HUD’s Office of Policy Development & Research (PD&R) recently published a report to Congress on the feasibility of creating a national evictions database to collect information on three types of evictions (1) formal court-ordered evictions, (2) extra-legal evictions and (3) administrative evictions. Through research and stakeholder engagement, HUD PD&R reports several key challenges to creating a national evictions database, including that “collecting, assembling, and correctly interpreting court records across multiple court jurisdictions is enormously complex and time consuming. Collecting data on extra-legal evictions on a national scale is arguably even harder because there is no formal record. Accurately describing the characteristics of households and landlords involved in eviction is highly challenging because of the minimal level of information typically provided in eviction case records, which lack sufficient PII to easily enable linkages to other sources of data.” The report also includes a set of potential approaches for how HUD could move forward to build a national evictions database, assuming additional federal funding and action from Congress.
Date Published:
January 12th, 2022