Getting Evicted from Public Housing: an Analysis of the Factors Influencing Eviction Decisions in Six Public Housing Sites

Evictions, perhaps more than other civil remedies for controlling crime and disorder in public housing, have seized the attention of policy makers and housing directors during the 1990s. Nonetheless, public housing authorities have been slow to enforce the federal "one strike" policy, which grants site managers the authority to evict suspected offenders after an administrative hearing, without having to wait for a criminal conviction. This paper examines the effects of criminal and lease-violating behavior on evictions among residents living in six public housing developments in Jersey City, NJ after controlling for family characteristics. We examine, first, the structural and violation characteristics of a sample of households evicted in 1994 and 1995; second, whether evicted households differ significantly on various social dimensions using a random sample of households taken from the same population; and third, the relative importance of family, economic and lease-violating factors in predicting whether an eviction will result. The implications, based on a logistic regression model, point to the discretionary use of administrative Crime Prevention Studies, volume 9 (1998), pp. 307-327 308 — Justin Ready et al. and policy violation notices as a promising tool for dealing with problem apartments in public housing communities.