2024 in review

As the year comes close to an end, we wanted to sum up some of the findings and analysis we worked on this year.

Early in 2024, Eviction Lab revisited the public health implications of eviction policies during the pandemic. Our analysis in a selection of locations that equal to a tenth of the renter households in the country estimated that moratoria and rental assistance were vital: if filings had continued at normal levels during the pandemic, over 9,000 additional renters would have died in the tracked locations. Conversely, eliminating eviction filings entirely during this period could have saved over 8,000 lives in the same areas.

We also analyzed how an economic boom can impact housing markets: we studied Williams County, North Dakota, where we uncovered how the fracking industry made housing more unstable for their community members. Previously, low eviction rates in the county skyrocketed alongside rising rents, transforming it into both the fracking and eviction capital of North Dakota by 2019.

Eviction Lab also spotlighted rural America, where over 200,000 eviction cases were filed annually between 2000 and 2018. The issue is most acute in the rural South, with counties in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina experiencing eviction rates above the national average.

Using our Eviction Tracking System, our researchers provided a picture of how evictions increased in 2023. Landlords filed nearly 1,115,000 eviction cases in 2023. That’s over 100,000 more cases than were filed in 2022. Of the 32 cities where we have complete data coverage, 25 saw an increase in eviction filings between 2022 and 2023.

We also published an analysis of the challenges in finding eviction data state by state. We found data for 41 states either via requests or through the state’s websites, but in Montana, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Oklahoma, we weren’t able to find any data.

Through our Eviction Tracking System we also continued to monitor eviction trends in more than 30 cities and 10 states across the country. Although we are still waiting for December data, between January and November 2024, landlords filed more than 926,000 evictions in the locations we track.

Some important locations saw considerable increases when comparing Jan-Nov 2023 with 2024. In Austin, eviction filings increased 35%; Phoenix saw an increase of 14%; and Pittsburgh experienced 11% more filings. At the same time, some of the biggest cities in our database, like New York and Philadelphia, not only saw decreases but also remained below pre-pandemic averages.

We know well that evictions disproportionately impact Black tenants and women. This was still the case this year. In Dallas, for example, a third of the renters are Black, but almost half of the evictions were filed against Black tenants. In Milwaukee, 36% of all renters are Black, but we estimate that 66% of the eviction filings were against Black tenants. In St. Louis and Philadelphia, we see similar numbers: more than 60% of filings are against Black tenants, but they constitute less than 45% of the renter households.

We hope that our research was helpful to the community of policymakers, legal experts, academic researchers, and citizens who want to see a country where everyone has access to a safe place to live. As always, you can reach us at [email protected] if you have questions!