Our 2023 research summary

During 2023, our team was hard at work not only keeping track of eviction data, but also publishing new research. Here’s a roundup of our most groundbreaking findings.

In February we published a paper through the Russell Sage Foundation 's journal where we explored the risk of eviction in suburban areas, shedding light on a trend that challenges the notion that housing instability is just a problem of big cities.

Later, we published a preliminary analysis of eviction filings in 2022. This showed that landlords filed nearly 970,000 eviction cases across the sites that we track in the ETS last year, an increase of 78.6% compared to 2021.

Our research also took us beyond the area of evictions and into the issue of zoning. In March, we published research that mapped and compared zoning policies across over 2,600 municipalities nationwide. This showed that exclusionary practices are more common than many have acknowledged, both across and within metro areas.

In May, a new study examined how COVID-era policies managed to cut eviction filings by more than half. The largest reductions in eviction filings were in majority-Black neighborhoods.

That same month, an article published in the American Society of Criminology 's journal showed how extractive landlord strategies promote crime hot spots.

In June, we published a study in Housing Policy Debate on how the low fees that landlords pay when filing an eviction promote high eviction rates. At the same time, increasing those fees could save many from an eviction.

In July, we published a paper with testimonies of tenants and how they navigated the eviction moratoria during COVID-19. Their stories offer insights into how policy supported tenants in need and possible improvements to these programs.

Focusing on public housing, in August our researchers published a paper that shows how some public housing tenants can be especially vulnerable to evictions. We interviewed 60 tenants in Connecticut, Ohio and Florida, all of whom were at risk of or who had experienced eviction, between March and September 2021. The paper examines what these policies meant to renters, how they shaped their well-being and housing security, how racism shaped policy effects, and how these experiences varied across different policy landscapes.

In October, we explored how evictions and gentrification are connected and how many evictions actually happen in areas that are not gentrifying. "Our response to the eviction crisis should be driven by data that allow us to target the neighborhoods—or even the buildings—at greatest risk," our researchers wrote.

Finally, at the end of the year, two groundbreaking reports came out thanks to a collaboration with the U.S. Census Bureau . The first, published in PNAS , identified the real number of people who experience an eviction filing each year: 7.6 million Americans, including 2.9 million children. Previously, we only knew the number of households, and we knew very little about the age, race and gender of these tenants.

“Renters with children face added financial burdens, limited housing options, and often discrimination from landlords,” reporters from The New York Times said?in an article highlighting this new data.

The second article from this collaboration explored the connection between housing insecurity and our health. This paper uncovered how high rents are connected to higher mortality rates. Someone paying 50% of their income toward rent in 2000 was 9% more likely to die over the next twenty years compared with someone paying 30% of their income toward rent. On top of that, simply being filed against was associated with a 19% increase in mortality.

You can find all of our research here and, if you want to stay updated on future work, you can follow us on any social media platform and sign up for our newsletter here.