Uncovering the unequal geography of housing insecurity
Each year, more than 31,000 eviction notices are filed in the Landlord-Tenant Branch (LTB) of the District of Columbia courts. District residents receiving notices were disproportionately African-American, and very few appeared in court with legal representation. In this set of papers and reports, I document persistent inequality in the eviction process in Washington, DC, describing the unequal impact of eviction across neighborhoods and the damaging consequences for poor families.
In 2020, Dr. Eva Rosen (McCourt School of Public Policy) and I published a report on racial and geographic disparities in evictions. We report that the eviction process impacts 1 out of every 9 renter households in the District. Our research was widely cited in local media, including the Washington Post and WAMU, and we published an OpEd in the Post. We have a recent article in Housing Policy Debate identifying the “comparative analysis problem” in research on evictions and another article in Socius theorizing and describing the process of serial eviction filings.