“I’ve done better during the pandemic because of the help from the government than in previous years,” said Mr. Spellman.
The true extent of the crisis facing tenants is understated by the available numbers on eviction, housing advocates and experts say. “The eviction avalanche is absolutely here across the country,” said Katie Goldstein, a housing justice campaign director with the Center for Popular Democracy.
There is no national database of evictions, and the haphazard patchwork of local policies and record-keeping methods in courts across the country poses severe obstacles to creating one. One-third of all U.S. counties have no available court eviction data at all, according to New America, a left-leaning think tank.
And most tenants are forced to leave their rental units not because of formal eviction proceedings, but because they’ve been illegally locked out or their utilities have been shut off, or because they want to avoid an eviction being added to their record by leaving on their own. There were 5.5 of these so-called informal evictions for every one formal eviction in 2017, according to the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey.
A recent survey of low-income tenants in Washington State found that one in five tenants were subjected to a method of informal eviction during the pandemic, compared with one in eight before the pandemic.
In September 2020, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended its eviction moratorium, Antionette Cobb came home to find her St. Louis apartment almost entirely empty. She’d fallen behind on rent after losing her job as a housekeeper at a hotel months before because of the pandemic. By August she had exhausted her savings. Ms. Cobb’s landlord rejected her offer to pay over half of her $550 rent for that month, she said, and decided to seize the property instead.