Measuring Evictions during the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

Evictions are a serious risk for households facing job loss and economic upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic, and temporary policies put in place to protect renters are beginning to expire. To understand how the crisis is affecting evictions, we measure eviction filing activity across 44 cities and counties. As of July 7, 2020, eviction filings have almost returned to their prepandemic levels in places where local bans have expired or where they were never enacted. We find that eviction filings tend to surge after temporary policies expire much more in places that enacted both filing bans and hearing bans than those that enacted just hearing bans while allowing filings to continue. As federal stimulus supplements for the unemployed expire, evictions are likely to increase for households that have lost work because of the crisis unless there is material improvement in the economy (Mervosh 2020).

Rural-Urban Differences in the Labor-Force Impacts of COVID-19 in the United States

“…This population was particularly disadvantaged relative to more educated adults in their likelihood of being unable to work, being paid for missed hours, and being able to work remotely. The temporary loss of income posed by this disadvantage likely put these individuals and their families in tenuous economic positions, which may have severely affected other forms of well-being such as household food security (Cowin et al 2020;Morales et al 2020). Although the loss of wages or employment may be temporary for these families, the pandemic's broader impacts are likely to be long term (Van Lancker and Parolin 2020), suggesting the need to continue to monitor how the pandemic has affected these marginalized groups.…”

“…The economic disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have been unprecedented in the United States, including record-high unemployment claims (Brave, Butters, and Fogarty 2020;Brynjolfsson et al 2020), widespread food and housing insecurity (Cowin, Martin, and Stevens 2020;Enriquez and Goldstein 2020;Morales, Morales, and Beltran 2020), and rising physical and emotional health challenges (Pfefferbaum and North 2020;Stainback, Hearne, and Trieu 2020). The majority of empirical work (to date) on the pandemic's labor-market impacts has focused on either the nation as a whole or the urban population, with rural populations-approximately 46 million people-remaining understudied (Mueller et al 2021).…”

Rural-urban differences in the labor-force impacts of COVID-19 in the United States

“…This population was particularly disadvantaged in their likelihood of being paid for missed hours and ability to work remotely. This temporary loss of income likely put these individuals and their families in a very unstable economic position and likely severely affected household food security and other forms of wellbeing (Cowin et al 2020;Morales et al 2020). While the loss of wages or employment may have been temporary for these families, the impacts may be long term; it is likely that these marginalized groups experienced the pandemic's economic disruptions in ways that cannot be measured via currently available CPS data (Van Lancker and Parolin 2020).…”

“…The economic disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have been unprecedented in the United States, including record-high unemployment claims (Brave, Butters, and Fogarty 2020;Brynjolfsson et al 2020), widespread food and housing insecurity (Cowin, Martin, and Stevens 2020;Enriquez and Goldstein 2020;Morales, Morales, and Beltran 2020), and rising physical and emotional health challenges (Pfefferbaum and North 2020;Stainback, Hearne, and Trieu 2020). The majority of empirical work on the pandemic to date has focused on either the nation as a whole or the urban population, with rural areas-approximately 46 million people-remaining largely ignored (Mueller et al 2021).…”

State Landlord–Tenant Policy and Eviction Rates in Majority-Minority Neighborhoods

“…In the first six months of the pandemic, a variety of federal, state, and local protections for renters were implemented to prevent rampant housing instability and eviction (Goodman & Magder, 2020). Preliminary estimates suggest evictions have increased in jurisdictions without bans on eviction filings and hearings, or eviction moratoriums (Cowin, Martin, & Stevens, 2020); the impacts of such policies on communities of color is unknown.…”