The Cost to Evict: Identifying the Relationship between Eviction Filing Fee and Eviction Filing Rate

Abstract

Evictions, the legal process a lawyer can use to remove tenants from rental properties, have risen to an unprecedented level in the US. Over 2.3 million evictions were filed in 2016. That’s 2.3 million adults and families left suddenly homeless, often unable to find a new home due to the “mark” of an eviction, forced to uproot their children from school and accept whatever often unsafe housing they can find. The eviction crisis is quickly moving to the center of the U.S. housing policy conversation, yet scholars have overlooked eviction for so long that barely anything is known about the relationship between eviction and policy. This thesis seeks to move eviction policy research forward by studying the effect of the court fee for filing an eviction case. Using novel county-level data on eviction filing fees, this thesis models the relationship between eviction filing fees and eviction filing rates using a partial pooling model. The model estimates that in eleven of the sixteen states studied, eviction filing fee has a negative effect, significant at the 95 level, on eviction filing rate, and in the remaining 5 states, the estimate was not significant. The model estimated that on average, for all counties, every additional $1 increase of filing fee causes the eviction filing rate to change by -0.0087, with a 95% confidence interval between -0.0146 and -0.0063. This estimate is robust to two adverse possibilities that could have skewed the results: (1) that certain states drastically raised their filing fees between 2016 and 2018, and (2) that counties with low eviction filing rates raised their local filing fees to increase revenue. This thesis’s finding that high eviction filing fees decrease eviction filing rates has implications for policymakers seeking to curb evictions. However, more research must be done into illegal evictions to ensure that an observed decrease in eviction filing rate doesn’t actually indicate that landlords chose to evict tenants illegally outside of the court to avoid paying a high filing fee.