The Effect of Community Organizing on Landlords’ Use of Eviction Filing: Evidence from U.S. Cities

Abstract

Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for this decline. I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organization of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning sixteen years estimate that an addition of ten community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a ten percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage.

Housing movement coalitions in the United States: Trends from big networks among urban civil society leaders

“…Finally, this analysis shows that robust housing coalitions do exist in conservative states, but that they also have not grown in such states since the financial crisis. As such, coalitions in hostile political environments may be more incrementalistic (Pixová, 2018), have less relationships with grassroots movements, or be less able to influence policy, but may still have an important role in helping tenants avoid poverty or displacement (Messamore, 2023). Future ethnographies of housing movements should examine these heterogeneous coalitions and understand their dynamics.…”

“…To identify community antipoverty organisations, meanwhile, I use NTEE-CC minor codes to capture a broad swath of organisations focussed broadly on neighbourhood improvement, encompassing: organisations focussed on crime prevention, organisations working broadly on neighbourhood development as well as with housing assistance, organisations running substance abuse prevention programmes, organisations that provide job training and workforce development, and organisations that provide recreational and social activities for youth. These classifications of community antipoverty organisations have previously been used in studies of crime (Sharkey et al, 2017(Sharkey et al, : 1220, and in research on eviction (Messamore, 2023).…”