Eviction for lack of ability to pay rent is a symptom of pernicious poverty; the best way to fix ... [+]
Poverty causes eviction. It’s pretty simple. When people are evicted from rental housing for inability to pay, it’s because they don’t have the money. The reason they don’t have the money is myriad, but when people earn less and face many expenses, especially unexpected ones, making housing payments can be difficult or impossible. When combined with other issues like addiction, collapse of the family, or unexpected expenses, lack of money can lead to lack of paying rent resulting in an eviction. Some tenant advocates have relentlessly resorted to hyperbole to attribute almost everything bad that can happen to a family to eviction; now they are suggesting eviction is killing people in an article in Social Science and Medicine. This is a misleading conclusion and doesn’t help families in trouble.
The article, The impacts of rent burden and eviction on mortality in the United States, 2000–2019, conducts a hearty analysis of existing data sets in an effort to suggest that “how rising costs and evictions are shaping mortality for American renters.” This isn’t surprising, both the effort to link eviction to premature death and the conclusion. Of course, people who are evicted are going to be more likely to die early.
“Another finding is that people living in poverty – those with incomes less than 50% of the U.S. median income — have roughly the same survival rates until they hit their 40s, after which they die at significantly higher rates than people with more adequate incomes and resources.”
That’s a quote from a recent article from the University of California Riverside headlined, “Poverty is the 4th greatest cause of U.S. deaths.” Even that conclusion is suspect. Less money in my bank account is not going to kill me; lack of health insurance, stress, and lack of access to healthy food and a higher use of drugs and alcohol to ameliorate anxiety from lack of money might.
I’ve posted before about the fact that the normative measure of affordability – a household should spend no more than 30% of its gross monthly, pre-tax income on housing – completely misses the mark in assessing whether a family has secure, affordable housing. I’ve also pointed out that residual income cost burdens are enough to sink a family into crisis even if they are meeting the normative standard or paying less.
The considerable effort in constructing these sorts of studies isn’t leading to anything other than revisions of tenant land lord laws at the state and local level that do absolutely nothing to address the central problem with households facing eviction: lack of financial resources. What these families need is fast cash to set them back on their feet. Some who typically embrace these sorts of catastrophic assessments of the impact of evictions are finally coming around to accepting this.
I’m sure we’ll see in the not-too-distant future an elected official waving around this study as the basis to making it harder to evict people from rental housing. All this does is raise the risk of developing, owning, and operating rental housing and that means higher deposits, more stringent screening, and in the end, higher rents. This just makes things worse for the people the author of these sorts of studies and elected officials who accept them unquestioning claim they want to help.
