State Eviction Moratoria Coverage during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background and Purpose

A key concern during the COVID-19 pandemic was a wave of evictions from rental housing due to non-payment of rent; in addition to the well-documented effects of eviction on well-being, public health professionals were concerned eviction-driven housing instability would exacerbate viral transmission. In response, federal, state, and municipal governments implemented eviction moratoria freezing or limiting some aspects of the eviction process.

State-level eviction moratoria varied widely in the strength of protections they provided and in how long they were implemented. Some states never adopted a moratorium, others allowed eviction proceedings but prohibited enforcement of eviction orders, and still others prevented the eviction filing process from even commencing. Some state moratoria were in effect for only a brief time in 2020, others remained well into 2022.

These differences highlight the role of federalism in the response to the pandemic. State discretion can allow policy to meet unique local needs and preferences, but it can also reflect and reinforce existing social disparities by providing uneven protection across place. I examined the relationship between state eviction moratoria and factors that, based on existing welfare state theory and research evidence, might be related to state policy adoption and design: political orientation of government, economic conditions, housing stress, public health conditions, and the racial and ethnic demographic context of the state.

Methods

Sample & Data

I created a dataset of state-month observations from all fifty states with categorical variables indicating whether 1) any moratorium was in effect and 2) whether a strong moratorium targeted early in the eviction process was in effect in a given month from March 2020 to March 2022 (n=1250). Political orientation of government was represented by party of the governor and a measure of the ideological orientation of the state legislature. Economic conditions were gauged using the state-month unemployment rate, housing stress by the proportion of renter households paying more than 35% of income in rent, public health conditions by COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population, and demographics by the proportion of the state population identifying as Black, Latinx, and other non-White identity.

Analysis

I estimated multilevel logistic regression models, nesting state-month observations within states, of each moratorium variable as a function of the covariates and a set of month indicators.

Results

Higher unemployment rates and more left-leaning legislatures were statistically significant as predictors of any moratorium in effect in a given state-month. Strong moratoria specifically were further associated with a Democratic governor, a larger fraction of the population experiencing housing stress, and the fractions of the state population identifying as Black and Latinx.

Conclusions and Implications

The results indicate that eviction moratoria reflected need—strong eviction protections were associated with prevalence of housing stress—and the political orientation of government. Most normatively concerning, however, the association with state demographics is consistent with theories of racialization of the politics of social welfare. At the very least, these finding show that Black and Hispanic renter households were afforded less protection by state-level moratoria as a consequence of state policy variation.