The Complexity of Eviction

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Matthew Desmond Opens Princeton Lab to Seek Solution

In 2008, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison named Matthew Desmond took up residence in a rundown trailer park on the South Side of Milwaukee, and later moved into a Black neighborhood on the city’s North Side, where he roomed with an African American security guard he’d met at the trailer park. His goal was to document from every angle and perspective the pervasive effects of eviction and chronic housing insecurity.

The result of this immersive 18-month fieldwork was hundreds of hours of recorded interviews and conversations, thousands of pages of transcripts, a deep dive into municipal and court records and a book, published by Crown in 2016 entitled, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Following eight Milwaukee families, both Black and White, their landlords and other key players in a highly character-driven narrative, Evicted is firmly in the tradition of such classic works of social consciousness and exposes of desperate living conditions as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, and James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book honed in on eviction as a central issue and cause of poverty, rather than a result or side issue.

Surprisingly to Desmond, this reality had received little previous attention.

“Together,” Desmond writes, “these combined data sources provide a new portrait of the powerful ways the private housing sector is shaping the lives of poor American families and their communities. They have shown that problems endemic to poverty—residential instability, severe deprivation, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, health disparities, even joblessness—stem from lack of affordable housing in our cities.”

His research earned Desmond a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship and an appointment to the Harvard University Faculty. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and a slew of other awards. But perhaps most importantly, Desmond’s ethnographic journey led him to Princeton University, where he became the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and the founder and principal investigator of the Eviction Lab.

As described on its website, “The Eviction Lab is a team of researchers, students and website architects who believe that a stable, affordable home is central to human flourishing and economic mobility. Accordingly, understanding the sudden, traumatic loss of home through eviction is foundational to understanding poverty in America.”

With support from the Gates, JPB and Ford Foundations and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the lab studied tens of millions of records to produce the first dataset of evictions in America, going back to the year 2000. The idea was to raise awareness among stakeholders and local officials as to how evictions are shaping their communities, to prompt them to work toward new solutions. The lab states, “We hope this data is used by policymakers, community organizers, journalists, educators, nonprofit organizations, students and citizens interested in understanding more about housing, eviction and poverty in their own backyards.”

Analyzing Eviction Data
Like Desmond’s book, the data and accounts from the Eviction Lab are nuanced and evenhanded. Shortly before Evicted was published, he told The New York Times, “Poverty is not just a sad accident. Yes, it’s partly about lack of jobs, but it’s also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.”

But in general, neither he nor the lab make out landlords to be bogeymen. They understand that renting, eviction and housing insecurity involve a complex inter-relationship of people and economic and regulatory factors, and that simple answers like lowering or forcibly abating rent are not actually resolutions at all. While we tend to focus on the large and impersonal management companies in the for-profit space, about 40 percent of the country’s close to 50 million rental units are owned by individuals and small operators who have limited means and fixed expenses, such as maintenance, property taxes and often mortgages of their own. And while the majority of evicted renters lose their homes for financial reasons beyond their control, some individuals are simply bad tenants who cause trouble, don’t maintain their properties or have substance abuse or severe mental problems. Therefore, the lab makes clear, the solutions to the eviction crisis can be as complex, varied and area specific as the problem itself.

The data Desmond and his team compiled brought to light a searing statistic: As reporter Conor Dougherty detailed in an August 2020 story in the Times, ”A little less than four million evictions are filed each year, one in four tenant households spends about half its pretax income on rent, and each night some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on streets or under bridges.” That was the experience when the American economy was booming. Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the unemployment rate above ten percent and likely to continue climbing, there are fears that the eviction rate could be orders of magnitude higher.

“The United States is on the brink of an eviction crisis of unprecedented magnitude,” the Times quotes Emily A. Benfer, a health justice authority and visiting professor at both the Columbia University and the Wake Forest University Schools of Law, who has collaborated with the Eviction Lab. In the wake of the crisis, the federal government imposed an eviction moratorium on subsidized housing and rental properties carrying loans back by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and 43 states and the District of Columbia have passed various eviction moratoria of their own, but all are of limited duration and often difficult to enforce.

Eviction is Just the Beginning of Losses
In recent years, it has become both an article of faith and a demonstrable dynamic that housing security is at the root of virtually all other health issues and social wellbeing. The Eviction Lab points out that when families lose their home, they often have to leave their community and their children have to switch schools, leaving friends and a support system and having to tackle a new curriculum. Families regularly lose what furniture and other possessions they have, which are piled on the sidewalk by a moving company or the sheriff’s department’s eviction team, or placed in storage, often requiring a steep fee to be reclaimed. A legal conviction—that is, one directed by a court rather than simply vacating a residence for nonpayment of rent—comes with a court record, which can prevent families from relocating to decent housing in a safe neighborhood (if they can even find and afford it) because many landlords routinely screen for recent evictions. Studies also show that eviction causes employment loss, as the stressful and drawn-out process of being forcibly expelled from a home can lead to workers being absent, not properly dressed or groomed, to make mistakes at work and lose their jobs. Eviction also can profoundly affect mental health and stability. One study found that mothers who experienced eviction reported higher rates of depression two years after their move.

Like the volume of housing disruptions, these attendant problems are only expected to escalate as a result of the pandemic. The Eviction Lab has responded by partnering with housing law experts to create several new tools. The Eviction Tracking System provides weekly updates on eviction filings in a number of American cities. The COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard compiles and rates state-level protections during the pandemic. A regularly updated list of emergency policies across all levels of government tracks the ways elected officials in municipalities around the nation have responded. And for those who need direct help, JustShelter.org offers a database of resources in all 50 states that provide housing assistance, legal aid and other services. There is also a means to provide tips and feedback to individuals and organizations trying to address the eviction and housing insecurity crises in various regions.

These resources are available at evictionlab.org.

Story Contact:
Matthew Desmond, matthew.desmond@princeton.edu