Rental-eviction rates soar with end of aid

Many US cities have seen a record number of eviction cases filed in 2023, and the filings are more than 50 percent higher than the pre-pandemic average levels in some cities.

According to the Eviction Lab of Princeton University, Houston eviction filing rates were 56 percent higher in April and 50 percent higher in May over pre-pandemic levels.

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, eviction rates rose 106 percent in March, 55 percent in April and 63 percent in May. Nashville, Tennessee, was 35 percent higher, and Phoenix 33 percent higher in May; Rhode Island was up 32 percent in May.

The US government funneled $46.5 billion into the rental market during the COVID pandemic to stop landlords from evicting unpaid tenants. That policy cut the eviction filings by more than 57 percent between March 2020 and December 2021, according to the lab.

As the pandemic era policy came to an end, and the rental assistance fund ran out, eviction filings started to climb. Total national filings jumped to the nearly pre-pandemic level by the end of 2022.

All told, landlords filed nearly 970,000 eviction cases in 2022 across the 34 cities tracked by the lab, representing an increase of 78.6 percent compared to 2021.

While eviction filings in 18 cities remained below average in 2022 with particularly low numbers of below two-thirds of average in New York, Richmond, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, other cities saw eviction filings surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

For example, the eviction filings in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul increased from 27.4 percent of the historical average in 2021, to 137.4 percent of the historical average in 2022. There were over 8,900 more eviction cases filed in 2022 than the previous year.

This pattern of large increases was also occurring in cities like Austin and Houston. Landlords in Houston filed 82,000 eviction cases in 2022, 40.6 percent more than the historical average in a typical year prior to the pandemic. In addition, each month's filings were above the historical monthly average in 2022.

For the state of Texas, about 270,000 eviction cases were filed in 2022, a historical high.

Inflation and the pandemic have driven up real estate prices, and the rental rate nationwide is about 30.5 percent higher above 2019, AP reported.

As a result, while eviction cases were slightly lower than normal in 2022, in the six combined cities of Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, New York City and Philadelphia, the total claims were 40 percent above average, the lab found.

While the general rule of thumb is that a household should pay no more than one-third of income for rent, low-income people often must use half or more of their pay for rent, Michelle Gilbert, legal and policy director at the Law Center for Better Housing, told NPR in Chicago.

"When you have to pay that much of your income for your rent, what happens is that there's some emergency, and then you get behind," Gilbert said.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimated a 7.3 million shortfall of affordable units nationwide, and low-income renters have nowhere to go.

According to Daniel Yentel, CEO and president of the coalition, that means "for every 10 of the lowest-income households, there's just a little over three homes that are affordable and available to them. And that gap grew substantially during the pandemic."

Yentel said that people of color are most impacted and most harmed by the housing market. "Black, Latino and indigenous people are disproportionately extremely low-income renters due to decades of systemic racism and ongoing discrimination in many systems. And so, they are disproportionately likely to be evicted or become homeless in our country," Yentel recently said in a PBS radio program.