Evictions

Methodology

This indicator reports information about formal evictions based on court records from 48 states and the District of Columbia, compiled by the Eviction Lab. Eviction records include information related to an eviction court case, such as defendant and plaintiff names, the defendant’s address, monetary judgment information, and an outcome for the case.

The eviction filing rate and eviction rate are included in the Eviction Lab dataset, calculated by dividing the number of filings or evictions by the number of occupied renting households in each area. The “filing rate” is the ratio of the number of evictions filed in an area over the number of renter-occupied homes in that area. An “eviction rate” is the subset of those homes that received an eviction judgment in which renters were ordered to leave. Information on the number of renter homes in an area comes from the U.S. Census and ESRI Business Analyst demographic estimates. The data is also formatted so each observation represents a household. Details of the cleaning process can be found in the Methodology Report (PDF).

Note:
Indicator data do not include information about “informal evictions”, or those that happen outside of the courtroom.
Data are cleaned to standardize names and addresses; duplicate cases are dropped from the dataset.