Eviction is the legal process by which a landlord removes a tenant from a rental property, typically for nonpayment of rent or lease violation. It occurs millions of times per year in the United States and represents one of the most acute forms of housing instability — an abrupt loss of housing that triggers cascading consequences for the households involved. Beyond formal eviction, millions more households are displaced through less visible mechanisms: informal pressure from landlords, economic displacement from rising rents in gentrifying neighborhoods, and the slow accumulation of circumstances that ends in homelessness. Together, these forms of displacement represent housing failure at its most visible and most damaging.
The Scale of Eviction
Estimating the number of evictions in the United States each year is complicated by the fragmented nature of eviction records, which are maintained at the local court level and are not systematically compiled in a federal database. Sociologist Matthew Desmond’s Eviction Lab at Princeton University made the first comprehensive national effort to aggregate these records, drawing on court filings from 48 states. The lab’s research found that approximately 3.6 million eviction filings were made per year in the United States in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic — roughly one filing every nine seconds.
Filings are not synonymous with evictions: many are resolved before a formal eviction judgment, through payment of rent arrears, negotiation, or case dismissal. But the filing itself has consequences regardless of outcome. An eviction filing appears in tenant screening databases and can disqualify a household from future rental housing, even if the case was ultimately resolved in the tenant’s favor. The research on screening databases suggests that many landlords reject applicants with any eviction record, at any stage of the process.
The rate of eviction varies substantially by geography, by race, and by income. Southern states, which tend to have less tenant-protective legal environments and more limited access to legal aid, have historically had higher eviction filing rates than the Northeast or West Coast. In some cities — particularly in the South — annual eviction filing rates have exceeded 10 percent of all rental households. Black renters, and particularly Black women renters, face eviction at disproportionately high rates. Desmond’s research in Milwaukee found that Black women renters faced eviction filings at nearly twice the rate of white renters with comparable income levels, a disparity he attributed partly to the geographic concentration of Black renters in poorer, more eviction-prone segments of the rental market and partly to differential treatment by landlords.
Who Faces Eviction
Eviction is highly concentrated among low-income renters, but it is not uniformly distributed within that population. Households with children, households experiencing job loss or income volatility, households whose rental housing quality is substandard (creating disputes over habitability), and households with any prior housing instability are at elevated risk. Research consistently finds that Black and Latina women renters — particularly single mothers — are among the most eviction-vulnerable populations in the United States.
The most common proximate cause of eviction is nonpayment of rent. But nonpayment itself reflects underlying income volatility and the narrow margin between income and housing cost that characterizes cost-burdened households. An eviction filing for $800 in missed rent is not evidence of chronic irresponsibility; it may reflect a single disruption — a lost shift, an unexpected medical expense, a car repair — that a household with no financial cushion cannot absorb without falling behind.
Landlord behavior also shapes eviction patterns. Researchers have documented variation in eviction filing rates across landlords with comparable tenant populations — some landlords file quickly for small arrears while others negotiate payment plans or absorb short-term delinquency. Large, corporate landlords have in some studies been found to file evictions at higher rates than small, individual landlords, a finding consistent with the incentive structures of institutional ownership described in the financialization article.
The Eviction Record Problem
One of the most consequential features of the American eviction system is that eviction records are public and persistent. Court records of eviction filings — not just judgments, but filings — are collected by tenant screening companies and sold to landlords as part of background checks. Most states have no law limiting how long eviction records may be reported or used in rental screening decisions.
This creates a paradox of permanent disadvantage. A household that experiences an eviction filing — perhaps due to a temporary job loss or a landlord dispute — may find that eviction follows them indefinitely, disqualifying them from well-managed housing in the private market and from federally assisted housing that also uses screening criteria. The search for housing following an eviction is therefore often confined to landlords who either do not conduct screening or who accept applicants with records — segments of the market that tend to offer lower-quality, less stable housing. The eviction record can lock households into a cycle of housing instability that is difficult to exit.
Several cities and states have begun addressing this problem through “clean slate” policies that limit the reporting or use of eviction records after a specified period, or that seal records from cases that were dismissed or resolved without a judgment. New York, California, and several other states have enacted or considered such measures. The emerging research on these policies suggests they can meaningfully expand housing access for affected households.
Displacement Through Gentrification
Not all displacement is driven by formal eviction. A second major pathway is economic displacement through neighborhood change — what is commonly referred to as gentrification, a term that describes the process by which rising incomes and rents in a neighborhood lead to the replacement of lower-income, often minority, residents by higher-income newcomers.
Displacement through gentrification operates through several mechanisms. Direct displacement occurs when a landlord does not renew a lease, converts a rental property to a condominium, or substantially renovates and re-rents at prices the original tenant cannot afford. Indirect or “exclusionary” displacement occurs when long-term residents are not themselves evicted but face an environment so transformed — in terms of rents, services, social networks, and character — that they leave. Statistical displacement refers to the condition in which lower-income households who might otherwise have moved into a neighborhood are priced out before they arrive.
Research on the effects of gentrification on displaced residents is consistent in finding negative outcomes: higher subsequent rent burden in destination neighborhoods, disruption of social networks and community ties, and in some cases worse health and educational outcomes compared to similar households who were not displaced. The research is more complicated on the question of who is displaced and at what rate — studies using different methodologies find different rates of direct residential displacement, though all find evidence of exclusionary displacement effects.
Homelessness as a Housing Failure
Homelessness is the most visible and severe form of housing failure — the condition in which a household has no stable shelter, sleeping in emergency shelters, transitional housing, cars, abandoned buildings, or public spaces. The relationship between homelessness and the broader housing affordability crisis is direct: research consistently finds that the primary cause of homelessness is the absence of accessible, affordable housing, not individual factors like mental illness or substance use disorder, though those conditions are common in the homeless population and affect the intensity of need.
The federal government conducts an annual Point-in-Time (PIT) count of people experiencing homelessness, conducted on a single night in late January by communities across the country. The 2023 PIT count identified approximately 653,000 people experiencing homelessness — an increase of about 12 percent from the prior year and the highest count since HUD began collecting data in its current form. The increase was concentrated in a small number of high-cost metros on the West Coast and in New York City, reflecting the interaction between extreme housing cost pressures and inadequate shelter capacity.
PIT counts are methodologically limited. Conducted on a single cold January night, they likely undercount people in unsheltered locations who avoid contact with counters, and they do not capture people in doubled-up or overcrowded housing who are effectively homeless but not visible on the street. Longitudinal studies that track individuals over time consistently find that far more people experience at least one night of homelessness in a year than are captured in a single-night count.
Chronic homelessness — the subset involving people who have been homeless for extended periods, often with disabling conditions — is a distinct policy problem from episodic or transitional homelessness. Most people who experience homelessness do so in a single episode that resolves within weeks or months when they find housing or receive assistance. Chronically homeless individuals require more intensive support, including permanent supportive housing that combines stable housing with access to health, mental health, and substance use treatment services.
The Housing First model — which prioritizes providing stable housing without preconditions regarding sobriety or participation in treatment — has been supported by substantial research evidence as effective at reducing chronic homelessness, including randomized controlled trials conducted in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The debate over Housing First is not primarily about the evidence but about resource allocation: providing permanent supportive housing at scale requires significant investment in both housing units and support services.
The connection between the general housing affordability crisis and homelessness rates is supported by research. Studies have found that in metros where housing costs are higher relative to incomes and where vacancy rates are tighter, homelessness rates are higher — even after controlling for other factors like mental illness prevalence and climate. This suggests that reducing homelessness requires not only targeted interventions for the chronically homeless but also the broader affordability conditions that prevent households from falling into housing instability in the first place.
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