Eviction comes fast and often, sweeping country

RICHMOND, Va. — Before the first hearings on the morning docket, the line starts to clog the lobby of the John Marshall Courthouse. No cellphones are allowed inside, but many of the people who have been summoned do not learn that until they arrive. “Put it in your car,” the sheriff’s deputies suggest at the metal detector. That advice is no help to renters who have come by bus. To make it inside, some tuck their phones in the bushes nearby.this courthouse handles every eviction in Richmond, Va., a city with one of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to new data covering dozens of states and compiled by a team led by the Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond.

Two years ago, Desmond turned eviction into a national topic of conversation with “Evicted,” a book that chronicled how poor families who lost their homes in Milwaukee sank ever deeper into poverty. It became a favorite among civic groups and on college campuses, some here in Richmond. Bill Gates and former President Barack Obama named it among the best books they had read in 2017.

But for all the attention the problem began to draw, even Desmond could not say how widespread it was. Surveys of renters have tried to gauge displacement, but there is no government data tracking all eviction cases in America. Now that Desmond has been mining court records to build such a database, it is clear even in his incomplete national picture that evic-