Below is an interview conducted by Ella Forlin, a Senior at Maggie Walker Governor’s School, with VCU Professor Benjamin Teresa about his study The Geography of Evictions in Richmond; Beyond Poverty. – minimally edited for clarity
My first question is, can you explain how you conducted the study The Geography of Evictions in Richmond: Beyond Poverty?
This study was published four years ago now, and it was towards the beginning of the conversation about eviction and housing instability in Richmond and Virginia that was sparked by the large, sort of first of its kind dataset from the Princeton Eviction Lab that indicated that Richmond and other cities in Virginia have comparatively high eviction rates. Early on, a lot of the conversation was like: Why is eviction so high? Why is there such high housing instability? And I remember quite distinctly like listening to some testimony at the General Assembly session that year, and there were representatives from the owners, apartment owners groups. They were saying, well, this is an issue of poverty, and people simply don’t have enough money to pay the rent. And I thought that that was one plausible and intuitive explanation, but maybe it didn’t tell the whole story or just something to investigate.
So that was kind of like the question: What is driving evictions? Are the poorest in the worst situation? And so actually, I just looked at a map to start looking at that question. And I noticed just by my eye, right when you map at the small scale (that’s the census block group level, which is really at a pretty small neighborhood level). What you see immediately, kind of knowing the city of Richmond in terms of the relative incomes and wealth of the neighborhoods, I can immediately see that actually the neighborhoods with the highest eviction rates didn’t perfectly overlap with the poorest neighborhoods. And so right off the bat, I thought there’s more than meets the eye there.
And one of the things that is important to understand about that sort of geography and of the spatial patterns of poverty in Richmond is that our poorest neighborhoods are public housing neighborhoods. So immediately What happens is that, that link between eviction and poverty is interrupted because public housing now is a whole other conversation about how our [legislative policies have] been involved in eviction and housing stability. And so they’ve kind of gone back and forth between … having better policies that kept people housed and [reducing] eviction. But my point is that immediately what you see is that the poorest neighborhoods are public housing developments, and so actually those aren’t the highest evicting places. The highest evicting places, what that study shows, is they’re actually sets of neighborhoods where people don’t live in public housing, but they live in mostly private, unsubsidized housing. So … they’re just renting an apartment or a house or whatever. And that’s where eviction rates are the highest.
And then that study went and said, then statistically, on average, can we understand the statistical relationship between these neighborhoods in their eviction rates? So what would reliably predict the eviction rate being higher or lower in the neighborhood? Is it driven by poverty or are there other factors? That study really develops a statistical model to try to get good at that on average. But basically, what I did in that paper is: I looked at all of the variables that we know can affect eviction so that would be at the neighborhood level. That would be things like median income, who lives in that neighborhood in terms of their income levels, the property values in that neighborhood: [characteristics] which would speak to the dynamics of investment or gentrification or disinvestment of a neighborhood, variables like that.
And then what statistically happens is those variables impact the eviction rate of the neighborhood. And so what we found is that once you account for all those other factors, the most influential factor on neighborhood eviction rates is the racial composition of the neighborhood. And so specifically what happens is as the share of African-Americans in a neighborhood increases, the eviction rate increases. And on the other side, conversely, as the share of white people in a neighborhood increases, the eviction rate decreases. And that was twice as impactful. This neighborhood racial composition is twice as important in affecting neighborhood eviction rates as the next most important factors like poverty and income.
And so in my mind, that study is the starting point for understanding eviction, housing, race, racial inequality, not the end. That study says this is what we should be looking at. These factors statistically are shown to be really important. But we don’t know. There’s a lot more work and that sort of thing to do since then. And we can talk about that. But that variable of the racial composition of a neighborhood: what does that mean? Because that’s an abstraction, a census derived measurement of a neighborhood, and that gives us a place to start to really investigate why that would have such a strong influence on the eviction rate.
So, why are these findings so significant in Richmond of all places?
Right. So I think that is the type of question that, you know, has directed us since then in our work. And so why is racial composition so important? That is really a current question, but really can only be answered fully by, we would argue, like a historical understanding of how we started this conversation with poverty, which is certainly influential. But how could race become so tightly predictive? How could race become so important? And how could poverty become racialized? The experience of poverty in a place like Richmond is really experienced through race. And so what we’ve done in other work is trying to map out in the neighborhoods and places where eviction is highest.
Historically, what has gone on there disadvantages those neighborhoods in their housing markets and in their labor markets. Maybe 15 years ago in the 2008 housing crisis, there were a lot of foreclosures in these highest evicting neighborhoods in 2020 or where we are now, and so a lot of homes were lost to foreclosure. In particular, Black households were particularly hard hit in the great recession and the foreclosure crisis from 2008 and afterward. And so you had Black families that were homeowners and then are no longer, so they lost the stability from homeownership. They have to rent. They lost the wealth associated with owning a home. And that’s just like the most recent episode, right?
So then the lead up to the financial crisis was an era of subprime lending, which is really high cost, expensive loans that were part of the reason why we had a 2008 housing crisis. But then you go even deeper into history and you learn about in the middle of the 20th century, in a place like Richmond and many other cities where Black neighborhoods in particular were repeatedly sites for slum clearance, demolishing of Black-owned homes and businesses. Again, you have a loss of wealth and stability coming out. So now, the period I’m talking about now is after World War II period. Urban renewal. And so the city of Richmond, of course, cleared, demolished large sections of Jackson award north north abroad and of course the Highway 95 that comes through.
Even prior to World War Two. And then throughout that era, our system of federal insurance for home mortgages was highly racially discriminatory. So it became very difficult until the civil rights era, until the 1970s. It’s very difficult for black families to be able to access mortgages which would allow them to buy a home. That’s another way in which Black neighborhoods and black families are cut off from the wealth building opportunities and the stability that were open to white families. So over these decades, there’s a repeated and recurring process of de-stabilizing, cutting off from wealth opportunities through homeownership in these types of neighborhoods and in these communities, namely Black communities and other communities of color. Certainly, I think that is historically the way that disadvantaged and you know, redirected resources away from Black households and Black communities. This really accumulates over generations.
Then, in this time period, what housing instability looks like today is eviction in rental housing, which again, is most heavily felt across race and in particular by black families in black neighborhoods.
Could you give a definition of what you mean by wealth?
Sure. So wealth can mean a lot of things. Wealth might include income from a job, but it’s more than that. It’s kind of the total amount of assets or resources, you know, someone or a household has under their control. And so wealth could be ownership of stock, financial assets, and bonds. Wealth can be ownership of property. Um, and so in the US, the middle-class historically, and it’s still the case, that most families’ wealth comes from their house. So we don’t necessarily think about it this way, but homeownership confers stability. Kinda like rent control, where you buy a home and you get a fixed rate mortgage, which sort of fixes your housing costs over 30 years. Obviously taxes can fluctuate and maintenance to the home, but you have a stabilized mortgage payments, which is a huge part of your housing costs. That’s the advantage of a fixed rate mortgage: over time you’re paying down the debt and so your equity in the property increases, which means your ability to then finance take more loans on the home against the home to finance college. Which can potentially further expand wealth building opportunities through higher education, or simply pass on property to future generations.
There’s other research that indicates that White people in particular, when they buy their first home, have substantial financial assistance from their parents or other relatives when they buy a home. And that comes from previous generations of homeownership, wealth that’s been built. And so that’s kind of when housing prices increase the way that they have and cut off access for first-time home buyers. The families that can tap their family’s wealth. That just further exacerbates those inequalities.
So I’m sure this is a question you’ve answered 1 million times over the past two years, but how has the pandemic impacted the rate of eviction in Richmond?
So we obviously focused on it a lot, and so a lot of unprecedented or unusual things in housing policy happened during the pandemic. So we had a lot of new policies that really hadn’t been tried. From the Centers for Disease Control at the federal level, they issued a set of renter protections which said because of the pandemic, it is in the interests of public health that people remain housed. It’s very difficult to mitigate a pandemic if people are homeless, and they’re in congregate settings and shelters. It’s very difficult for people to safely shelter in place or quarantine if they don’t have stable housing. So that’s like the rationale for why the CDC may seem odd, but really sort of housing and health crises are intertwined. And so there’s a set of renter protections that said if your income has been affected by COVID, then you can’t be evicted. So that was a major set of protections.
There was also a substantial amount of money that the federal government that Congress appropriated called the Emergency Rental Assistance. In Virginia, that was implemented in the form of the rent relief program, which ran over most of the pandemic and just ended its operation back in May. Evictions dropped pretty substantially during the pandemic. There is a pretty substantial drop in eviction filings, eviction judgments in the beginning of the pandemic, mid 2020. And then things stay around 20%-25% of pre-pandemic levels of eviction for a good while during the pandemic until things start to pick back up this year, probably in the spring. And by then the CDC protections had expired… they were really nullified by the Supreme Court. But those had gone away. And then Virginia’s rent relief program, which was paying rental deaths and keeping people housed, closed in May.
Since then, unfortunately, we’ve seen a pretty strong resurgence of eviction of court filings and judgments in some jurisdictions at this point even surpassed their pre-pandemic levels. So it’s definitely coming back.
How would you suggest legislators, federal, state, and local, sort of mitigate this issue? Do you think there’s anything we can do?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot we can do and we should do. I think some of the conversations are about a permanent rental assistance program. Some jurisdictions, not in Virginia… although maybe a little bit in Northern Virginia, have smaller versions of this. So kind of like emergency rental assistance, when people get behind on rent, they can step in and pay that and keep them housed. So there have been some conversations about, at the federal level, a media permanent emergency assistance rental assistance program. Also at the state level, restoring the rent relief program to some level.
I think there’s an important point here when talking about the pandemic: that there’s like emergency pandemic interventions in terms of the CDC that we talked about in the emergency relief program. And then there’s housing policy and all of the issues that existed before the pandemic. And so basically, you know, it’s not particularly surprising that as pandemic era policy unwinds comes to an end, evictions go back to where they were, because fundamentally nothing really was changed about our housing market back in 2019. And so like all the things that made eviction bad or needed, unfortunately, a common occurrence in 2019 pretty much are still in place today. That comes back to needing substantial commitments to public investment in affordable housing. And there’s many specific programs and ways to do that.
Fundamentally, you know, there’s really no way to provide for the housing needs of a large segment of the population without public investments like some of the other issues that pre-existed, COVID, of course, and affordable housing. Low wages are a big issue because housing and of course, labor markets intersect. So if people are only making $12 an hour, these wages are just insufficient to pay for housing. In most places, almost everywhere actually, the minimum wage is totally inadequate. So there’s, it’s not just housing policy, right? It’s other kinds of economic policy. And those I think are some of the major major pieces.
This might seem like sort of an obvious question, but why is it important that we address the issue of eviction? And what do high levels of eviction lead to and correlate with?
When I began working on evictions specifically, I had worked in housing markets and tenant issues for a while before. Although, I hadn’t really known as much about what we know now, about what the research tells us about the consequences of eviction and housing instability at a number of scales. The first thing that I learned and that surprised me the most is its effect on children. Losing someone’s home is a traumatic event, which means something very specific in understanding human physiology and psychology is that a traumatic event physiologically. It affects the body and affects the brain. And in particular for children, it affects brain development. Losing someone’s housing as a child is traumatic events which sets in that kind of trauma, left unaddressed, sets them up for increased risk of substance abuse abuse and the future of getting into contact with the criminal justice system, school delinquency, all kinds of issues that stem from this kind of traumatic experience. And so on that basis alone, right? Eviction being so detrimental to children, it’s really imperative that, you know, that’s avoided at all costs. The end.
So you can see the stemming from there that it affects children. It increases school truancy, chronic absenteeism at school. So if you have to move to a different neighborhood, if you’re evicted and maybe you can only find temporary housing, you’re kind of shuffling around. Students miss out on school.
We also know the effects on health for those who are evicted. Families that are evicted have poorer health outcomes, physical and mental health. It sets the household up for a much more difficult future housing search. So if you have a record of eviction, if it becomes very difficult to find new housing because of the landlord screen, they’re evaluating applications specifically for an eviction history. There’s much fewer options for housing landlords that are willing to rent to tenants with that kind of record. So your housing, whenever your housing choices are constrained, this means that your desperation increases, which means you’re willing to accept poor conditions, more exploitative conditions. And of course you have no choice about the cost.
One result of this is that people then find themselves in short-term hotels, which were never designed for long-term permanent housing and are also quite expensive. You know, people pay $200-$250 a week to spend in a short-term motel, which is a lot of money. You’re talking, that’s $800/$1000 a month. That is apartment rent, right. So it’s not cheaper by any means. And so then that’s kind of what happens just to the people themselves that are evicted. We also know from research that those effects are much wider spread, not just at the individual level, but at the community level.
Increased eviction also typically means higher levels of violence in a community. And I think that these are interrelated. Housing affects mental mental health, which affects dispute resolution, conflict resolution. The ubiquitous presence of guns, right, overlaps with all of these issues. And so housing instability means community and stability and increases community violence in many situations.
Finally, we did a cost of eviction study. We often think of eviction and being behind on rent as a private relationship. You know, you owe a debt to the landlord. But actually, what eviction does is it takes that private debt and blows it up into a cascade of public expenses. So someone being late on the rent because they lost their job, didn’t make enough, or the rent went up, whatever the reason is, translates into an eviction. When someone has to leave their home, it produces a set of public expenses for emergency shelter use or emergency room visits. As I just mentioned, chronic absenteeism at school in juvenile delinquency. And so we can actually calculate all these costs. Those costs far outweigh, typically on average, far outweigh what was owed in an eviction scenario. And so it’s also very costly from a public perspective in that it will be much more efficient to prevent evictions than it is to pay for all the social costs that they incur after the eviction takes place. So there’s a lot of bad things that happen due to eviction.
So we sort of touched on what recommendations you would make for the government to try and address this issue, but what would you recommend to individuals and maybe local civic organizations?
So I think there’s a lot of ways to maybe think about that. There’s, thinking about policymakers, elected officials, and legislation and policy, there are consistently elected officials at the state level and local level who do focus on this issue. Folks should be aware of who those elected officials are, and if they’re interested in supporting this type of work and change, support those elected officials at that level. A lot of what’s important, and historically how the housing system has been improved, is policy change but also through a lot of organizing work and kind of political participation and civic participation. And so this goes to everything from tenants and tenants union. So that’s kind of similar.
People may not be that familiar with tenant unions, but they might be familiar with labor unions. And so it’s a similar concept, right? Basically, tenants have shared interests, and they work together to press for what they need. Maybe that’s joining together to ask the landlord for certain improvements or changing of policies. So, there’s examples of landlords charging for cable installation, like extra fees. And this has happened in Richmond, and tenants have joined together and written about how this policy is unfair or puts a burden on their ability to pay rent. So maybe you don’t charge all these extra fees because we can’t pay the rent. And so the point is that working together in terms of a group of workers is going to do so much more than working on your own.
If one tenant says, I don’t want to pay this fee, that’s puts them at a great risk. If every tenant in the building says, we’re not going to pay this fee. That’s a whole other issue. That’s a whole other thing entirely that the landlord is not going to be able to respond the same way. So I think being aware of and thinking about working with others on these issues, whether that’s inattention, tenant union, or participating and other types of community-based organizations, civic associations that are focused on this type of change in this type of work is really, really important.
So I think individually you can think about it electorally. We need to get the right people in the right positions. But also working day to day, we need to strengthen how we work together to really advance, change that way as well.
Could you give me some examples of how permanent rental assistance programs have been implemented? Like in the US, near Virginia, or maybe internationally?
I think maybe what might be a good example is the housing choice voucher, sometimes referred to as Section Eight Housing. This is a federal affordable housing program where basically for those who qualify, because of their income, they get a voucher from the government that says they can rent housing in the private market and only have to pay 30% of their income. The government covers the rest of the rent. So only about one-fifth of all renters who qualify for housing vouchers receive a housing voucher, and that’s because Congress only appropriates a certain amount and doesn’t make it an entitlement. For example, Social Security is an entitlement, so anyone who’s eligible will receive Social Security because that’s the way the program is set up. Housing vouchers don’t work that way because Congress doesn’t fully fund it.
So that’s a good example to talk about when we think about expanding rental assistance or rental payment assistance, the voucher. It was actually in an earlier version of Biden’s proposed build back better plan that ultimately wasn’t passed. You got the other version, the Inflation Reduction Act version of it which didn’t have any housing stuff in it unfortunately. So in the original Build Back Better Build included substantial expansion of housing vouchers. Now, there are other issues about why housing vouchers alone wouldn’t do everything. One policy alone is insufficient. You need lots of other things.
My final question would be, do you have any resources you would recommend for people that want to learn more about eviction. And maybe the correlation between eviction and race and potentially eviction in gender, both in Richmond and nationally?
There are groups like the RV eviction Lab, the Princeton eviction Lab in many parts of the country. There are groups like it in California, in the Bay Area so anti-eviction, eviction mapping projects, and others. In many places, you will be able to find these types of organizations that highlight all these issues, housing instability, the connections to racism, gender, all of what you were just saying. So I think those are important resources.
There’s important research and scholarship and some of it which has been written for a wide audience. So many people are certainly aware of Evicted by Matthew Desmond. If folks are looking for a really in-depth and up-close account of who is involved in eviction, both landlords and tenants and the whole system in place, in one place then Evicted is a great book to read on that. And I think that these issues are, as we’ve started to talk about a little bit, not just housing issues. So when we talk about, I think that one fundamental thing is there’s never going to be justice in housing without there being justice throughout our society. Whether we’re talking about racial justice or employment, equality in terms of hiring and all that. So the criminal justice system and people who were incarcerated also have a very difficult time finding housing because of the screening practices. In that regard. I think what I’m getting at is like resources to help understand what’s happening in housing as part of a wider set of problems and really systems that reproduce this kind of inequality. And so that’s why I like reading other books. Also kind of like putting it in historical context. So Yamahtta Taylor has written a book called Race For Profit, which goes back to the 1970s, but talks about similar issues in US cities in that period of time. Back to that first argument or that first conversation we were having about. It’s really important to understand what has happened before to reproduce this kind of disadvantage over time and this instability or her time.
In other books about urban history. And there’s many of them. So like, I mean, obviously I’m a professor, so I’m recommending reading. But I like Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis and maybe White Flight by Kevin Kruse. These help kind of set the background for the types of conditions we have in a place like Richmond in terms of its racial and economic inequality.
Resources for deeper research and brief summaries:
Richmond, Virginia has the second highest eviction rate in the country according to a study taken by Eviction Lab in 2016. Due to redlining and discriminatory practices beginning in the 1930s, the eviction rate in Richmond’s predominantly Black neighborhoods is ten times higher than the rate of eviction in predominantly white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 attempted to rectify the effects of discriminatory housing policies by prohibiting the discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing based on race, color, nationality, religion, gender, disability, and family status. However, the effects of earlier practices were too ingrained for the act to effectively combat the “systemic imbalance of power.”
During the pandemic, the rate of evictions in Richmond increased, and this was particularly stark in communities of color. A study taken by VCU concluded that “the decisive factor in evictions in Richmond isn’t lack of money.” It is race. Richmond is haunted by housing practices that forced black people into areas of the city where banks wouldn’t offer mortgages and deprived black people of a voice in politics and their communities. The coronavirus exacerbated the remaining inequality due to Jim Crow laws and public policies made during the mid-20th century. Black Richmonders are facing the brunt of the economic strife caused by Covid because they work “on the front lines of particular jobs, underpaying jobs, that carry a high amount of the viral load.” The socio-economic status and race of a person harshly impacts how they are affected by disease physically, financially, and politically.
“This study examines the relationship between foreclosure and high eviction.” It found that the south, east, and northeastern neighborhoods of Richmond experience the highest rates of evictions which correspond with higher rates of foreclosures. The rise of investor-owned properties, many of which were previously foreclosed, have caused higher eviction rates in urban areas.
Virginia has a shortage of affordable housing and high rates of cost burden that limit the amount of money families have to spend in their monthly budgets and cause neighborhood instability. In Richmond, 87% of those earning 0 to 30% of the Area Median Income are housing cost burdened which means they pay more than 30% of their income for housing. The number of affordable houses available to those earning 50% of the AMI has decreased by 22.4%.
The racial composition of a neighborhood is a significant factor in determining eviction rates in Richmond. The eviction rate increases when the percentage of black renters increases in an area and the relationship is inverse with white renters. While poverty and eviction are connected, the areas in Richmond where the eviction rates are more than three times Richmond’s average, none of them are in the poorest areas of the city. This means that eviction had different causes other than poverty and inability to pay rent. The study “[estimates] that as the share of the block group’s African American population increases by 10%, eviction rate increases by about 1.2%. As the share of a block group’s White population increases by 10%, the eviction rate decreases by about 0.9%.”
The Covid-19 pandemic is magnifying the disparities caused by redlining and being disregarded in political decision making on Black residents of Richmond.
Collection of different studies on housing in Richmond conducted at VCU
Policies like redlining have designated black residents of Richmond to physically hotter portions of the city due to the infrastructure in those areas containing more heat-absorbing pavement and fewer trees. In the 1930s, the federal government created maps and rated the riskiness of different neighborhoods for real estate investments. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were frequently rated as “hazardous,” influencing investors to not put money into these areas. People in these areas did not receive federally backed mortgages or other credit which perpetrated housing and economic inequality that continues into the 21st century. Now, a recent study found that formerly redlined neighborhoods are 5 degrees hotter than non-redlined areas in the same cities. These areas are less likely to have trees and parks and include more paved surfaces that absorb heat. Heat is killing 12000 people a year in the United States, and this problem is disproportionately affecting people living in redlined districts.
In the redlined maps made during the 1930s, appraisers marked neighborhoods as hazardous because they were occupied by primarily black or non-white residents. With the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Congress outlined redlining, but the effects of this act continue to impact the cities where redlining existed. Redlining not only has effects on the economic health of the people living in redlined communities, but it can impact their physical health by increasing their risk of experiencing heat-related health conditions.
Areas of cities that suffered from disinvestment are more vulnerable to heat. More than 600 people are killed by extreme heat each year, and lower income and marginalized groups are the most affected by ‘“extreme weather and climate-related events.”
