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作者

Peter Hepburn

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue3,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

IntroductionResearchers have investigated the prevalence and the individual-, building-, and neighborhood-level correlates of eviction (Desmond and Gershenson 2017; Gomory 2021; Immergluck et al. 2019). Nearly all previous studies have focused on how these relationships play out in cities (Desmond and Shollenberger 2015; Lundberg and Donnelly 2019), yet today the majority of poor Americans—those most likely to face the threat of eviction—live in suburbs (Allard 2017a). Considerable attention has been paid to the consequences of this suburbanization of poverty, particularly the limited symbolic and material supports offered by state and nonprofit actors in these spaces (Allard 2009; Kneebone and Berube 2013). We know much less, however, about the differences—if any—between the operation of urban and suburban housing markets. In this paper we address three questions. First, do renters in the suburbs face equivalent risk of eviction as their urban peers? Second, are the factors associated with high rates of displacement in urban spaces the same ones that predict eviction in the suburbs? Third, what explains variations between metropolitan areas in the scale or direction of urban-suburban disparities in eviction rates?To answer these questions, we examined more than 2.3 million eviction cases filed between 2012 and 2016 in 71 metropolitan areas. We found that median eviction rates were higher in urban neighborhoods than in the suburbs (3.19 percent vs. 2.00 percent). We fit a series of regressions modeling eviction rates as a function of suburban status and an array of tract- and metro-level variables. After adding controls, we found no remaining difference: equivalent urban and suburban neighborhoods had, on average, equivalent eviction rates. To explore this finding in greater depth, we analyzed how the relationship between eviction rates and four key neighborhood characteristics—poverty rates, age of available housing, racial composition, and median rents—differed by suburban status. We found that the basic relationships observed in studies of urban eviction played out differently in suburban spaces.Although these models allowed us to evaluate general patterns in eviction risk across urban and suburban spaces, the main effects belied significant variation between and within metropolitan areas. We found that suburban communities had higher median eviction rates than their urban counterparts in one in every six metropolitan areas in our sample. Regression results indicated that this pattern was most common in metropolitan areas that experienced greater shifts toward suburban poverty since the year 2000, where urban rents were higher relative to suburban rents, and where suburbs were more segregated. We provide case studies of three metropolitan areas—Milwaukee, Miami, and Seattle—that yield sharply divergent patterns of urban-suburban disparities in eviction risk. Understanding this heterogeneity is, we argue, critical in addressing housing instability in any given area.Our findings illuminate a previously-overlooked aspect of suburban poverty: residential instability. This paper provides new insight into the contours of the eviction crisis, expanding beyond the urban spaces that have been the locus of nearly all previous research. In so doing, it advances sociological research into displacement and the housing dynamics of low-income suburban neighborhoods.