Peter Hepburn puts it very, very simply: “Eviction is bad for you.”
The associate director of The Eviction Lab at Princeton University told a session at NCSL’s Base Camp that eviction negatively affects almost every area of a person’s life and can result in a cycle of poor health and economic and housing instability.
“Eviction is associated with higher mortality and several disabling conditions, including increased risk of coronary heart disease,” Hepburn says. “Just the threat of being evicted is associated with increased anxiety, depression, exposure to violence, mental health, hospitalizations and suicide.”
For women, he says, eviction is associated with increased risk of physical and sexual assault.
“Eviction is associated with higher mortality and several disabling conditions, including increased risk of coronary heart disease.”
—Peter Hepburn, The Eviction Lab
About 1 in 14 renting households is threatened with evictions every year, and about 3.9 million individuals receive eviction judgments, he says.
Children are at a particularly high risk; about 40% of those threatened with eviction are under 18, according to The Eviction Lab.
“It’s associated with increased exposure to lead poisoning, food insecurity, academic decline and reduced life expectancy,” Hepburn says. “Literally, it takes years off of people’s lives. Kids who are born evicted or whose mothers are evicted when they are pregnant are at greater risk of low birth weight and preterm birth. It really alters your entire life course for the worse.”
Black Americans are disproportionately evicted: Over half of all eviction filings are against Black renters, though they make up just 1 in 5 renters.
Several states have moved to alter the historical advantage landlords have held over tenants.
“When I read our Residential Landlord Tenant Act, it was clear that it was a slam dunk, if you will, for our landlords,” Washington Sen. Patty Kuderer (D) says. “There was absolutely no way out of (eviction). The only thing the judge could look at was whether or not three days had elapsed. We had no defenses. There was no, ‘I lost my job and I need to wait seven days to get unemployment set up.’
There was also, Kuderer says, a provision in the statute that automatically shifted the landlord’s attorney’s fees to the tenant.
“I was talking to one judge who indicated to me that he had an eviction for $50, but he ended up having to enter a judgment for $2,050 because they had to add the attorney’s fees on,” she says. “So we immediately addressed those issues. We extended the timeline to 14 days. We eliminated the automatic fee shifting, and we also allowed for judicial discretion so the judge could take into account the circumstances.”
Indiana’s Supreme Court drove the change in the state’s eviction law, says Rep. Chris Jeter (R).
“They were alarmed by the increase of evictions that we saw, obviously all over the country during COVID, and they instructed our landlord tenant judges to inquire with the litigants if they would be interested in working together to try to acquire some rental assistance,” Jeter says. “And, surprisingly, what we started to see—and it was totally voluntary—but a lot of those landlords and tenants took the court up on that offer and then were referred to resources that allowed them to actually resolve these issues.”
The court’s action piqued bipartisan interest in the state legislature. “And as we began to look at it,” Jetter says, “we saw that 40% of evictions in Indiana actually didn’t result in eviction orders, which led us to the conclusion that landlords don’t want to evict tenants, and tenants really don’t want to be evicted.”
Indiana expanded access to rental assistance and allowed landlords to apply for tenant assistance on behalf of the tenant.
“We really found that that drove a lot of resolution in these landlord-tenant issues,” Jeter says.
The next step was to create a system allowing tenants to get their eviction records expunged. “We saw the landlords can resolve these cases and kind of go about their business,” Jeter says, “but tenants a lot of time would find it difficult to rent additional space or go get a new place because they had these evictions on their records. A lot of times (the evictions) were just because of the hard times that folks had during COVID and other matters, and they were able to make good on it. We didn’t want to perpetually punish them into the future. And so that has really proven to be a tremendous success.”
NCSL policy associate Walker Stevens, who moderated the session, cited research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition that 81% of landlords are able to hire an attorney in eviction cases, compared with only 3% of tenants.
Washington state passed a right-to-counsel law in evictions through the state’s Office of Civil Legal Aid.
“We saw roughly a little over a quarter of the cases filed were actually just dismissed by the judge by having that representation there,” Kuderer says. “So they didn’t find merit in the claim and many more ended up with a payment. It’s not inherently one party bad and the other party good, etc., etc. It really is about just trying to make sure that people have the resources that they may be entitled to, including emergency rental assistance, in order to maintain the tenancy.”
Mark Wolf is a senior editor at NCSL.