How evictions and housing instability can have deadly consequences

With pandemic protections like eviction moratoriums and emergency rent assistance drying up, eviction filings have risen more than 50 percent in some cities. New research shows that housing instability can have deadly consequences. Stephanie Sy reports.
Amna Nawaz:
With pandemic protections like eviction moratoriums and emergency rent assistance drying up, eviction filings have risen more than 50 percent in some cities, and new research shows that housing instability can have deadly consequences.
Stephanie Sy has that story.
Stephanie Sy:
As the cost of housing in the U.S. continues to soar, new research shows a link between eviction and premature death, a link shown to be even stronger during the pandemic. During the first two years of the COVID-19 crisis, the mortality rate was more than twice as high for renters facing eviction.
We spoke to renters across the country who have faced eviction about the toll housing instability took on their health.
Sabrina Davis, Missouri:
My name is Sabrina Davis. I live in Kansas City, Missouri.
I was evicted in February of 2021.
Macario Garcia, Texas:
I am Macario Garcia. I live in Dallas, Texas.
I was faced with eviction and I am currently still struggling.
Bree Davis, North Carolina:
I am Bree Davis. I currently live in Durham, North Carolina. I am the mother of a wonderful 10-year-old son.
We were evicted in December of 2022.
Macario Garcia:
After two years of struggling to pay rent, I get faced with eviction, and all I could feel was my blood pressure drop. During that moment, I saw myself in the street.
Here in Dallas, we have a homelessness problem and I saw myself like that.
Sabrina Davis:
After living in a house that I was renting, we’re here and complaining about high utility bills, the landlord, instead of fixing the issue, decided he would hand me an eviction.
I mean, where was I going to go? That was my main thing, is, oh, my God, I can’t be homeless.
Bree Davis:
There was no cushion for a working mother and a son who was excelling in school. We were supposed to be a part of a community. And the decline immediately happens, the sleepless nights, the diet changes, the anxiety.
Macario Garcia:
Your mind is just racing and it’s the one topic in your mind, eviction, eviction, eviction.
Sabrina Davis:
I suffer with chronic pain on my neck and my toes. So when I got evicted, that stress intensified that chronic pain that I was already living with.
Bree Davis:
It was about a six-month or seven-month span, Airbnb and hoteling it until we found a room to rent. We didn’t have a kitchen to cook in. Everything was microwaved at some point or eating out.
In addition to that, we’re open to COVID and viruses and colds. And there is a fear of going to the doctor. You’re trying to pay for home, for a roof over your head every night. So God forbid you get sick and have to pay for medicine or examinations.
Macario Garcia:
I decide that the extra $100 to $200 that I had to spend for the two weeks, until next pay period that it was going to be for food, it’s no longer for food or transportation. It’s for late fees, it’s to catch up on a rent.
Sabrina Davis:
My hair was falling out really bad. It was horrible. It was scary. And I was having such stress that one day I was having heart palpitations. I got really clammy and sweaty and nauseous.
I didn’t think I’d make it to the other side.
Bree Davis:
If you aren’t relatively healthy entering this, you’re going to be depleted at the end. It’s a disease that has no name at this point, other than eviction.
Stephanie Sy:
We’re joined now by Nick Graetz From Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. He’s the lead author of a recent study that found a link between eviction and mortality.
Nick, thank you so much for joining the “NewsHour.”
Before we go into your study, what do you understand about who is impacted by eviction?
Nick Graetz, Princeton University Eviction Lab:
So, we have known for a long time. Tenant organizers and advocates have been sounding the alarm that this is — seems to often be Black tenants, especially women with children.
And in this new study, what we found, close to 30 percent of Black women renting with children are threatened with eviction each year. And we need to think about these disparities as the result in a lot of ways of racist housing policies, which have segregated certain Americans to really high-cost, unregulated, often exploited of rental markets, where eviction just becomes sort of part of the business model.
Stephanie Sy:
And in your new research just published, you do look at court records. These are people that are facing eviction filings, threatened with eviction.
And then you look at excess mortality. What made you want to study the correlation between evictions and health?
Nick Graetz:
You know, we have a lot of reason to think eviction has a lot of terrible consequences for health, both in terms of chronic stress and mental health.
And mortality serves as sort of a social mirror, the culmination of all the mechanisms linking eviction and health, so whether that’s prioritizing rent over preventive health care and food, or experiencing really intense housing precarity after an eviction.
We found that renters threatened with eviction, mortality rates during the pandemic were about double what we would have expected based on pre-pandemic mortality rates, which were already extremely high for folks facing eviction.
Stephanie Sy:
How do you delineate what was associated with the eviction versus what other factors that same group of folks you looked at might have been going through during the pandemic, for example, lack of access to health care?
Nick Graetz:
It’s tough to parse out those different pathways.
I think we think of an eviction filing as really an indicator of risk of an acute event happening, such as the eviction itself, but also a more general indicator of financial distress. And we know that the threat of an eviction has health impacts, even if it doesn’t ever happen to you.
So the constant stress of making rent or facing eviction is traumatic. There’s an expression, the rent eats first. We know that tenants tend to sacrifice other needs, like food and health care, when rent goes up, which often can precede an eviction. So all of these consequences sort of compound over time in ways that shape health, both leading up to and following the event of an eviction.
Stephanie Sy:
But to be clear, your research doesn’t really look at causality, right?
I mean, how strong is the evidence that you’re talking about? You’re bringing up pathways. I don’t see that your paper necessarily proves that.
Nick Graetz:
That’s right.
Yes, so we’re not making a claim here about the causality of the eviction event itself. We’re sort of comparing how mortality changed among folks who were filed against during the pandemic compared to the kind of mortality rates we were seeing among that group prior to the pandemic.
So, right, this is sort of a descriptive finding, rather than a causal finding, of pointing out that there is really a really big spike in excess mortality for these folks, sort of induced by that first year or two of the pandemic.
Stephanie Sy:
And yet, even with the limitations of the study, it seems clear from your study that you have found sort of an anomaly, something we wouldn’t expect with just the number of excess deaths with people facing eviction court filings.
What do you hope people, lawmakers, policymakers take from this research?
Nick Graetz:
So, I think of the lesson I would want to take away from this is moving towards creating a country where quality housing is affordable for everyone, and also pointing out that we were experiencing a housing crisis before the pandemic.
And so these data sort of show how these things were exacerbated by COVID-19. But I think that, today, as rent burdens hit record highs and evictions are increasing again, we should really be thinking about those policies to reduce evictions and guarantee affordable housing, and not just housing policies, but also those critical health policies.
Stephanie Sy:
Nick Graetz from Princeton’s Eviction Lab, thanks so much for joining us.
Nick Graetz:
Thanks so much for having me.