Eviction filings skyrocket post-pandemic

ATLANTA — After a lull during the pandemic, eviction filings by landlords have come roaring back, driven by rising rents and a long-running shortage of affordable housing.

Most low-income tenants can no longer count on pandemic resources that had kept them housed, and many are finding it hard to recover because they haven’t found steady work or their wages haven’t kept pace with the rising cost of rent, food, and other necessities.

Homelessness, as a result, is rising.

“Protections have ended, the federal moratorium is obviously over, and emergency rental assistance money has dried up in most places,” said Daniel Grubbs-Donovan, a research specialist at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

“Across the country, low-income renters are in an even worse situation than before the pandemic due to things like massive increases in rent during the pandemic, inflation, and other pandemic-era related financial difficulties.”

Eviction filings are more than 50 percent higher than the pre-pandemic average in some cities, according to the Eviction Lab, which tracks filings in nearly three dozen cities and 10 states. Landlords file around 3.6 million eviction cases every year.

Among the hardest-hit is Houston, where rates were 56 percent higher in April and 50 percent higher in May. In Minneapolis/St. Paul, rates rose 106 percent in March, 55 percent in April, and 63 percent in May. Nashville was 35 percent higher and Phoenix 33 percent higher in May; Rhode Island was up 32 percent in May.

The latest data mirror trends that started last year, with the Eviction Lab finding nearly 970,000 evictions filed in locations it tracks — a 79 percent increase compared with 2021, when much of the country was following an eviction moratorium.

At the same time, rent prices nationwide are up about 5 percent from a year ago and 30.5 percent above 2019, according to the real estate company Zillow. There are few places for displaced tenants to go, with the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimating a 7.3 million shortfall of affordable units nationwide.

Many tenants would have been evicted long ago if not for the safety net created during the pandemic. There was also $46.5 billion in federal Emergency Rental Assistance that helped tenants pay rent and funded other protections. Much of that has been spent or allocated, and calls for additional resources have failed to gain traction in Congress.