1 of 15

Covering Coronavirus: The End of the Eviction Moratorium and Pandemic Aid

Peter Hepburn

Rutgers University-Newark / Eviction Lab

September 29, 2021

2 of 15

Eviction prior to the pandemic

So let’s start by talking about eviction prior to the pandemic. What you’re looking at here is a map of county-level eviction rates nationwide in 2016. In that year, the Eviction Lab estimates that 3.7 million eviction cases filed across the country. That’s seven eviction cases filed every minute. And that was happening when the economy was quite healthy and unemployment rates were below 5%.

How did we get to this point? At the root of the problem is the unavailability of affordable housing. Rents have increased dramatically over the last several decades, while wages have remained stagnant, especially for low-wage workers. Prior to the pandemic, almost half of renter households were categorized as housing cost burdened, spending more than 30% of income on rent. A quarter spent more than half of their income on housing. These shares were far higher for low-income households. Housing choice vouchers could, in theory, help, but only one in five eligible households actually receive them. Margins are thin when you’re devoting that much of your income to housing, and the typical renter has little or nothing in savings—no private safety net to see them through in the event of job loss or an unexpected medical bill.

Failure to pay rent is by far the most common cause of eviction, and the amounts in question typically aren’t all that large. Between 2014 and 2016 the median money judgment on an eviction case $1,253. Because that total includes legal fees and costs accumulated during the court process, most tenants initially faced eviction for less. And nearly all tenants facing eviction do so without legal counsel.

3 of 15

Patterns of eviction

The eviction crisis isn’t just in the big cities

Even within cities, eviction is felt unevenly

Disproportionate share of evictions are against Black renters
Women bear the brunt of eviction
In many cities, a small number of buildings account for an outsize share of cases

Eviction isn’t always about displacement

Serial eviction filing as a property management tactic

I want to highlight just a few findings from research done by the Eviction Lab. First, the housing crisis extends beyond the big cities that we tend to think of. This is a problem not just in New York, Seattle, and the Bay Area. We see really high rates of eviction in a host of smaller and mid-size cities and rural areas, especially in the Midwest, Southeast and Sunbelt. 1 in 13 households is evicted every year in Tulsa. 1 in 9 in Richmond.

Second, eviction affects some areas and some people more than others. Looking nationally, we’ve estimated that the eviction rates faced by Black renters are about double those faced by white renters. Every year, more women than men are evicted—and we know that households with children are at high risk of displacement. We’ve also documented the outsize impact of a small number of landlords in driving the eviction crisis: just a few buildings are consistently responsible for a large share of evictions in most cities. In Tuscon, AZ, for instance, the same 295 buildings are responsible for 2/3 of all evictions in the city, year in and year out.

Third, eviction isn’t always about displacement. Especially in jurisdictions that make the eviction process cheap, fast, and easy for landlords, it becomes a default tool for collecting rent, a regularly-employed threat that makes property management that much easier but leaves a lasting mark on tenants’ rental histories.

4 of 15

Negative health outcomes of eviction

4

Physical Health	Mental Health	Associated Conditions Among Women	Associated Conditions Among Children	Exposure to Sub-Standard Living Conditions	Barriers to Livelihood
Higher Mortality Respiratory Conditions High Blood Pressure Poor Self-Rated General Health Coronary Heart Disease Sexually Transmitted Infections Drug Use	Depression Anxiety Mental Health Hospital-ization Exposure to Violence Suicide	Physical Assault Sexual Assault Drug Use and Related Harms Pre-term Pregnancies Future Housing Instability	Lead Poisoning Academic Decline Food Insecurity Emotional Trauma Risk of Chronic Disease in Adulthood Low Birthweight Decreased Life Expectancy	Lead Mold Poor Ventilation Pest Infestations Crowding	Failing credit scores Downward move Unemploy-ment Residential instability Homelessness Inability to access social services

Sources available in EA Benfer, et al., Eviction, Health Inequity, and the Spread of COVID-19: Housing Policy as a Primary Pandemic Mitigation Strategy. J. Urb. Health. 2021.

Given that this is a talk at the Center for Health Journalism, I wanted to highlight the effects than eviction has on people’s health and well-being, both short- and long-term. Eviction has been associated with several disabling respiratory and coronary conditions, as well as increased risk of anxiety, depression, mental health hospitalization, and suicide. For women, eviction increases the risk of physical and sexual assault.

We know that children are a significant risk factor for eviction, but we’re still only scratching the surface when it comes to understanding how eviction affects those kids. So far, we have evidence that it’s associated with emotional trauma, lead poisoning, food insecurity, and academic decline. Pregnant women going through the eviction process are more likely to give birth pre-term or to low birthweight babies.

Eviction leaves a permanent mark on tenants records, one that many landlords treat as a serious red flag. Eviction thereby creates long-term barriers to finding stable housing in the future, forcing people to settle for worse apartments in worse neighborhoods. This often sets off a cascading chain of residential instability.

5 of 15

Increased eviction risk during the pandemic

At the outset of the pandemic, an estimated 50 million people lived in a renter household that suffered COVID-19 related job or income loss (40% of job loss occurred in low-income households).

Sources: Terner Center at UC Berkeley; Federal Reserve, The Pew Research Center

So this is the status quo—the crisis we found ourselves in before the pandemic. And then COVID-19 hit and everything came to a screeching halt. At that point, there was every indication that the economic fallout of the pandemic was going to be felt most acutely by renters. By April of 2020 more than 50 million people lived in renter households that suffered COVID-19-related job or wage loss. And that loss affected people of color at much higher rates than their white counterparts. Initial numbers from April highlight this disparity: 61% of Hispanic Americans and 44% of Black Americans said that they, or someone in their household, had experienced a job or wage loss due to the coronavirus outbreak, compared with 38% of white Americans.

At the same time, according to a Pew study, over 70% of black and Hispanic renters surveyed said they lacked emergency funds to cover 3 months of expenses. Job and wage loss placed millions of renter households at risk of eviction due to nonpayment of rent.

6 of 15

Eviction Filings during the Pandemic

6

In response to the pandemic, the Eviction Lab began collecting eviction filings in real time in jurisdictions across the country. We call this the Eviction Tracking System (or ETS) and we built a very detailed and informative website for it that you can find at evictionlab.org. We now have data from 6 full states and 31 cities, which lets us monitor what’s happening for a quarter of all renter households in the country. These data allow us to keep tabs on what’s happened since the pandemic began, what effect moratoria have had, and to offer some suggestions of what may be coming next.

What you’re looking at here is eviction filings relative to historical average—by month—across all of the jurisdictions that we’re tracking. You’ll see that pre-pandemic, back in January and February of last year, eviction filings were right about at normal: 100% of historical average. They fell in March as courts across the country started closing down, and bottomed out in April at below 10% of historical average. Through the first four months of the pandemic, under strongest state-level moratoria and with CARES Act protections in place, filings remained below a quarter of normal. Filings increased during the CDC moratorium, but remained below half of normal in nearly all months.

As you’ll notice in that final month of the series, eviction filings have not spiked in the four weeks since the send of the CDC eviction moratorium, which is something I’ll discuss further in just a minute.

7 of 15

Eviction hotspots

Before that, I wanted to take a moment to highlight a new feature that we recently added to the ETS website: a listing of eviction hotspots. Prior research from the Lab has demonstrated how heavily concentrated eviction cases are under normal circumstances. We wanted to evaluate the extent to which that’s true during the pandemic as well, so we went through and calculated which buildings were responsible for most filings during the pandemic. We’ve done this for 20 cities at this point, and are in the process of adding some more. In each, we show on the website the top-10 eviction hotspots in the city and the share of all filings that come from the top 100 buildings. This, for instance, is Jacksonville FL, which has seen over 11,000 eviction cases filed over the course of the pandemic. Over a third of those cases come from just 100 buildings. An intrepid reporter looking for a story could investigate further, aiming to show how these buildings are potentially linked or where they’re clustered. I’m really hoping Kriston will touch on this angle too.

8 of 15

Eviction-COVID links: Vaccination

8

9 of 15

Eviction-COVID links: Incidence and Mortality

9

2.1 times higher incidence

5.4 times higher mortality

10 weeks

Leifheit, et al., Expiring state eviction moratoriums and CovId-19 incidence and mortality. Preprint, 2020.

10 of 15

What’s happening now?

11 of 15

What’s happening now?

12 of 15

Variation across the country

13 of 15

Peter Hepburn��Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University-Newark�Research Fellow, The Eviction Lab�peter.hepburn@rutgers.edu��https://evictionlab.org/eviction-tracking/

14 of 15

Local protections matter

15 of 15

Inequities in ERA distribution