Camila Vallejo is a communications specialist at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.
More than 7 million U.S. renters, on average, face an eviction threat every year. Yet a number of states still make it difficult for local governments, advocates and researchers to get complete information about who is being evicted.
We need to improve this data in every corner of the country. Local governments’ ability to understand and act on our current housing crisis relies on leaders grasping the status of evictions in their communities.
With a concerted effort to invest in the local courts, which manage eviction filings, policymakers can go from navigating the eviction crisis blind to nipping it in the bud. Researchers and court systems have found that better data can result from simple changes, such as improved court standards and case management systems.
An experiment reveals eviction data inconsistency
At Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, the housing research center I work for, we currently offer eviction data for more than 30 cities and 10 states — updated monthly and representing a third of renters in the country. But why do so many places still lack this information?
To understand this issue, I set out earlier this year to ask every state a relatively simple question: How many evictions were filed annually statewide between 2018 to 2021? Nine states were unable to provide these baseline figures: Montana, Oklahoma, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. While I had luck getting data in the remaining states, in many places it was only after extensive research and follow-up requests.
The federal government does not require states to track eviction data, and local courts vary in how they track such information — if they decide to do so at all.
While 10 states I requested data from had interactive public dashboards, 15 offered the data through already-generated reports often buried somewhere on their websites. Sixteen states created reports specifically for my request but differed in timeliness and how they categorized evictions.
Fix it from the bottom up
Examples across the country highlight the numerous paths communities can take to improve eviction data.
“It’s really hard to identify the issue if someone is not sitting back and looking at the data,” Katherine Keefe, circuit court clerk for McHenry County, Illinois, told me when I conducted interviews for my data-collection experiment. While the state couldn’t fulfill my data request for 2018-2021, it started compiling eviction numbers in 2022, a state public information officer told me.
Keefe says the data compilation is only possible thanks to local support. She said that Illinois started by updating its record-keeping manual while pushing each county to upgrade its case management system. That cost McHenry County several thousand dollars, but it was worth it, Keefe told me.
This change allows courts like Keefe’s to feed a quarterly statewide record of eviction filing numbers, giving stakeholders a better glimpse of the problem.
In some places, getting better eviction data isn’t just about updating collection methods but instead cutting back on red tape. As of March, South Carolina makes eviction data available for every county in the state. That’s thanks to South Carolina’s NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, which sued the state judicial branch to lift a ban on “scraping” eviction data from public records.
The need for better data became more evident than ever during the pandemic, as housing stability became an evident necessity to overall public health. South Carolina’s NAACP wanted to educate and cater to tenants facing housing instability in real time, but they didn’t have the resources to see who needed help the most and where they could find them.
Glynnis Hagins, a recent Skadden Fellow at NAACP, said the courts limited data access in part to protect tenants’ privacy.
“So many landlords and tenant screening companies want access to this data in the same way that we're getting it, and [courts] want to keep that out of their hands,” Hagins says. Today, both can be balanced. Similar to South Carolina, local governments can share eviction data with journalists, researchers and others who will ensure tenant privacy while limiting usage to organizations like tenant-screening companies who want tenant records to turn a profit.
While Hagins is glad South Carolina is now a leader in data availability, she adds the U.S. still has a long way to go in giving tenants the resources they deserve.
“The fact that the federal government doesn't require states to share how many tenants are facing eviction really speaks volumes, not just about the state of eviction and renters, but just about housing overall,” Hagins told me. “It just isn’t a priority for the government.”
Looking forward
Why focus on improving eviction data now? A record high of 22.4 million renter households are spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, possibly forgoing food or medical needs. All while research shows that evictions can have cascading consequences and even contribute to premature deaths.
Thankfully, this issue has garnered attention from researchers and housing advocates alike, so there’s no shortage of efforts to solve the problem or examples of why reliable numbers help. Local data has supported the continued success of eviction-diversion programs, held landlords accountable and pinpointed system failures.
Organizations like New America have created guides for local courts to improve and leverage eviction data. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has drafted reports detailing why eviction data matters and what is needed to improve it: concerted support and financial investment from all levels of government.
When we don’t have reliable data, it’s easy to ignore a problem or pretend that a person in crisis is a one-off example. While policymakers can often turn a blind eye, tenants can’t.
