The Evictions That Landlords Got Away With During the Pandemic

FLH Senior Policy Analyst Sabiha Zainulbhai and Nora Daly wrote an article for Slate, exploring "informal evictions" amid COVID-19, and the challenges in measuring home loss that occurs outside the U.S. legal system.

As businesses shuttered and millions of U.S. residents lost their jobs in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many feared that an unprecedented surge of evictions was around the corner. But after the Supreme Court struck down the Centers for Disease Control’s nationwide eviction moratorium last August—ending one of the main protections to keep people housed during the pandemic—court eviction filings didn’t immediately surge above pre-pandemic levels. Had the predicted eviction tsunami simply evaporated?

Those who fight evictions daily—housing advocates, tenant organizers, and legal aid providers—know there’s more to the story. Many suspect that an eviction tsunami is surging around us, but has been rendered invisible because much of the displacement is occurring outside the legal system, through so-called informal evictions. (We discuss this phenomenon in a brief released by New America last week.)

Informal eviction can take many forms, including tactics like landlord intimidation, refusal to make repairs, or spreading misinformation, particularly related to a tenant’s rights. But because they don’t follow a well-defined process, and by definition occur in the shadows, informal evictions are challenging to measure. And without an accurate measure of informal eviction, we’re two years into a pandemic—one that has underscored the inextricable link between housing and health—with at best a murky understanding of how housing displacement is impacting families in the U.S.

Learn more about "informal evictions," and efforts to measure them across the country, here.