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Eviction Moratoria Save Lives: the Evidence

posted by Adam Levitin

Once in a while you see an empirical paper that makes you say "wow." That's my first reaction to an NBER paper out from some economists and a sociologist at Duke and UNC. The paper, entitled "Housing Precarity & the Covid-19 Pandemic: Impacts of Utility Disconnection and Eviction Moratoria on Infections and Deaths Across US Counties" has an absolute bombshell finding:  eviction and utility disconnect moratoria save lives.  A lot of them.  

The paper suggests that had eviction and disconnect moratoria been in place since the start of the pandemic, deaths would be down by over 55!!!! That's 246,000 deaths that shouldn't have happened. From the abstract

We find that policies that limit evictions are found to reduce COVID-19 infections by 3.8% and reduce deaths by 11%. Moratoria on utility disconnections reduce COVID-19 infections by 4.4% and mortality rates by 7.4%. Had such policies been in place across all counties (i.e., adopted as federal policy) from early March 2020 through the end of November 2020, our estimated counterfactuals show that policies that limit evictions could have reduced COVID-19 infections by 14.2% and deaths by 40.7%. For moratoria on utility disconnections, COVID-19 infections rates could have been reduced by 8.7% and deaths by 14.8%.

Here's the key graphic: 

Evictions

The methodology is a regression analysis on COVID infection/death rates and a county-level housing insecurity measure—that means that the paper is not connecting actual deaths and actual evictions. And one might question if the controls adequate capture everything. People more methodologically expert than me need to kick the tires here. But at a first glance, the directional findings here are very strong (over 99% chance of a correlation in all of the key specifications and models) and the point estimates are huge. Even if the findings are off by a factor of 100, we're talking about 2,460 unnecessary deaths, a staggering number from a pre-COVID perspective (close to the 9/11 direct death toll). If the paper is right, the CDC's eviction moratorium might have done more to save lives than any other single action taken during the pandemic. 

This paper should be a real spur for states to tighten up their renter protections and utility disconnect regulations during the pandemic. It should also be a call for the CDC to not only extend its eviction moratorium at least until the fall, but to expand it to cover utility disconnects and mobile home repossessions. 

Comments

I had a real problem with this article.

Although the eviction threat is very serious, actual evictions have not accelerated so far. A group called the Eviction Lab tracks the number of actual filings.
Over 27 large cities (including New York), the actual filings for 2020 totalled about 220,000. Los Angeles and Chicago were not included in their study, so let's add another 100,000.

Now -- how could 300,000 or even one million actual evictions cause 246,000 Covid deaths? Especially when many covid deaths have occurred in nursing homes -- which have many problems, but evictions are not one of them.

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