Tenant Exit: Eviction

If a tenant fails to pay rent or otherwise commits a material breach of the lease, the landlord can elect to terminate the leasehold and evict the tenant from the property. It is undoubtedly true that the eviction process and the subsequent scramble for a new place to live can be a traumatic, humiliating, and disruptive occurrence. Eviction displaces children from their schools, rends the social networks of the poor, and forces many families into shelters or onto the streets. Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard, has found that forced relocations are also shockingly common. In Milwaukee, the location of Desmond’s research, 17 percent of the moves undertaken by renters over a two-year period were forced relocations. See Matthew Desmond et al., Forced Relocation and Residential Instability Among Urban Renters, 89 SOC. SCI. REV. 227 (2015). In response to the social cost of eviction, some American cities and many countries around the world make it difficult for landlords to remove tenants. Should more U.S. jurisdictions follow suit? Consider the following story: 

A patient political scientist … might be able to place American cities on a left-to-right spectrum according to how long tenants whose eviction has become a cause manage to stay where they are. It may be, for instance that some city like Houston is on the far right of the spectrum. . . . Houston’s most powerful citizens are known for a devotion to private property so intense that they see routine planning and zoning as acts of naked confiscation. . . . San Francisco might qualify for the left end of the spectrum. [I]ts best-known evictees [are] the tenants of the run-down three-story building called the International Hotel . . . . In the fall of 1968, about a hundred and fifty people who were living in the hotel . . . were told to be out of the building by January 1, 1969. The building was finally cleared—in what amounted to a military operation requiring several hundred policemen—on August 4, 1977. 

Calvin Trillin, Some Thoughts on the International Hotel Controversy, New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1977, at 116.