in USA Today, inflation has coincided with the expiration of eviction moratoriums and COVID-19-related rental assistance to cause a surge in evictions over the past 18 months. It can be seen in the following cities:
When Winter Torres, CEO of New Mexico Eviction Prevention & Diversion, tried to help get eviction deadlines in New Mexico extended from one of the shortest periods in the nation, the attorney reached out to the Eviction Lab for supporting statistics. “New Mexico, consistently one of the poorest states in the nation, allows a tenant only three days to pay rent after a landlord’s notice before a landlord can file an eviction case,” said Torres. “Three days is not enough time to seek enough money from friends and family, to get an advance at work, or to seek out and obtain assistance from a charitable organization.”
Carl Gershenson, Lab Director for Eviction Lab, provided a letter to the state’s volunteer legislature, showing data from around the nation that indicated that slowing down the eviction process is a proven method of reducing evictions and saving tenancies. “Even a modest period of notice is associated with a 43.6 percent reduction in the eviction filing rate,” according to the letter. “For example, Camden, New Jersey, requires no eviction notice prior to filing, while neighboring Philadelphia requires ten days’ notice. Both cities have large low-income and African American populations (associated with high filing rates), but Philadelphia had a filing rate of 7.7 percent in 2018 while Camden County had a filing rate of 16.1 percent.”
The letter also illustrated that increasing the time before eviction hearings increases the likelihood that tenants will be present at their trials. Additionally, giving evicted tenants more time to find a new home makes it more likely that they avoid many of the negative outcomes associated with evictions, including health problems, depression, job loss, and homelessness.
“Together, the changes outlined should be expected to substantially reduce the overall number of evictions filed, the number of eviction filings that result in a default judgment against the tenant, and the number of evicted tenants who end up homeless or suffering from the other documented impacts of eviction,” the letter concluded.
Lobbying is one example of Eviction Lab’s value to communities and organizations who want to monitor their local eviction data. Gershenson said interested parties can use their website and staff to search for data for their county (EL has information for every U.S. county), compare data across regions, interact with demographic characteristics, and create reports. The EL data covers 2000 to 2018 and is garnered by culling publicly available county-level statistics and through sharing.
“Eviction Lab’s data gave us ideas about some concerning indicators for which to keep a lookout,” said Torres. “For instance, households headed by women are more likely to suffer eviction in New Mexico. Their data also demonstrates the impact on children, which may help explain at least some portion of why New Mexico is always last in the nation in terms of education, has very high childhood trauma rates, and has very poor adult literacy rates. The detriment to children is not something policymakers paid much attention to previously.”
While EL’s data can provide supporting information when seeking policy and legislative changes, it’s also been impactful in identifying landlords who evict more often than others. “We’ve also seen people compare our lists to lists of outstanding building code violations. This shows that they (landlords) also ignore maintenance requests,” Gershenson said.
Gershenson wants community officials to know that sharing information with EL is easy, that the information doesn’t have to be prepared, and that EL does most of the work. Torres can vouch for that. She said that after working with EL, she can recommend many ways communities can use it to improve eviction rates and solve the consequences of high rates.
“They should map it, constantly monitor it, compare it with socially vulnerable areas, and use it to identify the entities who file the largest number of evictions,” Torres said. “Perhaps they could start to work with those businesses to improve surrounding opportunities. I think it could help reduce or at least stabilize our unhoused rates.”
“I think it’s only been the last five-plus years that policymakers and the academic world have been paying attention to this issue,” he said. “We’ll be here recording the progress that cities make.”
