Episode 51: The Geography of Eviction with Kyle Nelson

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host Shane Phillips. This week, we're talking with Kyle Nelson about the kinds of neighborhoods where eviction is most common. In a recent episode, we spoke with Hyojung Lee about how gentrification may have different displacement impacts in different types of places, and this episode is a great complement to that conversation because the headline finding here is that eviction is actually quite a lot more common in neighborhoods with persistent concentrated disadvantage not necessarily the gentrifying neighborhoods that people might expect. An important part of this discussion and of Kyle's research is the distinction between two different kinds of eviction. One type are the traditional court-based evictions that listeners are probably most familiar with, and we can also categorize these as "at fault evictions" because they usually follow some kind of lease violation, like failing to pay the rent on time. The other kind is no-fault evictions, and we'll get into what those actually look like in the interview. As we discuss our knowledge of where evictions occur, how often they occur, and to whom is really shockingly limited. Research like this is a necessary first step for identifying the communities most impacted by eviction and figuring out ways to prevent it. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Jason Sutedja, Divine Mutoni and Phoebe Bruce. You can email me at Shane phillips@ucla.edu with any questions or comments, and if you liked the show, give us a review and a five-star rating. It really does help. Now let's get to our conversation with Kyle Nelson.

Kyle Nelson is an urban sociologist and ethnographer who got his PhD at UCLA and is now doing research here as a postdoctoral fellow. And today we're talking about where evictions happen, and how places with lots of evictions may differ from places where they're less common. Kyle, thanks for joining us, and welcome to the housing boys podcast. Thank you so much for having me. And Mike is my co-host today but also as a co-author on these papers, he's also a co-guest. Welcome, Mike.

Michael Lens 2:28
Thank you, Shane. I'm going to be much more rude than usual because I have rights as a guest that I don't usually try to capitalize on as a host. And I want to know more seriously that we talked about before we got on that this is maybe not our 50th episode as the public will absorb it, but it is our 50th recording, and that seems pretty cool. And in honor of that we're finally going to interview Professor Lens.

Shane Phillips 2:58
There we go, have we not done that yet?

No.

Well, welcome.

Michael Lens 3:04
But that's my fault that was on sabbatical. It's not that I've asked for this sort of thing. I like being on the host side. We'll see how it goes on the guest side.

Kyle Nelson 3:12
Yeah, I'm interested to hear from this Professor lens.

Shane Phillips 3:15
All right, Kyle, we always start with a tour. You said you want to talk about Winston Salem, North Carolina. You've got me, you've got Mike, we're visiting, where are you taking us?

Kyle Nelson 3:25
Well, so this is my hometown, and it's a kind of strange city I think for urbanists - just under 250,000 people, top 100 US city by population, and really like by all accounts, you wouldn't expect it to be doing that well. You know, in the 90s, we lost a lot of manufacturing, primarily RJ Reynolds, which is a big tobacco company, Hanes Brand Used to be based out of Winston Salem, and a lot of people thought the city was going to die. And instead, it's had this you know, this rebirth as sort of a hub of the regional information economy through a couple of partnerships with Wake Forest University, which is really kind of transformed downtown. Now you have people living downtown which is super fun so I'd probably start with downtown, just to kind of give you a sense of, you know, a place that is populated by tobacco lofts, and, you know, still has like, a decent amount of abandonment, but you know, has really bounced back in a kind of inspiring way. And I think I'd also drive you all around because you know, like a lot of cities in the south, there's really extreme racial residential segregation. And some of that is maintained infrastructurally, you know, some of that is, you know, just generally more spatial but we're looking at a city that has virtually no public transportation that's really large in terms of mass that has a lot of people but really isn't that organized. And so I just really want to hear your thoughts on the place and then you know as urbanist and planners, I'd like to hear, like, what would you do differently? Because you kind of have a city that's getting a second chance, you know, at becoming at least like a regional metropolis, and it's my hometown.

Shane Phillips 5:15
Do you attribute its relative success to anything in particular? Like, do you have any guesses or insights as to why it's done pretty well compared to other places in kind of similar situations?

Kyle Nelson 5:27
You know, I think some of it's the sunbelt migration. You know, a lot of folks from the Northeast have been moving to various cities in the Sunbelt so generally, just low cost of living like a lot of places that has been changing recently. And I think, you know, there's a lot of universities in Winston Salem - there's Wake Forest, Winston Salem State, the North Carolina School of the Arts, which is now part of the UNC system. There's always been an audience for a bigger city. And so I think people were really just waiting for it to happen,m and now that it's happening, people are moving downtown, they're going downtown, it's starting to see movement happening in ways that it just wasn't when I was growing up.

Shane Phillips 6:11
So today, we are going to be talking about two eviction studies that Kyle worked on the first published in city and community and titled 'The Neighborhood Context of Eviction in Southern California', with co-authors, Ashley Grimace, Xavier Cli, and our very own Mike Lens. That one looks at court-based eviction filings in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, and San Diego counties, which together are home to over 20 million people. The other study is in Housing Policy Debate, and is titled 'Spatial Concentration and Spillover Eviction Dynamics in Neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California, 2005 to 2015', with the same co-authors. That second paper looks at two types of evictions in the city of LA, with very different trends and that seem to affect very different communities. So the two papers are both looking at the types of neighborhoods that have the most evictions, Kyle, what's the motivation for trying to understand that better?

Kyle Nelson 7:10
Yeah, so at the time, and we can talk more about the origin story, the micronized collaboration, but at the time, we knew a lot about what Mike and I call the individual life of eviction, right - the sort of demographic determinants of receiving an eviction filing or being disruptively displaced as a result, you know, of eviction. So, you know, we didn't necessarily want to write that paper, right? Academics, advocacy communities, really knew about evictions demographic for risk factors already. And, you know, and we had a data set that didn't allow us to do the kinds of analyses that facilitate studies of evictions in individual life. And generally, I've always been preoccupied by what I call the institutional life eviction, right, focusing on the institutional processes that produce outcomes like eviction filings or eviction lockouts, and nobody had really done that work in Los Angeles before. And, you know, when I started Graduate School, I like a lot of people. I was inspired by Matthew Desmond's work. But the kind of eviction data that Matt was able to collect in Milwaukee was virtually impossible to collect Los Angeles. And so you know, Mike and I actually met as we were troubleshooting, trying to collect point level eviction data, and Los Angeles. And, you know, after a lot of conversations, you know, we figured out how to troubleshoot the problem. So we ended up getting data from a company called American information Research Services. It included addresses listed as premises on eviction filing. So then we started thinking about spatial dynamics, and it helped that I was working, you know, at the time with a really talented quantitative methodologist names Ashley Grimace who ended up becoming a co-author on the paper, and Ashley had this experience with her dissertation research because she was studying the spatial dynamics of vaccine exemptions in California. And so I think, you know, the idea to, to focus on...

Michael Lens 9:19
Totally irrelevant research in the 21st century.

Shane Phillips 9:23
To be clear, this is pre-COVID, right?

Kyle Nelson 9:26
Yeah, this is pre COVID so...

Shane Phillips 9:28
Tlhis is like measles, mumps, rubella, those kinds of ...

Michael Lens 9:30
like 2016 or 17/18 yeah.

Kyle Nelson 9:34
So if you're ever trying to figure out like what's important to study, you should talk to Ashley first because she's always right. Yeah, so you know, our papers, look at how demographic characteristics are expressed spatially and how different types of eviction are specially patterned, both in the city of Los Angeles and also throughout Southern California.

Michael Lens 9:55
To build on that, for me first of all, it's really cool to just kind of remember Kyle and I bumbling into each other and then I mean, I'm doing most of the bumbling because Kyle had spent a couple of years by that point volunteering in eviction defense clinics, spending a lot of time observing this institutional life of eviction, at least in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse mostly which is in downtown Los Angeles. So I knew nothing about eviction, aside from what Matthew Desmond taught me in that really groundbreaking book, and then I met Kyle. And as is I think, the best case scenario for any faculty member at any stage of their career, got to learn a ton from somebody who was a student at the time, and you know, technically is a student of mine because I'm I was on Kyle's dissertation committee, but it's very unclear who the Anakin and who the Obi Wan Kenobi is in this relationship. You know, just building on also our motivations, you know, I think, for me, going into this, I'm somebody who studies neighborhood dynamics, somebody who studies neighborhood effects, neighborhood processes, neighborhood change, segregation, and other spatial issues. But connecting to eviction, I felt like we've often been told a story related to issues of gentrification and displacement, that the areas where we are most likely to see rises in eviction rates are the places where, you know, the rent is getting more expensive, and as a result of the rent getting more expensive, landlords are more likely to push people out through various tactics, one of those tactics being eviction whether informal or formal. And so, you know, we wanted to test that hypothesis, right, we wanted to try to find data, find to see what we can learn from data, as connecting this input of sorts of neighborhood change to this outcome of eviction. And so, you know, that to me is like the policy and in kind of urban processes that we're testing here to see like, hey, you know, is this true? Is this where we need to be on the lookout for rising eviction rates? Is it where the rent is getting more expensive?

Shane Phillips 12:24
Yeah, Mike, building on that, I think it's really difficult, and, you know, I'm not sure who has successfully done this yet to connect neighborhood characteristics or changes in neighborhoods to the outcome of eviction, what was your strategy? Or what methods did you use to try to do that in these papers?

Michael Lens 12:44
Yeah, so I think, you know, a lot of our listeners are familiar with how challenging it can be to at the neighborhood unit of analysis, identify what we call causal processes, or establish causality, right? So you know, what causes evictions is a complicated story at the individual level but I think it's even more complicated at the neighborhood level because there are many more variables that go into neighborhood change on one side of the equation, and the outcome of neighborhood levels of eviction. So I think first, you know, we want to be kind of humble in how we present that. So we did not account for selection bias for something that we might call reverse causality, right, in which evictions might relate to neighborhood change, we have some methods in which by looking at different points in time,

Shane Phillips 13:42
Like you're sort of saying, it's not that the changing neighborhood is causing rising or falling evictions, but rather, let's say, rising evictions, because of that churn are actually causing the neighborhood change. So like that's the reverse causality,

Michael Lens 13:57
Right, so these causal mechanisms can go in both directions.

Shane Phillips 14:01
And Kyle, I'll turn this back over to you. We're talking about in these two papers, two different kinds of evictions but in the Southern California paper, the one that looks at all five of those different counties together, you looked just at court based eviction filings. So I think we can start there. I'll just ask all of the big-picture questions at once. What do these kinds of filings represent? Where did you see them concentrated? And what kinds of characteristics were associated with the neighborhoods where they were most common whether that's, you know, income, racial and ethnic makeup, housing type or otherwise?

Kyle Nelson 14:36
Yeah, so you know, in this study, we're looking primarily at court based eviction filings right? What this means is that the landlord goes to the court and the landlord as plaintiff and in a civil jurisdiction lawsuit filed a lawsuit against their tenant, they filed the lawsuit against the tenant over the issue of possession and then, you know, they're given a court date, and the eviction process ensues. But we're looking primarily at this moment of filing, right, because we don't have information about eviction outcomes which is a feature of trying to study eviction in Los Angeles. And, you know, there's the general process, a frustrating process at that, of trying to get data on eviction outcomes, even in the aggregate, it's virtually impossible.

Shane Phillips 15:28
Can you say really quick, why Los Angeles, in particular does not have the outcome data available?

Michael Lens 15:34
Oh, this is fun.

Kyle Nelson 15:35
When we were doing the study, it was, it was primarily because, you know, the court system in LA County, just didn't have the case management software. They were using incredibly old technology to try to keep track of all of this stuff. And, you know, until Mike and I started asking these questions and advocates started asking these questions, you know, I don't think many people that even asked for this.

Michael Lens 16:02
This is the largest county court system in the country, is that right?

Kyle Nelson 16:06
Yeah, and a lot of people say in the world,

Michael Lens 16:10
This is the 21st century, this is the largest economy on planet Earth right?

Kyle Nelson 16:16
Yeah, and they were using computer systems that were so outdated that, you know, they couldn't pull data off of them. So while some counties in California report aggregate data on eviction outcomes, to the statewide Judicial Council, LA County never did. You know, and the process to update the system, at least, you know, at the time was so onerous and costly that it just was never going to happen. That started to change, and now we're having conversations myself advocates, you know, around California, we're starting to have these conversations now where it's, you know, can we use legislation to compel courts to report? Can we use kind of relentless Public Records Act requests to compel?

Shane Phillips 17:06
Where it's more costly for them to keep responding to those than to just update their systems?

Kyle Nelson 17:11
Yes, and you know, the other thing that's happened is that the LA Superior Court system has modernized their case management. Now, whether or not that's made its way to eviction courts, that's another question entirely, but, you know, change is happening. But all of this is to say that when we were doing this work, you could not get this data. You could get aggregate filing data by bugging them a lot but outside of that, we really couldn't.

Michael Lens 17:40
So much so that the company that we received these data from, the American Information Research Services, which I believe has sold this product since then, and so it's a different entity that holds these data now, but they were so behind the times that this company would send individuals to pull physical files and copy and, you know, right into their own database on a laptop, the information on every eviction filed, and I can't remember how many records you're restricted to pull in a day, you know. So somebody would show up there, grab 100 files, sit in the lobby, and type these data into a laptop. And that was how this company created the database, or at least rounded out the database for LA County, from the courts that still only did paper files.

Kyle Nelson 18:39
This is completely different from people that you know, study Milwaukee, or Cleveland, where they email a clerk and the clerk just sends them everything. It's hard to really get across how difficult it is to do this work in Los Angeles. Politicians didn't know anything about eviction filing volume, advocates didn't know anything about eviction filing volume. I don't know if the courts do anything. So it's really a special place when it comes to data inaccessibility.

Shane Phillips 19:11
So we've talked about sort of what these filings represent and what they don't represent because we're talking about filings and not actual, like executed evictions. But then how about those follow-ups about where you saw these evictions concentrated in the neighborhood characteristics where they were most common?

Kyle Nelson 19:28
Yeah, so we found that evictions tend to be concentrated in areas with high shares of households, you know, below poverty and high shares of of African American residents. And what I think is really important about those findings is that this isn't just in one city, this is across five counties. And as you pointed out before five massive counties that have incredibly different housing markets, you know, never mind the fact that you know, we're also kind of nested within regional housing market. And the thing that's, you know, I think, really shocking is that even across all of these different contexts, we found that the same characteristics, were predicting where evictions were going to be concentrated. And as far as I know, this was the first study that, you know, looked at a sort of comparative perspective, because, you know, a lot of people had identified that evictions were happening in areas with, you know, high shares of socially marginalized residents, that evictions were happening in places that are generally considered to be low rent. But as far as I know, nobody had really done that work comparatively. And so, you know, we found that not only did our findings, you know, conform to what we would have expected based on this massive literature, right, but they also hold across a lot of different housing market contexts. And, you know, that's important, I think, from an empirical perspective, but also a policy perspective, because it really gives us a sense that, you know, evictions are not distributed equally in space, they're not equally distributed in the population. And so that gives us, you know, as academics that are interested in participating in policy conversations, that gives us a really important, you know, finding to figure out, like, why is this happening, what can we do about it.

Michael Lens 21:19
Right, and I, you know, I think Kyle and I came into this, well Kyle and I, and Xavier, and Ashley, we came into this thinking that there are at least two broad characteristics of neighborhoods that we might think are associated more or less with evictions, and they're not mutually exclusive by any means. But one of these characteristics is what you might call concentrated disadvantage - places with lower incomes, places with higher shares of racial minorities. And on the other side of the equation, it might be places that are not necessarily advantaged but are rapidly appreciating in advantage - we might think are indicative of gentrification. And so if you want to think about it pretty simply, as are we more likely to see higher eviction rates in places that are gentrifying versus places that are concentrating disadvantage, we find a whole lot more evidence that concentrated disadvantage is where we see higher levels of eviction, which to me tells us eviction is more about poverty, it's more about the racial discrimination in housing markets, it's more about people who have fewer options in the rental market, and who are finding it more and more difficult to afford rent because of their individual circumstances and the relationships with their landlord rather than the landlord looking around and saying, "I can get a lot better rents here, I need to figure out ways to get rid of some of the renters that I have that are not paying me as much". Now again, these things are not mutually exclusive by any means, and also recall that there may be other things going on that we don't capture. This is not the definitive causal story on neighborhood eviction rates. But you know, for now, I feel more confident in saying that, we need to look at places that are still locations of concentrated disadvantage, rather than places that are gentrifying as the most likely neighborhoods that are seeing high eviction rates.

Kyle Nelson 23:33
And the question about gentrification is an interesting one, because...

Michael Lens 23:37
For sure

Kyle Nelson 23:37
... you know, we didn't find that direct relationship but you know, a finding from the second paper, and I don't think it even made it into the final draft of the paper that was kind of interesting that we didn't push, was that the places that had the highest eviction rates at time one, were places that were gentrifying or had gentrified by time two. And so you know, that suggests to me that we're kind of asking the wrong questions about eviction, right, it seems like eviction is something that happens before gentrification, and that's something that our findings support. So while we can't really you know, talk much about causality, I think we're almost like bracketing the question of causality altogether, because, in real-time, evictions are happening in remarkably similar neighborhood contexts. Now, whether or not those neighborhoods ultimately gentrify or whether or not you know, these neighborhoods continue to be poor, disadvantaged for a long time, that's another question entirely, right. But if you're a policymaker trying to get a sense of well, how do you decrease the number of evictions, I feel like our paper has, you know, has provided a roadmap at least to identify the areas that you would expect there to be significant eviction risk.

Shane Phillips 24:59
So that's court based eviction filings, which are the focus of your Southern California paper, as I said in your housing policy debate article, you also look at Ellis Act eviction petitions. Tell us what those are and what distinguishes the two eviction types, in terms of landlord motivations. How did you expect the different motivations or purposes behind Ellis Act eviction petitions to impact their spatial distribution in relation to court-based eviction filings like how did you expect them to differ?

Kyle Nelson 25:32
Yeah, so Ellis Act evictions are a class of eviction called a "no cause eviction", and what that means is that in areas that are protected by rent stabilization ordinances and just cause ordinances, landlords have to have a reason to evict you. So when we're studying court-based evictions, we're studying evictions for cause but in places like the city of Los Angeles, a landlord has a set of exceptions too to just cause, right, where they can evict tenants for no cause. And there's a series of eviction types that are captured under this right, we can be talking about owner movements, for example. So if the owner of an apartment complex wants to move into one of the units in a complex, then they're they're able to evict a tenant you know, without cause. Ellis Act evictions are evictions that occur because the property owner, the landlord wants to withdraw the building or the unit from the rental market entirely. And to do that they have to petition the housing department, right, or whatever the entity is that you know, processes, housing cases,

Shane Phillips 26:45
And just to be clear, this is a statewide law so the apartment owners, rental unit owners in any city in the state are able to do this, but they have to go to their respective housing department or the equivalent.

Kyle Nelson 26:56
Yeah, and at the time, there weren't many rent control jurisdictions in LA County, right, it was the City of LA, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills.

Shane Phillips 27:04
That's actually a really important point, because there's no need for the Ellis Act eviction route in a place without rent control, and specifically without just cause eviction protections. Because if you don't have Just Cause Eviction protections, which say, you can only evict people for these reasons, and for cause, or for the specific no-fault reasons. If those rules aren't in place, landlords can evict people for any reason, or no reason at all. And I think that's actually kind of standard practice in most of the country, it's actually more rare for cities to have Just Cause Eviction protections. That is certainly changing at some level nationally, and I don't know, maybe the majority of housing units are covered by just cause at this point, I kind of doubt it but I think that's an important point to make that you just raised.

Kyle Nelson 27:49
Oh, definitely, and it's not just nationally, I mean, there's 88 cities in LA County, right, plus unincorporated LA County. Very few of those cities have rent control protections, right, so even in our court-based data, there's probably cases that are no fault cases because as you point out, right, a landlord doesn't have to have a cause in a lot of jurisdictions. So you know, if you're looking at tenants who are living in the city of Bell, for example, there is no rent control in Bell so if your landlord wants to evict you, they can just evict you.

Shane Phillips 28:23
Just to be clear here, though, with the passage in, I think 2019 of AB 1482, that does include Just Cause Eviction protections for most rental housing now correct? So not during the study period, which only went up to 2015 but now most rental housing in California is covered by these Just Cause Eviction protections.

Kyle Nelson 28:45
Yeah, yeah, you're right. So basically, the Ellis Act eviction cases are ones where landlords want to, you know, do condo conversion, they want to knock the building down, sell it to a developer and build something else. There's a lot of hotel development that happens with the Ellis Act that basically, like these are a particular type of eviction that can only happen, at least in the period that we were studying, can only happen in a handful of places right? So one of the reasons why I think the spatial concentration measures were much weaker for Ellis Act cases, is that they really can only happen in a handful of cities versus eviction filings that are happening through the court system, which can literally occur anywhere in the county. And so I think that's, that's part of it, and you know, when you talk to advocates about where Ellis Act evictions are happening, they'll tell you well, they're happening in places like Venice Beach, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, they're happening in places that have a very different demographic profile than the kinds of places where court based evictions are happening, right. So, you know, that was something that we were interested in, because one of the things that I'm fascinated with as an urban sociologist is how we can kind of take this incredibly complex phenomenon like eviction, and we can turn it into an outcome without really asking ourselves, what is it that's actually happening here? And so when I was studying eviction in Los Angeles, well, there's so many kinds of eviction that are happening. Do they all exhibit the same type of spatial dynamics or is there something different, right, is there a different mechanism that is shaping variation and outcomes? And so that, you know, that was one of our main hypotheses for that paper is that, well, there must be different mechanisms here. And as Mike pointed out, before, Ellis Act evictions are happening because, you know, landlords decide that there's some kind of better use or more valuable use for the space, right, whether they're going to offload the building entirely, whether they're going to continue to own it but turn it into some other type of function, which is really different from a court-based eviction. Because landlords that use the Ellis Act, they can't re-rent those properties, at least in theory, for I believe, a period of five years, right? So it's not like you're using the Ellis Act to evict tenants and replace them with, you know, higher paying tenants, you can't do that. So, you know, we had an idea that the underlying mechanisms would be different,

Michael Lens 31:17
Right, and I think the economics are obviously very, very different, right? And part of that has more to do with the demand side of the equation. So the tenant side, if you're looking at court-based evictions, again, we have a lot of evidence from the literature that obviously people that are more likely to experience evictions, are living in poverty. We confirm that in our spatial research, and then where do we think Ellis Act evictions are more likely to occur, at least it's places where landlords have a better option, one option that might have very little to do with economics is that the landlord wants to take over the unit and live in it, that's probably a little bit more randomly distributed. But if it's a condo conversion, that's a situation in which the landlord thinks I have something of pretty high value, and so I'm going to exit the rental market and sell this unit for a pretty high number, or at least a higher number than I think I can get it with the equivalent rental relationship.

Shane Phillips 32:27
Right, and I think, just to draw this out, it's a really important point to connect to rent control, because in many cases, that's what creates that gap in value where you might have a tenant who's lived in the unit for 20 years, and their rents only been allowed to go up by, you know, 3% a year, and maybe the market rents have been increasing 5% or more year after year, and so the gap between what they can get from a market rate tenant, and the current tenant is quite large but they can't get a market rate tenant unless that person voluntarily moves out. So the alternative there is through the Ellis Act, they can evict them to turn it into condos and sell it or to perhaps redevelop the building into more apartments that will not be subject to that rule because b they're new.

Kyle Nelson 33:16
Yeah, and tenants can, you know, tenants essentially can get evicted twice during the LSA process, right. The first time is when they receive notice that they have 90 days to vacate, or 60 days to vacate. And the second is if they don't vacate within that period of time, then the landlord will file an eviction with the court system. And I wanted to add that, you know, when landlords filed these petitions, they also have responsibilities to tenants right, and that's mainly they have to give tenants time to move, and they have to give them material relocation assistance. And so you know, and there's different classes of tenant as defined by various housing bureaucracies, right, so older tenants, people who have been in their apartments for longer, folks with children, you know, are entitled to larger benefits than let's say, you know, a single person who's living in a unit for two or three years.

Shane Phillips 34:13
And you know, that makes sense, just because certain people have greater needs but also again tying this to kind of the gap between the rent and what can be achieved by doing something different with the property. That person who moved in just a few years ago, is paying pretty close to market rate, whereas against someone who's lived there much longer probably is not in a rent-controlled jurisdiction, like Los Angeles. So zooming into LA, let's talk about the actual eviction trends over time for both kinds of evictions, how many court filings and Ellis Act petitions were occurring, and how did those numbers shift year to year from 2005 to 2015?

Kyle Nelson 34:52
And so I guess the first way to answer that question is that there's a huge difference in scale. There are far far far more court-based evictions filed, than no-fault evictions, you know, petitioned, you know, in the city of Los Angeles. So I think that's the first thing to kind of take note of is that even though these are technically like two types of eviction, they're happening in very different scales. So, you know, we were studying this period of time between 2005 and 2015; (in) 2005, there are 55,322 evictions filed in LA County, during the Great Recession, that number jumps much higher, right, we get all the way up to 72,167 evictions by 2008. And it really takes like five, six years for those numbers to get back to pre-recession levels. In fact, the numbers don't return to pre-recession levels until 2015. The general trend in LA County is that there used to be a ton of evictions filed, like a ton. In the year 2000, which is the oldest date in the dataset, you know, there were as many as 81,000 plus evictions being filed in LA County. The courts consolidate, the economy gets better because there was a mild recession and you know, the turn of the 21st century, those numbers kind of fall into the 50,000 range right, before they shoot back up again, in 2008, during the Great Recession. Then you have this period of recovery until about 2015 when evictions are finally back to their pre-recession levels. And then at that point, we start to see, and this is sort of a bit of a paradox if you follow the way that eviction is covered in the press, we start to see evictions declining at a pretty significant rate, culminating in 2019 when there were only 40,572, you know, evictions filed. Of course, after that, you get the COVID era with,you know, all of these tenant protections, the so-called eviction moratorium, and, you know, as those protections peel away, now we're seeing the numbers are shooting back to pre COVID levels. So this was one of the findings in both of the papers is that eviction filing volume, at least for court based evictions is, you know, is definitely sensitive to these kinds of large-scale economic shocks. You know, in moments where the economy's bad and there's some sort of really bad economic event, right, whether it's the you know, the great recession or if it's the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown, you know, evictions just skyrocket. Right. So, that's the general trend. And you know, we noticed an inverse trend with Ellis Act evictions right, when court-based evictions were high, Ellis Act evictions were low, and when Ellis Act evictions were high court based evictions were low. But, you know, again, I want to caution listeners from taking too much away from that, in large part because the scales are so different. There are thousands of Ellis Act eviction cases, there's tens of thousands of court-based eviction cases. Right, so you know, the trends are inverse, but I'm not sure that we can necessarily say that when times are good landlords resort to the Ellis Act, and when times are bad, they use the courts. We can't say anything like that.

Michael Lens 38:28
Yeah, that's a good point. Ellis Act is I guess, counter-cyclical, you know, where you see less of it when times are bad, because, you know, landlords have fewer options in terms of what they can do with their property economically but I think that's a very key point, right, that you're not necessarily seeing people on the landlord side toggling back and forth between a court process of eviction and an Ellis Act process of eviction, because there's just not anywhere near as many really I guess I would say, Ellis Act opportunities out there.

Shane Phillips 39:06
So let's move on to talking about the actual neighborhoods where eviction filings were most common, or maybe the characteristics of the kinds of places where they were most common. Maybe it will be easiest to separate these findings into the results that mostly align with expectations and previous research. And those that were maybe a bit more surprising. We can start with court-based eviction filing rates, and specifically the cross-sectional data that just looks at associations between evictions and neighborhood characteristics at a couple of points in time, which is 2005 to 2009 and 2011 to 2015. I think listeners will not be that surprised to hear that filing rates are lower in neighborhoods where a higher share of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher or that neighborhoods with a higher black share of the population experienced higher rates of court filing given what we know about the marginalization of black people in our economy and in the housing market, and just from previous research on eviction. You also saw higher court-based eviction rates in places with higher rents, higher median home values, median incomes, and vacancy rates, and in neighborhoods with more units funded by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, and just more new units generally, did any of those surprise you or raise interesting questions.

Kyle Nelson 40:29
In the 2011 to 2015 period, the highest prevalence was clustered in South Los Angeles, the Harbor region, and the San Fernando Valley region. You know, the one that was truly surprising to me was the San Fernando Valley. We typically think about the San Fernando Valley is like, you know, anywhere between a middle-class and upper-middle-class to upper-class utopia, in a sense, right at a place with, you know, with a lot of homeowners, we don't typically think about, you know, the San Fernando Valley as being a place with a lot of poor renters that we've

Shane Phillips 41:03
Yeah, we all seem clueless

Kyle Nelson 41:06
And so yeah, the valley being an area with higher prevalence of these eviction clusters, like that was a surprise for me. And, you know, it wasn't as surprising that evictions were also clustered in South Los Angeles in the Harbor area, because again, we know from all of this prior research that black people, primarily black women, are evicted at much higher rates than other tenants. When we look at the findings in this 2005 to 2009, I think we see it's very similar. But we see evictions are happening in areas that are also highly populated by Latino folks, too right, so like Central Los Angeles, Northeast Los Angeles, East LA, again, that's not particularly surprising, because you would expect evictions to be concentrated in places with lots of demographic minorities and, you know, with lots of socially marginalized folks. So yeah, and again, like evictions can only really happen in places where there's rental housing, right, so it's not surprising for example, that there are very few evictions in the West side, because there are very few poor renter neighborhoods and the west side. So you know, I think the evictions in Los Angeles and a lot of the places that we expected to see them. And then we also found a couple of other places like the San Fernando Valley, where there's a lot of poor tenants in places like Van Nuys, and this work has actually been, you know, kind of illuminating on the policy and advocacy side, because you know, that finding in particular, I think, has kind of shined a light on our various valleys as places that we need to really direct resources to.

Michael Lens 42:51
Appreciate that kind of geographic trip through different parts of the region, and specifically Los Angeles that highlight it, because building on what Kyle just said, it's about where can we direct resources, right, if we want something like this to be policy relevant, it's about if someday we had some kind of eviction defense alert system, right, like, where are the places that we need to target resources? And I think that's helpful. The other side of your question Shane is thinking of, you know to me anyways, thinking about what are the kinds of findings that surprised us right, and some of that is like locational but then some of that is, what are the neighborhood characteristics that we find that are more about the variables, the characteristics, the indicators of these neighborhoods. And, you know, I think, given how much we control for poverty, race, and the rental market in terms of the number of rental units, the fact that we see more evictions, where there are more low-income housing tax credit units, swifter change, an increase in the number of evictions, where we see increases in low-income housing tax credit units during this time period. That's perplexing, I guess, you know, maybe we're not doing a good enough job controlling for poverty. But we would expect, all else equal, that if you have more subsidized housing in the form of low-income housing tax credit developments, if you have active production in low income housing tax credit developments, that would help absorb eviction type problems, right, where you would have fewer people that are falling behind on the rent because the rent is subsidized. And so that's a perplexing finding. There's a growing area of research on the extent to which people are being evicted from anywhere from public housing to people using housing vouchers to people occupying Low-Income Tax Credit Housing. So we're starting to learn a little bit more that it's certainly not anywhere near as simple as once you, you know, win the lottery, so to speak, and are able to obtain,

Shane Phillips 45:14
So to speak, not literally win the lottery

Michael Lens 45:19
Not the fun kind, not the scratch off but the literal housing voucher lottery or public housing lottery, or Low Income Housing Tax free development, pseudo lottery, you would think that people are protected from eviction outcomes if they live in subsidized housing but that is far from the case. You know, public housing authorities evict but also, when you live in a tax credit development, you largely have a private landlord, and there's no reason to think that you're necessarily any more protected than somebody who is, you know, living in a market rate unit.

Shane Phillips 45:58
Yeah, and maybe it sort of points toward the difference between just having a low income and having a volatile income. Because if you're someone who makes $30,000 a year and is eligible for a low-income housing tax credit unit, it's great that your rent is lower than it would otherwise be. But if you have a three-month period where you just can't find enough work, or any work, then you're still very vulnerable to falling behind, and being evicted, and I think you know, that's more likely to happen probably when you're paying with a voucher to a private regular landlord than maybe in a low income housing tax credit project or public housing project where they might be a little more flexible and give you a little more leeway. But yeah, I think that's an important point to make. Mike, I want to actually follow up here in the Southern California paper on court based evictions, you wrote, "explanations for eviction prevalence in a neighborhood generally fall under two categories, either neighborhood change explains eviction prevalence because residents cannot afford increasing rents, or evictions are concentrated in neighborhoods with higher proportions of low income residents, and or people of color. In our study, we find much stronger support for the latter explanation. In other words, court-based eviction filings are less likely to occur in neighborhoods with rising rent, or income levels than in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates or shares of African American individuals". In our recent conversation with Hyojung Lee, Mike, you said that his research with Kristin Perkins had you more convinced that there really is an association between gentrification and displacement, and I imagine you can correct me if I'm wrong, that your own research with Kyle here may partly explain why you weren't all that persuaded by neighborhood change and gentrification as drivers of eviction before. I'm wondering, is there any tension there between your findings for Southern California here, and now Hyojung and Kristen's more recent work?

Michael Lens 48:00
Well, the obvious answer is that Kyle, Ashley, Xavier, and I are right, and everybody else is wrong. But if I'm going to be more diplomatic, shout out to Kristin and Hyojung, we've talked a few times on this podcast about eviction research, you know, which is, in some ways, an exploding area of research, and I think is an important one, for sure. And certainly one of the things that we talked about is that eviction comes in many forms, and eviction is not synonymous with displacement. You know, it's, I think, a few measurement things are important to keep in mind, right? That, whether it's court-based evictions, or no-cause evictions, which, you know, we have two papers that kind of focus on. Those are two flawed measures of eviction, or at least limited measures of eviction that don't capture every way that a landlord is either trying to remove a tenant from their unit or is ultimately successful in removing a tenant from the unit for myriad reasons. So our measures of eviction are limited. That's one thing, and then obviously, to the extent that we have limitations in our in how well we're capturing this broad phenomenon of eviction, we're even more limited in capturing a broader phenomenon of displacement. Right? I think that you have to be very precise about kind of which what thing you're looking at and what the limitations are when you are looking at eviction, and which form of eviction versus a broader phenomenon such as displacement. And so I found Hyojung and Kristen's work to not only put at least a bit of a caveat on the conclusions from our own work but you know, really more this broader literature on the role that gentrification plays in this thing we call it displacement that is bigger than eviction, right? It's, you know, accelerated patterns of mobility out of neighborhoods, by lower-income people, or however, we want to define the kind of vulnerable group. And so I think their work, again, is capturing this broader phenomenon, and, you know, their work and our work, I think can sit next to each other is mostly in this measurement difference, you know, and so I compare their work to the earlier work that is, again, I think, looking at this broader phenomenon of displacement than just eviction.

Kyle Nelson 50:51
Yeah, and just to add, our findings don't disprove anything right? All we're saying is that this relationship that we expected to see wasn't there. It's, you know, it's not saying that people in gentrifying neighborhoods don't get evicted. It's just that, you know, when we look over these large periods of time, when we look over these large swaths of space, we don't see what we expected to see. Like I mentioned earlier, we do see that there is kind of like a lag effect, right? Evictions tend to predate gentrification and the process through which neighborhoods gentrify but here we're talking about in real time, does gentrification cause eviction? No, we didn't see it. It's possible that, you know, the folks that would be displaced by gentrification were already displaced, prior to gentrification. But you know, this requires a study in and of itself. And I'm not sure we have the data, the data on eviction, or the census data, to be able to draw those kinds of conclusions.

Shane Phillips 52:03
So coming back to some of the results here, we've really just talked about the associations between neighborhood characteristics at a point in time and eviction rates during that same time period. You also looked at how changes to neighborhoods over time, were also associated with higher or lower eviction rates for both kinds of eviction, the court based and Ellis Act evictions. In that part of this analysis, what did you find there?

Kyle Nelson 52:34
You know, I think the real finding, I mean, the Ellis findings, they're kind of complicated. It didn't tell us really much of anything in terms of what the associations were. With the court-based evictions, I don't know what you want to call it, like how durable the associations are over time and across space especially with households that are, you know, that are at the poverty line or below poverty, and, you know, a neighborhood share of African American residents like. I think that's a pretty big deal; even as neighborhoods change, these factors are still making certain communities more likely to have a concentration of eviction filings.

Michael Lens 53:20
Recall, again, that we have two papers in two different forms of eviction, the second paper in Housing Policy Debate that looks in the city of Los Angeles, specifically, what are the neighborhood characteristics that are most strongly associated with no cause or Ellis Act evictions? As Kyle points out, those findings are much less conclusive. And the way I think about this is that across space, there are fewer opportunities, and more concentrated opportunities for Ellis Act conversion, or more concentrated outcome sometimes because you might have a large development that in a particular year, a land owner decides to exit the rental business, and you have a sudden big number in the number of Ellis Act evictions in that census tract - that can add like a little bit of random noise that's not necessarily connected to neighborhood processes. It's more connected to the whims or the financial or economic circumstances of that landowner. And so, if suddenly in census tract A, a landowner exits the rental business with a 500 or 750 unit Ellis Act conversion, like that ends up sucking up a ton of variation in Ellis Act conversions across space in a particular year, that might end up not having a whole lot that's related to neighborhood conditions. So I mean, this is, you know, quantitative researcher kind of like, overly like explaining his data perhaps. But like, that's one of the caveats. I think for me, at least one of the explanations of why the connections between neighborhood characteristics and Ellis Act evictions, it's just a lot more ambiguous.

Shane Phillips 55:27
Yeah, it does seem that the combination of just how relatively rare Ellis Act evictions are, and the sort of idiosyncrasies of individual property owners, like, if older owner passes away, and their heirs take the property and don't want to be landlords, like, they can either Ellis Act, or they'll sell it to someone who maybe will do that, because they see like, that's the most valuable use of the property for them. But like, obviously, the market conditions matter, because that's only going to be feasible in certain neighborhoods but it still was dependent on this kind of random chance instance, of both the person passing away and passing it down, and the sort of just personal preferences of the people who inherited that property. And you do hear about these kinds of transfers of ownership as being the trigger point for a lot of these kinds of evictions.

Kyle Nelson 56:19
And it's, you know, it's one of the reasons why in the paper, we say a big limitation is that we don't have data on property ownership. You know, maybe if we had data on property ownership, right, different types of landlords, different types of buildings, then, you know, we might be able to have more, more precise analysis, right? But, you know, strictly from the perspective of demographics, you know, of like the concentration of rental housing, we just didn't see it.

Shane Phillips 56:47
Yeah, so last couple of questions here, thinking about how we respond to these findings as academics or urban planners or policymakers, one of the policies you recommend is robust tenant protections that go beyond municipal boundaries. Could you say more about that, what kinds of protections do you think would be most helpful, and is the purpose of protections that extend across municipal or even state boundaries just about covering more people or are there other benefits to that approach as well?

Kyle Nelson 57:19
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned it earlier, LA has a political fragmentation problem, right? We have 88 cities, we have a large chunk of unincorporated Los Angeles County, and each of those cities has a government. Each of those cities has, you know, some kind of code enforcement mechanism. At the end of the day, it's just incredibly confusing living in a place like California, especially in a county like Los Angeles, what actually applies to you,

Shane Phillips 57:49
We talk all the time about how like, people don't realize that living in Venice, living in North Hollywood, you are, in fact, in the city of Los Angeles, like so many people don't even realize what city they live in.

Kyle Nelson 58:00
Exactly, and so, I would say like, the foremost reason to have broad-based tenant protections that cover as many people as possible across jurisdiction, is just that you just want to get rid of the confusion. You want to make sure that, you know, people understand what their rights are, and aren't having to pay attention to the way that, you know, again, I feel like I'm picking on the city of Bell, but that how the city of Bell fits within LA County fits within the state of California, right, that's really hard for anybody to do. Never mind, like, you know, if you're facing eviction, you're under a ton of stress. So you know, the broad-based protections, I think, first and foremost are important just to really standardize people's rights, get to the point where you can put everybody's rights on a single piece of paper, rather than, you know, 15 different pieces of paper that you have to cross-check with, you know, different changes to temporary protections and, you know, codified permanent protections, right. So, I think, you know, we first just have to make the system much easier to navigate where people know what their rights are, and where we protect as many people as possible.

Shane Phillips 59:13
And I think it goes both ways, actually, to where it's not actually just about the tenants knowing their rights, but the landlord's knowing their responsibilities, and to the extent that they do also not having the, frankly very plausible deniability of saying like, "well, it's just so confusing. I didn't know what I was responsible for". And it's not to say that that's actually like valid defense, but it is certainly the kind of thing that I think you hear, and it is very confusing to keep track of all the different rule changes, whether you're a landlord, and especially if you know, you just own a couple of units or so, and you don't consider like landlording to be your job, or your primary source of income or work or whatever.

Kyle Nelson 59:57
And this became a huge issue during the COVID pandemic, because in all of these, you know, all of these press conferences and the pages in newspapers and on television, everybody was saying there was an eviction moratorium. But in reality, evictions could continue, right tenants could still get evicted, landlords could still evict, and there was so much confusion over that process, that we created these policies that ultimately failed both landlords and tenants right. And so again, like, you know, this is a fragmented region, and a fragmented state. But we need to start making policies, especially housing policies that cut across these boundaries, because otherwise, there's just, nobody has any idea what the rights and responsibilities are.

Shane Phillips 1:00:50
And although you do recommend these broad and consistent tenant protections, you do make an exception in the case of neighborhoods with large or increasing shares of black residents. Tell us more about why you think that exception is important, and thinking about actual policies and practice, what might it look like to prioritize black neighborhoods, and the residents with these protections or different kinds of protections?

Well, so first and foremost, I think it's important to keep in mind that these aren't just neighborhoods, oftentimes, these are cities. These are cities that have local governments that can make life you know, better for black residents thinking about cities like Lancaster, Palmdale, you know, cities in the southeastern part of Los Angeles

Michael Lens 1:01:39
For a couple of examples of cities that maybe do the opposite of making life better. Is that what you're saying? Sorry if you're a leader in Lancaster or Palmdale, but I just insulted you, and I'm not sure I take it back.

Kyle Nelson 1:01:53
So, you know, I think first and foremost, it's not just talking about targeting neighborhoods, I think it's, you know, there are cities, where black people in particular are far more likely to get evicted, right, where eviction is a much more likely reality than other communities right. So, you know, first and foremost, we can kind of can bolster the tenants rights regimen in these places. Second, I think that there's you know, there's a lot of ways you can do targeted outreach, this is one of the kind of policy tragedies of not having, you know, available eviction data is that we don't really know, you know, what are the zip codes where people are getting disproportionately getting, you know, eviction filings, because if we knew where those places were, we could have targeted outreach, we could have folks knocking on doors, we could have ad buys in the media, we could have, I don't know billboards in park benches. We could get the message out so much more effectively.

Shane Phillips 1:02:52
We have billboards - they're the 'Syphilis Explosion', and, and 'Housing is a Human Right', billboards,

Kyle Nelson 1:02:58
There literally was one of those outside of my apartment for about two months.

Shane Phillips 1:03:05
Now we're gonna have to provide a link to a picture of these billboards. So I apologize to the non-LA residents who have no idea what I'm talking about.

Michael Lens 1:03:13
We're dragging the AIDS Healthcare Foundation,

Kyle Nelson 1:03:15
Whatever you do, do not google this don't waste your time.

Shane Phillips 1:03:21
I'll provide the link directly, yeah.

Kyle Nelson 1:03:23
Yeah, so you know, we can do targeted outreach. And I think it's, you know, it's actually happening right now, there's a lot of advocacy coalitions in Los Angeles, including the right to counsel coalition that I organized with a lot, that has been working with the LA County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs, to define zip codes to target, right to have more outreach to have more tenants rights clinics to have lawyers available to represent tenants from, you know, specific zip codes right. But again, to go back to the, you know, the eviction data problem, this is all based on, you know, increasingly more complex estimates, right, this isn't based on actual data. And so the way that you target services, whether legal services, tenants rights, clinic type services, you know, services that are going to help with code enforcement and habitability, you have to know where the problems are, and we just don't. And that's, that's a huge problem right? So that's kind of how I see this whole thing working is that you really bolster the rights that tenants have. You make, you know, as many tenants as possible in the state of California covered by the same sets of rights. And then you can really kind of do the work of figuring out like, what are the cities and what are the neighborhoods that we need to work with, to do the same? And, you know, the second thing that I want to bring up is that it really is a shame that there is not a single tenant protection in the state of California that keeps tenants out of eviction court, the only way that you get to realize your rights as a tenant, when you're defending yourself against eviction, is to show up in court and assert those defenses. And, you know, the broader kind of policy vision here is to decouple tenants rights from this framework where you have to be able to mobilize them legally, in your own defense. We need to find ways of keeping tenants out of court, rather than giving them you know, more and more rights to utilize when they're in court. And that's, you know, and we haven't really talked about this, but the reason that's so important is that we know that the majority of tenants are losing their cases by default. And what that means is that when a landlord serves a tenant an eviction notice, a tenant has to respond within a certain number of days. And for whatever reason, there's a lot of reasons, most tenants lose their cases because they don't respond in time. So they don't even you know, have the opportunity to defend themselves in the first place. So, you know, I think that when you put those three kinds of policy strategies together, that's where you get a framework for tenants' rights, that also is a way of preventing eviction, which we just currently don't have. No matter how much we talk about policies as doing eviction prevention, there's no way to keep tenants out of court, right? You can take Matt Desmond's prescription, you can give everybody housing vouchers, but tenants are still going to get evicted. You can you know, bolster everybody's tenants rights, and you can, you know, make the strongest set of protections in the history of the United States, and it doesn't keep tenants out of court. So, you know, as academics that are working in the policy advocacy sphere, I think it's also really important that we think about how do we prevent the problems that we see in our research. And that's something that's always been really important to me as a scholar.

Shane Phillips 1:07:06
Well, I think that sobering reality and set of recommendations is a great place to end. Kyle Nelson, thank you for being on the Housing Voice podcast and Mike Lens, kind of a guest as well. Thank you for being on the Housing Voice podcast.

Michael Lens 1:07:18
Great to be here, Shane, I I've heard a lot about your upstart podcasts and it's, it's amazing to finally get an invite.

Kyle Nelson 1:07:26
Thank you, Shane. It's a pleasure to talk about the work again. Yes.

Shane Phillips 1:07:36
You can read more about Kyle's work on our website. lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there to the UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at ShaneDPhillips, and Mike is at MC_lens. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.