Discrimination in Evictions: Empirical Evidence and Legal Challenges*

Tens of thousands of housing discrimination complaints are filed each year. Although there has been extensive study of discrimination in the rental market, discrimination in evictions has been largely overlooked. This is because determining whether discrimination exists in evictions presents several challenges. Not only do landlords typically have a non-discriminatory reason for evictions (e.g., nonpayment), but they also wield tremendous discretion over eviction decisions—discretion that can be informed by conscious or unconscious bias against a protected group. Detecting discrimination in evictions, moreover, poses a number of challenges that conventional methods of assessing housing discrimination are ill-suited to address. This Article is among the first to empirically investigate racial and ethnic discrimination in eviction decisions. It does so by drawing on the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, a novel observational study of 1,086 rental households. Statistical analyses reveal that among tenants at risk of eviction, Hispanic tenants in predominantly white neighborhoods were roughly twice as likely to be evicted as those in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. Hispanic tenants were also more likely to get evicted when they had a non-Hispanic landlord. This Article discusses possible explanations for these findings and evaluates legal and policy solutions for addressing discrimination in the eviction process.