Increased rental rates causing widespread evictions

Increased rental rates are creating difficulty for people trying to keep up with payments, which subsequently is leading to lots more evictions.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), more than half of U.S. workers cannot afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment while only working one full-time job. Now, cities across the U.S. are seeing more tenants removed from their rentals.

Houston real estate attorney Ernie Garcia said that since the Covid-19 pandemic, more households have struggled to keep up with their bills and rental payments.

"We’ve seen definitely an increase, a rise in those numbers," Garcia said.

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The NLIHC says half of people who have a full-time job and make up to $33/hour can’t afford a one-bedroom rental.

"When they get increased rental values due to the landlord seeing increases in things like insurance and property taxes, that’s when you’re seeing people who otherwise didn’t have problems encounter difficulties," Garcia said.

Carl Gershenson, Ph.D., is the director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. He says in the counties where Princeton’s Eviction Lab has studied recent data, landlords filed more than 1 million eviction cases in 2023. This is an increase of 100,000 cases compared to 2022, and 500,000 more than 2021.

"Rents have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. If rents in those cities increase at such a rapid rate, that is just going to squeeze a lot of families who were already stretching themselves in order to make the monthly rent," Gershenson said.

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Gershenson says there is a solution, but it would take the help of local governments and employers.

"Ultimately, there are two solutions. We can get rent to go down, or we can get people’s incomes to go up," Gershenon said. "At the same time, we’ve seen evictions go down in cities in the northeast like Philadelphia and New York City, where local governments are making reducing evictions a major priority."

Gershenson also said that weaker tenant protections, like no rent stabilization or affordable tenant legal representation, have also contributed to the increases.