Sigh. This is from the Wall Street Journal today:
Eviction filings over the past year in a half-dozen cities and surrounding metropolitan areas are up 35% or more compared with pre-2020 norms, according to the Eviction Lab, a research unit at Princeton University.
This includes Las Vegas, Houston, and in Phoenix, where landlords filed more than 8,000 eviction notices in January. That was the most ever in a single month for the county that includes the Arizona capital.... Overall, eviction notices were up 15% or more compared with the period before the pandemic for 10 of the 33 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab, which looked at filings over the past 12 months.
If you look at a list of major US cities, on any metric, there will always be some at the top and some at the bottom. It takes less than ten seconds to hop over to the Eviction Lab website and see this chart front and center:
As you can see, the national average for evictions is consistently less than their old average. You have to read to the seventh paragraph of the Journal article to learn obliquely that "evictions more broadly have settled to roughly where they were before the pandemic."
Over the past year or so progressives have been hellbent on promoting the idea that we're barreling toward an eviction crisis now that pandemic protections have mostly been loosened. But at least their motivations are clear. What's the Journal's excuse?
What's the Journal's excuse?
They want to tsk-tsk about those lazy slackers (for which read young &/or non-White people) who are mooching off society, unlike responsible (non-young White) people who something sensible something responsible something. Give their Murdoch / plutocrat audience a warm fuzzy.
Also maybe some kinda second-order-effect jonesing for lower interest rates -- more evictions because costs too high because interest rates too high or some equally convoluted nonsense. And taxes also, too.
What's the Journal's excuse?
biden's shitty economy is getting (white) moms and kids tossed out into the street
Your Eviction Lab link is only 10 states/34 cities for its whole dataset. That's hardly the ironclad source you're making it out to be. Evictions are down about 6.5% among the locations they track, which again - is not the full country and notably it doesn't look at the following large markets/states with expensive rental markets:
Washington, DC
Maryland
CALIFORNIA
Chicago
etc.
What is with your obsession on this topic? Why are you so hellbent on "proving" that there is no housing crisis?
Today's edition of "That thing you're worried about? It's not a problem to me, Kevin Drum." Which is oh-so-often housing.
Kevin always has data to back his claims. You can argue with his data, but acting like he shouldn't poke holes in panicky narratives is silly. The media has an incentive to promote panicky narratives because they get clicks, thereby making the world look worse than it is; Kevin is doing a good public service by debunking alarmist nonsense and helping us calm down.
"Panicky narratives"
*rolls eyes*
How many holes do we need to poke in Kevin's data, according to you? One? Ten? Twenty? Please, in the name of your radical moderation, set a goal post.
So the cities and states it DOES look at are not representative? Any data to back that up? Or is this merely silly nitpicking -- "hey, they didn't look at EVERY RENTER IN THE COUNTRY!!11!!"
Perhaps take a look at general discussions of "statistical sampling" in the literature.
It's not "statistical sampling", which if you were arguing in good faith you'd have thought about this for more than half a second. Go look at what Eviction Lab says about where they get their data: only from those places with publicly available data.
I notice you didn't state any reason why you think the data with a built-in selection bias is representative, especially since it excludes the most populous state and several other of the country's largest housing markets.
They normalized this for population growth, right?
here's your reminder that the pandemic *emergency* has ended, but the pandemic rages on, with multiple waves every year, no herd immunity in sight, and accumulating research showing that COVID does long term damage that becomes more important after multiple infections.