Post-pandemic surge in evictions spotlights unequal housing crisis

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the 2018 data on eviction rates in Washington, D.C. comes from Eviction Lab’s National Eviction Map. We regret the error.

A surge in evictions in some cities and states is returning rates to pre-pandemic levels and highlighting how renters of color and renters with children are facing the brunt of America’s housing crisis.

Eviction rates have been steadily increasing after dropping dramatically due to renter protection measures passed during the COVID-19 pandemic. As federal assistance has ended, the fate of renters has largely been left in the hands of state and local governments.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, the largest nation’s eviction database, reported a 78 percent increase in evictions from 2020 to 2021 in the 10 states and 34 cities it monitors. And the crisis has likely gotten worse since then as remaining eviction moratoriums have ended. 

The trends are not impacting American renters equally. Nonwhite tenants and tenants with families are feeling the brunt of America’s housing crisis. 

“We know that, disproportionately, the families that are facing eviction in this country have children,” Peter Hepburn, associate director at the Eviction Lab, told The Hill. 

In May, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) announced the Build Housing with Care Act of 2023, which would address housing disparities by promoting affordable housing that is co-located with child care.

“In Oregon, there are over 110,000 renters who make less than $27,000 a year and pay over half their income to rent,” Wyden said in a statement to The Hill. “And making rent is even more challenging when the cost of childcare can reach the cost of a mortgage.”

Since being referred to committees in the House and Senate, this bill has not appeared to make any progress.

“Having greater access to both affordable housing and childcare would be enormously beneficial to low-income households,” Hepburn said of the bill.  

Lawmakers are also applying pressure over the racial disparities in America’s eviction rates. Last week, Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) pressed the Housing and Urban Development Department’s inspector general on the issue during a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing. 

“As of last month, over 1.8 million people reported that they were at risk of eviction or foreclosure within the next two months,” Williams said at the hearing. “Nearly 54 percent are Black or Latino.”

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) also brought this problem to the House’s attention in a resolution about the unique difficulties Black women face in the U.S.

“Black women have the highest rate of eviction in the country,” Watson Coleman said in a statement to The Hill.

The Eviction Lab’s findings supported Williams’s and Watson Coleman’s concerns. 

“We’ve been able to demonstrate that Black renters routinely face much higher eviction rates than their white counterparts,” Hepburn said. “In many cases, we’re talking twice as high.” 

The emerging eviction data shows abiding inequalities more than five decades after the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, which ostensibly ended practices of racial exclusion in the housing market. Households with children were not labeled as a protected class until Congress amended the act in 1988. 

While the data appears to contradict the spirit of the Fair Housing Act, Hepburn said there was a lot of work to be done to prove it was being explicitly violated. 

The Lab’s Eviction Tracking System’s (ETS) breakdown of state and city eviction data showed an eviction’s disproportionate effects on renters of color in some states where rates are rising the fastest. 

As of June 3, Virginia had the highest amount of filings out of all the states that ETS tracks. The counties with the two highest eviction filing rates since June 2022 had largely Black renter populations.

In recent years, ETS showed 68 percent of those who faced eviction in Philadelphia were Black despite making up only 42 percent of the renters. 

New York City and Las Vegas, the cities with the highest number of eviction filings, according to ETS’s latest data, had similar disparities. The highest number of eviction filings since spring 2022 for each city were in areas with predominantly non-white renters. 

Washington, D.C., also has a history of high eviction rates. In 2018, Eviction Lab’s National Eviction Map reported an eviction filing rate of 17.2 percent for the city, which topped the national average by 9.39 percent. A study from the Brookings Institution found that of evictions filed in D.C. from 2012-16, approximately 78 percent took place in Black-majority neighborhoods. 

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has attempted to tackle the racial disparities in the housing market through The Black Homeownership Strike Force. Bowser recently allocated $18 million to the committee’s Black Homeownership Fund and other recommendations.

However, Bowser remains short of her 2019 goal to create 36,000 additional housing units by 2025. On top of that, her latest budget proposed slashing some of the city’s housing programs funding.  

While the issue is largely being left to states and cities to deal with, Hepburn said there is plenty of room for federal action. 

“We’ve talked with folks at a number of the agencies about ways they could engage with this or be involved with this work,” Hepburn said when asked about the federal government’s interest in the lab. “It remains to be seen what comes next.”