What Happened to the Eviction Tsunami?

FLH Program Director Yuliya Panfil and David Spievack wrote an OpEd for FiveThirtyEight exploring why the U.S. is not experiencing a widely-predicted "eviction tsunami" amid COVID-19.

Since the pandemic began, housing experts (including one of the authors of this article) have been predicting that the pandemic’s economic fallout would produce an eviction “tsunami” that could put as many as 40 million people out of their homes.

The experts are still waiting.

Theories abound as to why we have not witnessed a cascade of evictions. Some observers think that social policies, like the eviction moratorium, stimulus payments, extended unemployment insurance and rental assistance have staved off disaster. Others think “mom-and-pop landlords” who tend to deal with lower-income tenants have been more accommodating or reluctant to lose tenants than expected. A few commentators have pointed to problems with the data underlying predictions of an eviction tsunami, and to the existence of contradictory data. Another view is that a tsunami of evictions is indeed occurring, only we can’t see it: Even as courts halted formal evictions, millions of tenants faced “informal evictions” over the course of the pandemic, with landlords refusing to make necessary repairs or changing the locks without notice or using other means of harassment. 

The reality is undoubtedly some combination of the above, and given the lack of nationwide eviction data, parsing out the relative contributions of these factors is likely not possible. The United States has no national eviction database, and as of April 2021, one-third of U.S. counties don’t report annual eviction data. Informal evictions, which some estimates suggest could be over five times more common than court-ordered evictions, aren’t tracked at all.  

But regardless of how we arrived at the unexpected place of having fewer formal evictions than before the pandemic, what we can say in hindsight is that a figure of 40 million evictions was likely far too high. That’s because the data used for this estimate and several other early predictions was a poor barometer of likely evictions.  

To read more about how researchers perhaps overestimated the scale of evictions amid COVID-19, click here.