Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Housing rents are rising much faster than incomes in many U.S. cities, leading to renters devoting record amounts of their income to housing costs. This crisis is particularly pronounced in Southern California, where approximately 100,000 tenants are evicted annually. Research has looked at individual-level determinants of evictions, but not spatial dynamics and neighborhood correlates. This is largely because data on evictions are sporadic and incomplete, as eviction records are not reported in any systematic way across localities. This research often relies on data in a particular locality from examining court orders, conducting courtroom surveys, or administering neighborhood surveys. In this paper, we focus on local economic forces and investigate the neighborhood correlates and causes of eviction. In particular, we are concerned with the spatial dynamics of eviction in Southern California, and explaining both how and why these dynamics change over time. To answer this question, we examine two types of evictions: court-processed evictions in five Southern California counties between 2007 and 2014 and “no fault” evictions filed through the Ellis Act, which is a California law providing owners of rental property a pathway to exit the rental market and evict existing tenants without cause. We use the latter data in the City of Los Angeles during the same time period. Preliminary analyses suggest that neighborhoods experiencing robust income and rent growth see divergent trends in court-processed and no fault evictions over time. A neighborhood’s share of black residents is the most consistent predictor of localized eviction rates, echoing prior research on individual-level determinants of evictions.