The True Victims of the US Evictions Crisis

FLH Director Yuliya Panfil and Brigid Schulte, director of New America’s Better Life Lab, co-wrote an OpEd for CNN highlighting recent findings that children under five years old are the group most likely to face eviction across the United States. Panfil and Schulte ask: are sky high childcare costs, and poor availability of care, to blame for this disturbing trend?

It’s urgent to understand why so many small kids are being displaced from their homes. The eviction study offers no explanations. But we wondered, could it be that for parents, record-high rents — three in ten renter households now spend more than half of their income on rent (according to a 2024 study) — are being exacerbated by a lack of affordable, accessible child care?

In other words, could the convergence of a housing affordability crisis and a care affordability and availability crisis be forcing American parents to choose between paying for housing and paying for child care? Or, like Ms. Schields, could the inability to find child care, much less afford it, prevent parents from finding and keeping a job that would pay the rent?

Read the full article here.