There’s No Easy Way to Stem Evictions
Common policy solutions may be targeting the wrong problem.
- By
- February 18, 2025
- CBR - Public Policy
A lost job. An unanticipated medical bill. The relentless grind of making ends meet. People can fall behind on their rent for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes they never catch up. Landlords can choose to evict tenants who aren’t paying their rent—and it happens often.
What drives the high rate of evictions in the US rental housing market has remained unclear. Are tenants becoming persistently unable to pay their rent, or are landlords quick to evict at the first sign of trouble because the costs of doing so are low? A study by Chicago Booth’s Scott Nelson and his coauthors suggests that the former is true but that policy solutions are often directed at the latter.
The number of evictions in the United States is substantial. As of September 2024, landlords had filed for more than 1 million in the 10 states tracked by Princeton’s Eviction Lab, with over 80,000 carried out in the previous month alone. Evictions are far more prevalent for renters than foreclosures were for owners at the peak of the 2010 housing crisis.
Understanding the root causes of evictions has been difficult because researchers typically can’t observe data on both tenant payment histories and landlord eviction decisions. Without these data, it’s virtually impossible to tell what nonpayment patterns precede eviction, and what types of nonpayment landlords are otherwise willing to forbear.
Nelson and his coresearchers—who included Yale’s John Eric Humphries and Winnie van Dijk, New York University’s Daniel Waldinger, and NYU PhD student Dam Linh Nguyen—worked diligently to obtain data use agreements that allowed them access to detailed payment records from a large set of landlords’ ledgers, tracking both monthly payments and eviction decisions for 6,000 tenants between 2015 and 2019. “Working with these records has been like seeing this market in detail for the first time, which is incredibly exciting as a researcher,” Nelson says.
They wait to see if the rent will come in
Landlords commonly delay filing an eviction, often tolerating two to three months of missed rent payments, according to the research.
The team focused on high-eviction zip codes in cities in the upper Midwest, including Chicago. Their analysis reveals that while about half of tenants missed at least one month’s rent during the study period, and one in four faced an eviction filing, landlords often showed patience before pursuing eviction, typically waiting for renters to miss two to three months of payments.
To understand the underlying causes of evictions, the researchers built a model that captured how landlords learn about their tenants’ financial circumstances over time.
“When a tenant falls behind, the landlord asks what’s going on,” Nelson says. “A landlord needs to determine whether a tenant has just missed one month and might recover, or whether they will consistently not pay rent going forward.” This determination process involves considerable uncertainty, as local housing markets and eviction rules differ, as do renters’ personal circumstances.
The model identified three types of tenants: those who almost always pay, those who struggle but pay about 80 percent of the time, and those who have lost the ability to pay and rarely make rent. By analyzing how nonpayment risk evolved during the years studied, they find that 80–90 percent of eviction cases involved tenants who had become persistently unable to pay. These situations were not temporary delinquencies that might resolve on their own.
This insight helps explain why common policy proposals may fall short. The researchers examined three potential remedies: eviction taxes, mandatory delays, and landlord subsidies for delinquent tenants. Their model predicts that these would not have prevented the majority of evictions in the data, since most evictions involve tenants who have lost the ability to pay rather than those who face temporary difficulties. The policies primarily help tenants best positioned to catch up on their own and do less to aid those in the most precarious situations.
Each policy examined would change eviction rates by less than 10 percent, the researchers calculate, concluding that the path to reducing evictions may require addressing the underlying economic instability that leads to persistent nonpayment, rather than focusing solely on the eviction process itself.
John Eric Humphries, Scott Nelson, Dam Linh Nguyen, Winnie van Dijk, and Dan Waldinger, “Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market,” Working paper, November 2024.
More from Chicago Booth Review
More from Chicago Booth
Your Privacy
We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice, which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.