On Friday, NPR's Marketplace ran this headline: "Eviction filings hit pre-pandemic levels a year after the end of the moratorium."
The evidence presented is slim—which is hardly surprising since data on evictions is all but nonexistent in the US. Eviction is a local court action and the county numbers aren't aggregated by any federal agency. In fact, literally the only organization even trying to track evictions is the Princeton Eviction Lab, and there's a hard limit to what they can do. They only track 31 cities, and only five of the top ten, a list that excludes both Los Angeles and Chicago.
That said, the show interviewed Carl Gershenson, the project director at the Eviction Lab, who said "Eviction activity in the United States looks like it’s returning approximately to where it was before the pandemic." A Federal Reserve paper using the Lab's database of evictions estimates that early this year we were up to about 200 evictions per 100,000 renters compared to 300+ before the pandemic.¹ Finally, my own eyeball look at the Lab's data suggests that evictions have returned to pre-pandemic level in the sunbelt but are still significantly below that in other areas.
For what it's worth, however, there's another bit of data that doesn't address evictions directly but does address the general health of the rental market. It's our old friend, the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, and for the past couple of years it's been asking renters how they're doing:
It stands to reason that you're only at risk of being evicted if you're behind on rent, and that number has stayed rock steady since the pandemic started. Government payments and eviction moratoriums helped during 2020 and 2021, while economic recovery picked up the slack late last year.
Overall, then, what little evidence we have suggests that the rental market is back to its normal, pre-pandemic state. Evictions are down in some cities but up in others, and the ability of renters to pay their rent has been stable all along. We're neither in nor heading toward a crisis, just stuck in our usual state of chronic, low-level stress, where we treat the poor in an offhandedly crappy way and no one cares much. I suppose you can call that whatever you want.
¹The paper also concluded that the eviction moratorium in the CARES Act was ineffective while the CDC moratorium had a very large effect.