Forecasting the Magnitude of the Eviction Tidal Wave Following COVID-19: A Case Studyof the Bronx

Introduction: While communities of color are being disproportionately impacted by the health and financial consequences of COVID-19, the effects of COVID-19 on housing instability is yet to be understood. Since early in the pandemic, housing policies have temporarily frozen evictions, however, these policies are set to expire in the summer of 2021. The current study seeks to shed light on the magnitude of the impending eviction crisis and to identify the communities that will be most impacted. We use the Bronx as a case study because it had the highest number of pre-COVID eviction filings in New York City and is home to a relatively large proportion of the communities being hardest hit by the pandemic.

Methods: Data from the New York State Office of Court Administration was used to identify eviction filings in the Bronx from January 2016 through April 2021. Hierarchal time series forecasts were conducted to predict the number of expected eviction filings from March 2020 through July 2021 for each zip code in the Bronx given historical and seasonal trends. The number of rental units in each zip code was also forecasted through 2021 using American Community Survey (ACS) estimates. Finally, we estimate the number of “missing” eviction filings for each zip code by adjusting the number of expected evictions for actual post-COVID evictions. To compare relative magnitude across zip codes, we standardized estimates to the number of rental-unit-months in all forecasts. Community-level socioeconomic and demographic variables for regression analyses are drawn from the 2019 ACS.

Findings: Our forecasts predict that there will be 58,299 cumulative “missing” eviction filings across the Bronx from March 2020 through July 2021, roughly 10% more eviction filings than in all of 2019. After controlling for median rent, the proportion of individuals living below the poverty line in a community is associated with a greater number of predicted missing eviction filings (t=4.39, p<.001). When controlling for both median rent and the percentage of individuals living below the poverty line, the percentage of individuals in a community reporting as “one race, white only” is significantly and negatively associated with the number of predicted missing eviction filings (t=-2.33, p<.05), while the percentage of individuals in a community who report “one race, Black only” is significantly and positively associated with the number of predicted missing eviction filings (t = 4.39, p<.001).

Conclusion: Actual eviction filings across communities in the Bronx have seen a precipitous drop since March 2020, when policies were enacted to provide temporary relief to renters by freezing evictions. However, time series analysis using court records show that filings were relatively stable leading up to COVID-19. Results from forecasting models suggest that when the current eviction moratorium expires, the Bronx will experience an eviction crisis with the effects felt most strongly among poor communities and communities of color- the same communities already being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. This highlights an urgent need for policies that specifically target these communities in order to avoid the catastrophic consequences of the looming eviction crisis.