How many people are affected by eviction?
How many people are affected by eviction in the United States? In a new paper in PNAS, my co-authors and I provide a more comprehensive answer to this question by linking eviction court filings to Census data. We find that the number of people affected by eviction is much larger than the number of people listed on the eviction records because many households include children and other adults who are not named in the court documents. Figure 1 of the paper shows who was missed for both eviction filings (purple bars) and eviction orders (yellow bars). In both cases, the total population affected (furthest left bars on chart A) is much larger than the number of people listed on the eviction (the second set of bars for “Listed adults”).
Children account for most of the population missed when looking at court records alone, but there are also adults in the household who are not listed on the court records. Of those adults, the majority are either adult children or the spouse/unmarried partner of the person on the court record.
I will share our findings from the analysis of the population affected by eviction here over the next couple of days.
*Always read PNAS as an initialism, not an acronym. If you want to know why, listen to yourself as you say it as an acronym.