Appendix: Additional Comments on and Interactive Versions of the Graphs in No Shelter, No Safety

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which initially put upwards of 40 million households across the U.S. at risk of eviction, new social science research has been seeking to clarify the relationships between eviction, the household-level hardships that surround eviction, and the impacts of eviction on community-level processes and outcomes, especially as they relate to neighborhood social ties and public safety. One critical finding from this work is that “eviction results in ‘hypermobility’ for those forcibly displaced from their homes, making it more difficult for neighborhoods to establish community crime prevention strategies.” More explicitly, eviction forces households to engage in frequent relocation, which disrupts social networks in both the communities they are evicted from and the neighborhoods to which they move. At the same time, because the relocation process for evicted households is never smooth, and typically involves multiple moves in the months that follow eviction, “forced hypermobility makes it especially difficult for low-income [evicted] families to settle into a community and achieve the necessary financial, social, or educational stability crucial for well-being and active community engagement.” The consequence is that communities with higher eviction rates tend to be less cohesive and more prone to social disorganization and crime.

To explore these possibilities, the following graph plots data on social ties/economic connectedness from the national Social Capital Atlas versus average annual rates of eviction filings per renter household in New York State (NYS) at the ZIP-code level of analysis. The latter data come from the NYS Unified Court System Landlord-Tenant Data Extracts for 2018 through 2022. Matching expectations, the graph shows a strong, negative association between social ties and eviction filings that cannot be explained by chance alone. ZIP Codes in NYS with high eviction rates tend to have the weakest levels of economic connectedness.

Relatedly, as eviction filing rates increase, the level of social cohesiveness in a ZIP Code – measured as the extent to which friends within a ZIP code share other friends in common – tends to decrease. This relationship cannot be explained by chance alone. Comporting with recent academic literature, the higher the eviction filing rate, the weaker are a community’s social ties and social cohesiveness.

To the extent that local social networks are “conduits for political participation”, the destabilizing effects that eviction has on social ties arguably curtails civic and political action. Moreover, for evictees, the added material hardship of eviction forces individuals to deprioritize civic participation as they instead focus on survival and securing shelter. All of these dynamics tend to “breed government cynicism”, whereby evictees and residents in neighborhoods where evictions happen grow increasingly skeptical of formal political institutions and processes. One domain where recent research has found evidence for these outcomes is electoral participation. In a large-scale study involving tens of millions of voting and eviction records from across the U.S., scholars found that eviction causes lower voter turnout, even after accounting for factors that are known to influence voting behavior. Perhaps the most concerning implication of this findings is that, because evictions are heavily concentrated in under-resourced communities of color, eviction may actively be “suppressing the political voice of the poor and blunting the full power of the Black and Hispanic vote.”

Concerning NYS, the graph below shows ZIP code-level turnout among active registered voters in the most recent (2022) statewide General Election – obtained via a January 2023 voter file from the NYS Board of Elections – versus eviction filing rates. Consistent with findings raised in the prior paragraph, there is a strong, highly statistically significant, negative relationship between evictions and electoral participation across New York.

Whereas the graphs above show correlations, and are not geared toward elucidating causal relationships like several of the research studies mentioned earlier, they are highly consistent with the growing state of knowledge on eviction’s community-level impacts – namely, through its combination of forced hypermobility and imposed (added) material hardship, eviction contributes to the perpetuation of poverty and inequality by (1) isolating evictees from social networks, (2) disrupting residential stability, and straining social relationships in communities, all of which works to (3) reduce civic engagement and keep communities from developing the types of norms and internal capacities that are critical for crime prevention and public safety. Without intervention, it seems highly probable that New York’s “resurgence” in eviction filings might make the state more unequal, less democratic, and less safe over time.