By Corey Hazekamp, Sana Yousuf, Manorama Khare, and Martin MacDowell, Housing Matters, March 31, 2021
New research shows the current eviction crisis is doing more than displacing renters and creating housing instability—it also has a significant relationship with people’s health. In the past, researchers have established links connecting homeowners’ housing conditions with health outcomes. However, no research has focused on housing and health outcomes among renters. This study examines the relationship between evictions of renter households and health-related behaviors.
The authors investigated health-related behaviors—binge drinking, current smoking, lack of leisure time and physical activity, obesity, and sleeping fewer than seven hours—among adults ages 18 and older in 1,267 census tracts in urban Illinois using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 500 Cities Project database. This database pulls information from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Census Bureau 2010 data, and American Community Survey 2013–17 five-year estimates. Eviction filing rates and formal evictions were extracted from the Eviction Lab national database for 2016. Eviction Lab filing rates are used to account for threats to legally evict renters, though an eviction may not ultimately have been carried out.
Using these data, the authors explored the relationship between each behavior and eviction filings and eviction rates, first for all tracts and then for tracts where more than half the households were people of color.
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