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Key Takeaways

• More than 2 million households are evicted each year, usually for unpaid rent.
• In a sample of low-income rental portfolios, about twice as many tenants missed rent as were evicted.
• Landlords selectively filed eviction cases against tenants who were least likely to pay rent going forward, usually after multiple months of missed rent. Even so, about 15% of evictions involved tenants who would have resumed paying.
• Policy makers should consider whether eviction mitigation policies adequately address the persistent payment issues that accompany the majority of evictions, as well as the policies’ costs and benefits to tenants, landlords, and taxpayers.

An estimated 2.7 million eviction cases were filed against renters in a typical year prior to the pandemic, representing about 5 to 6 percent of renter households (Gromis et al., 2022). Evictions can be traumatic and can harm tenants’ future economic prospects (Collinson et al., 2024).

Increased awareness of the prevalence and consequences of eviction has led to renewed policy interest in aiding renters at risk of eviction. An increase in policy proposals designed to increase tenant protections and reduce eviction began with the publication of Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted. The pandemic threw an additional spotlight onto eviction policy, with unprecedented interventions through state- and federal-level eviction moratoria and a large-scale emergency rental assistance program.[1] While these policies ended with the pandemic, the surge in proposed tenant protection legislation continued. In 2021, for example, 400 bills were introduced at the federal and state levels alone.

The policy proposals are wide-ranging. Many cities and states have enacted “right-to-counsel” programs providing legal aid to tenants in eviction court. Other cities offer short-term rental assistance to tenants at risk of eviction. The filing fees landlords must pay to initiate an eviction case vary across court systems (Gomory et al., 2023). In different ways, all of these policies seek to help tenants facing eviction.

Understanding the behavior of landlords — who decide whether and when to pursue evictions — is crucial for designing effective eviction-related policy. This policy brief — based on my research with colleagues (Humphries et al., 2024) — discusses what researchers already know about the causes and consequences of eviction, what I’ve learned from my research on landlords, and issues policymakers should consider going forward.

What we know about evictions

The laws and court procedures governing eviction vary across jurisdictions, but several features are common. When a landlord files an eviction case, this initiates a formal court process. A judge presides over the court proceedings, which can end with an eviction order from the judge, a settlement between landlord and tenant (often reached under the judge’s guidance), or a decision dismissing the landlord’s claims. When an eviction order is granted, the landlord can request an enforcement agency, such the local sheriff’s office, to enforce the order by changing the locks and removing possessions from the rental unit.

Although tenants can be evicted for other reasons such as damaging the unit, a large majority of evictions are for nonpayment of rent (Gromis [Wv1] et al., 2022). Cases often end with both possession and money judgments, but anecdotal evidence suggests landlords usually don’t get their money back. The primary benefit for landlords is recovering the unit, which they can then rent to someone else.

The eviction process can be costly for both tenants and landlords. On the one hand, it can be traumatic for tenants, who may simply have nowhere else to go (Desmond, 2016). This can be exacerbated by the “scarring effect” of having an eviction case on the tenant’s record, which can make it difficult for the tenant to find new housing.

Landlords also face costs from going through a formal eviction — court filing fees, legal fees for eviction lawyers, and time and hassle costs. In California, evictions are especially expensive. Filing fees range from $250 to $450, and lawyer fees are $500 to $2,000.[2] The legal process can also take months to conclude. In our study, which covered rental properties in such cities as Chicago and Detroit between 2015 and 2019, tenants moved out on average four to five months after an eviction was filed.

Prior research has shown that eviction has negative downstream consequences for tenants, which may extend to their local communities and social safety nets. Collinson et al. (2024) link eviction court records to administrative data and exploit the fact that cases are randomly assigned to judges who differ in their leniency. Based on this research design, they show that in New York City and Chicago, an eviction judgment against a tenant causes reductions in income and credit access, and increases homeless shelter stays and emergency room visits.

Renters often are hit with evictions precisely when they are most economically vulnerable. Survey evidence and administrative data show that lower-income, non-white, and female-headed households with children disproportionately face eviction (Gaetz et al., 2023). Collinson et al. (2024) also show that households facing eviction experienced increased financial distress in the year leading up to their eviction.

Given these concerns, it is natural to ask whether the policies cities and states are proposing can meaningfully reduce eviction rates. One observation about many of these policies is that they provide short-term relief. For example, short-term rental assistance programs only cover up to a few months’ owed rent. This may be sufficient to help tenants who are undergoing temporary financial distress. However, if a tenant has longer-term difficulties paying rent, these policies may only delay evictions rather than prevent them. This was one of the key questions motivating our research study.

What we’ve learned about landlords

To better understand the drivers of eviction, we obtained proprietary lease-level ledger data on privately owned rental housing in low-income neighborhoods where evictions are common. The data provide an unusually detailed look at landlords’ portfolios — for every month and unit, they record whether every unit is occupied or vacant, the rent charged to and paid by each tenant, and — crucially — when the owner filed a case in eviction court.

The data cover cities in the upper Midwest during 2015-2019. A large share of the units are located in Chicago and Detroit, where rental prices were stable and tenant protections moderate during this time period. The average rent was about $900 per month. Some of the strongest tenant protection policies — such as rent control and good-cause eviction laws — did not impact this sample.

In this sample, there were many evictions — one in four tenants had an eviction case filed against them at some point during their lease. However, an even greater number of tenants — 50 percent — had periods where they missed rent. This reflects the fact that landlords tolerated some nonpayment and usually waited to file an eviction until the tenant was at least two or three months in arrears. Figure 1 shows the distribution of tenant balances in the month an eviction was filed. Many tenants recovered from default; 39 percent of those who defaulted for the first time eventually paid back the rent they owed.

Figure 1: Histogram of tenants’ owed rent on the date an eviction case was filed (Humphries et al., 2024).

These patterns show, first, that nonpayment risk is a significant factor on the balance sheets of landlords who operate in the low-income rental market. Tenants without a rent subsidy paid only 86 percent of the rent they owed. Figure 2 shows that nonpayment losses were concentrated among a minority of tenants who owed several months’ rent at moveout. Nonetheless, about one-third of losses from nonpayment came from tenants who were not evicted. This illustrates the value of the ledger data: while rent owed is recorded in eviction court records, researchers do not usually observe it for tenants who are not eventually evicted.

Figure 2: Histogram of tenants’ owed rent at moveout. Sample includes tenants who moved out, whether or not an eviction was filed (Humphries et al., 2024).

The data also suggest that landlords think carefully about whether and when to initiate eviction proceedings. It might make sense for a landlord to tolerate some nonpayment given that some tenants recover from default and the eviction process can cost the equivalent of multiple months of rent. If the tenant can recover or at least continue paying, keeping the tenant is probably preferable to going through a costly eviction process, which includes not just the legal costs but losses due to vacancy while trying to find a new tenant, who also might not pay.

Finally, if landlords think carefully about eviction, tenant protection policies making it more or less costly to evict might impact their decision to do so. But the data on their own do not tell us how landlord eviction decisions might respond to new protections. We use a model to extrapolate the nonpayment and eviction patterns in our data to predict (1) how much evicted tenants were likely to have paid if they had been allowed to stay in their unit and (2) how landlords’ decisions to evict depend on the costs and benefits of doing so.

The model clarifies that while many tenants in default recovered and continued to pay rent, evicted tenants were much less likely to have done so. For example, 85 percent of evicted tenants would have missed at least three of the next 12 months of rent if allowed to stay in their unit. Landlords behave as though the cost of an eviction equals two to three months’ rent. The high cost of eviction for landlords leads them to wait to file until they believe a tenant is unlikely to recover.

Because of this, our model predicts that policies of the scope many cities and states are considering would not have prevented most evictions. For example, doubling the filing fee in Cook County, Illinois, would have reduced the eviction rate by 5 percent, as would a significant expansion of Chicago’s short-term rental assistance program. These predictions are driven partly by the fact that eviction is already quite costly for landlords and partly by the fact that by the time most tenants are evicted, they are unlikely to pay going forward.

 What policymakers should consider

 Even if most evictions are unlikely to be prevented, that doesn’t mean that the policies under discussion aren’t worthwhile. Our findings can help policymakers weigh the costs and benefits of various reforms to tenants, landlords, and taxpayers.

First, it is important to understand which types of renters are likely to be helped. Our model predicts that policies such as legal aid, which assist renters after an eviction has been filed, are likely to help the tenants in greatest financial distress. In contrast, increased filing fees or rental assistance are more likely to prevent eviction for tenants who could recover and pay rent going forward. Policymakers interested in correcting externalities from eviction may be more interested in the latter group of policies; policymakers focused on helping renters in the greatest financial distress may prefer assistance that primarily benefits renters after evictions have been filed.

Second, benefits to tenants must be weighed against additional costs (or benefits) these programs create for landlords. Even if policymakers are not concerned with landlords’ welfare per se, landlord costs can have unintended consequences. Landlords could raise rents or invest less in maintaining their properties, leading to higher prices and lower housing quality. Alternatively, landlords might screen prospective tenants more aggressively in response to stronger eviction protections, shutting out the most economically vulnerable renters from the market entirely.

Our results suggest that programs like legal aid, which delay evictions, generate particularly high costs for landlords because of the extra time they give to tenants who cannot pay. One advantage of rental assistance programs is that both landlords and tenants may benefit.

Finally, policymakers should consider the costs or savings these policies generate for taxpayers. A benefit of taxing evictions is that it raises revenue. This revenue could be redirected to, for example, finance homelessness services or rental assistance programs. In contrast, legal aid programs usually involve the government paying tenants’ legal costs. Budget constraints have been a major challenge in New York City’s citywide right-to-counsel program.[3]

The fact that these policies have different effects along all of these dimensions also implies that policy packages that combine them may be more attractive than any one policy on its own. For example, an eviction tax raises revenue but generates costs for landlords, while expanded rental assistance would be costly to taxpayers but benefit landlords. Higher filing fees, paired with expanded rental assistance, could therefore help renters and reduce evictions while generating smaller costs for landlords and the government.

Overall, these policies can all make some dent in eviction rates. But our findings suggest that if policymakers want to dramatically reduce evictions, other approaches are needed.

One option is to make eviction much more difficult for landlords — through long delays or large eviction taxes. Such changes might dramatically reduce evictions. However, our research suggests that they would generate large costs for landlords, which may then be passed on to renters.

A second option is to address the longer-term financial distress that appears to be driving many evictions. One way to do this could be through expansion of existing parts of the social safety net. For example, many low-income tenants do not qualify for unemployment insurance benefits upon losing their job. There is also a housing-specific program that could play this role: the Housing Choice Voucher program. This program provides a generous, long-term subsidy for low-income households to rent on the private housing market, which greatly reduces the share of income most beneficiaries devote to paying rent. Benefits are currently rationed among those eligible due to limited funding, but the U.S. Congress could vote to increase funding and expand benefits to all eligible households. In 2015, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that such an expansion would cost $410 billion over 10 years and assist 8 million additional households.[4]

Indeed, tenants in our data with a housing choice voucher were less than half as likely to be evicted as tenants that do not have one. While this correlation may not be causal since tenants with and without vouchers may not be directly comparable, it is consistent with the idea that longer-term assistance may meaningfully reduce evictions.

Footnotes

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References

1. Cassidy, Mike, and Janet Currie (2023). “The effects of legal representation on tenant outcomes in housing court: Evidence from New York City’s Universal Access program,” Journal of Public Economics, 222, 104844.
2. Collinson, Robert, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Davin Reed, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk (2024). “Eviction and Poverty in American Cities,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 139, 57–120.
3. Desmond, Matthew (2012). “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology, 118, 88–133.
4. Desmond, Matthew (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown Books.
5. Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Katherine O’Regan, Sophia House, and Ryan Brenner (2021). “Do Lawyers Matter? Early Evidence on Eviction Patterns After the Rollout of Universal Access to Counsel in New York City.” Housing Policy Debate, 31, 540–561.
6. Gaetz, Nick, Carl Gershenson, Peter Hepburn, and Matthew Desmond (2023). “A Comprehensive Demographic Profile of the U.S. Evicted Population,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120, e2305860120.
7. Gomory, Henry, Douglas S. Massey, James R. Hendrickson, and Matthew Desmond (2023). “The Racially Disparate Influence of Filing Fees on Eviction Rates.” Housing Policy Debate, 33(6), 1463-1483.
8. Gromis, A., I. Fellows, J. R. Hendrickson, L. Edmonds, L. Leung, A. Porton, and M. Desmond (2022). “Estimating eviction prevalence across the United States,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119, e2116169119.
9. Humphries, John Eric, Scott Nelson, Linh Nguyen, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger (2024). “Non-payment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market.” Technical Report.