Detroit eviction filings on track to return to pre-pandemic level as COVID-19 protections expire

Policy brief: A Public Health Crisis, Not a Property Dispute: Learning from COVID-19 Eviction Response Measures in Detroit. With pandemic-era protections expiring, eviction filings in Detroit rose from historic lows to 75% of the pre-pandemic rate as of June. At the current filing rate, 21% of Detroit renters-61,000 tenants-will face the threat of eviction this year. University of Michigan researchers analyzed data from nearly 68,000 eviction case records filed in Detroit's 36th District Court between January 2019 and June 2022 to note trends in eviction filings during the pandemic and make projections for the rest of 2022. "In Detroit and cities like it, COVID-19 eviction response measures disrupted a status quo of unjust and unmitigated mass displacement,” said Alexa Eisenberg, postdoctoral research fellow at U-M's Poverty Solutions initiative. "The policy changes early in the pandemic showed us evictions are preventable but inevitable within a system that prioritizes landlords' investment interests over tenants' health and human right to shelter. Eisenberg and Katlin Brantley, a graduate student research assistant at Poverty Solutions, co-authored a new policy brief based on data from the Eviction Machine, an organizing, advocacy and research tool that was developed by the Urban Praxis Workshop with support from Poverty Solutions and Data Driven Detroit.