From the Wall Street Journal today:
Why Philadelphia Is Bucking a Nationwide Surge in Evictions
In a nutshell, Philadelphia's success is chalked up to its mandatory eviction diversion program: "After a trial period [starting in 2020], the city in June made it a permanent requirement for landlords to go through out-of-court negotiations with tenants before they can sue to remove them."
The Journal uses data from the Eviction Lab, which got me curious about evictions in general. It turns out Philadelphia isn't the top performer:
Philadelphia is down 41% compared to before the pandemic but New York City is even better, with a decline of 48%. So what's their secret? Here is eviction nationwide:
Evictions never turned into a crisis. After the pandemic they reverted to their normal rate and have declined by about a quarter over the past year.
As an aside, I have some doubts about the Eviction Lab data. They show Maryland as the eviction capital of the country—which might be true—but their most recent data includes things like 98.8 eviction filings per hundred renters in Baltimore County. It doesn't seem especially likely that landlords literally tried to evict everyone, which prompts me to have some doubts about the rest of their data. Caveat emptor.
Setting aside cities in the red states, what's up with Minnesota?
Clearly an opportunity for an attack ad against Walz.
I'm a MN resident and know there was a state eviction moratorium that was more comprehensive and longer than the CDC national one. Looking it up I see it started to phase out beginning in August 2021 and the final eviction protections lasted until June 1, 2022 (https://www.cura.umn.edu/research/impact-covid-19-eviction-moratorium-landlord-initiated-displacement-actions-minnesota). But I have no idea if that was done in other states or if would make any difference.
(I know this is comparing with PRE-pandemic, but I'm thinking if there were a lot of cases that were "bottled up" the rate could rise higher after the restriction was lifted than if they had been less restricted.)
Color me shocked and surprised that 3 of the top locations are in Florida.
Seriously, what an increasingly sickening government that state has. Sure glad they don't have any serious problems like natural disasters or insurance crises to deal with!
Under FAQ on the Eviction Lab site, they explain that Maryland formerly had the eviction process start with a court filing, rather than a notice from the landlord to the tenant, giving a higher rate of eviction filings than other states. They say that some landlords would file every month against the same tenant, so there can be many filings for a single tenant. So 98 filings per 100 tenants doesn't mean filings against 98% of the tenants.
Yeah, it's going to vary widely across states.
It doesn't look to me like there is much of a relationship between rent affordability and eviction filings. Are eviction rates mostly reflective of differences in local laws, and not affordability?
It's apples and oranges between states. As Jerry noted, in Maryland the data is for the number of eviction suit filings (they aren't called that in Maryland - they're "Nonpayment of rent" and "breach of lease", for non-rent-related matters). And those can happen every month that a tenant is delinquent on rent, and even getting a judgement against a tenant doesn't result in automatic eviction - so they aren't eviction numbers.
But OF COURSE you would see rent-related evictions higher in areas that are less affordable. Why is that even a question? It's patently obvious.
Jared Kushner owned a lot of properties in Baltimore and was doing this. along with charging all kinds of late fees on top of other fees. He was sued in court and had to pay $3M.
https://www.propublica.org/article/kushner-apartments-lawsuit-baltimore-maryland-settlement
I grew up in Maryland. Now I can puff my chest out with pride and say, “Look at us. We’re so great only the ‘One Percenters’ get to stay!”
New York was very generous with rent relief even after ERAP (emergency rental assistance program) and LRAP (landlord rental assistance program) expired and now many municipalities have Good Cause Eviction (rent stabilization lite, rents cant go up by more than 10% and if the LL doesn’t want to renew the lease they have to say why) and NYC has given all tenants a civil right to counsel, so that might explain NY’s statistics.
That thing you're worried about (America's eviction crisis)? It's not a big deal to Kevin Drum. No crisis is ever a real thing to Kevin Drum.
I don't think he's entirely off base with this, but I think it's for other reasons.
However, it's of a piece with his insistence that there is no housing crisis - which there absolutely is, and eviction rates (even though they've been tamped down by various things, including aid programs) are a symptom of that.
So since Kevin's against the idea of a housing crisis, he's also against one of the pieces of evidence for a housing crisis.