The Eviction Lab: Who is Evicted in America?
by Nick Graetz, Carl Gershenson, Peter Hepburn, and Matthew Desmond
for The Eviction Lab
Through a groundbreaking collaboration with the U.S. Census Bureau, we are able to provide a comprehensive picture of the full population of renters living in households that were threatened with eviction between 2007 and 2016 (we describe the full methodology below). We are able to demonstrate, for the first time, the sheer number of people facing the threat of eviction, the scale of racial/ethnic disparities in eviction risk, and the heavy burden of eviction faced by children. Across the life-course, the risk of experiencing an eviction—a deeply traumatizing event—is highest during childhood. Evicted children face increased risk of food insecurity, exposure to environmental hazards, academic challenges, and a range of long-term physical and mental health problems. We now know that nearly three million children face these risks every single year.
These data offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand eviction risk in America. They also make clear that several groups officially protected from housing discrimination by the Fair Housing Act (FHA) are at disproportionately high risk of eviction. We describe our findings in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and highlight five key results here.
