Opinion: The true victims of the US eviction crisis

Before Kiarcia Schields and her four children were evicted from their home for the first time in August 2020, she saw it coming. The Covid-19 pandemic had shuttered her children’s schools, child care, after-school programs and summer camps.

Yuliya Panfil – c/o Yuliya Panfil

Brigid Schulte – Courtesy Brigid Schulte

As a single mother living far away from family in rural Georgia, there was no one else but her available to care for her children. That meant there was no way for her to do her job as a hospice nurse. No child care, no job. No job, no money to pay the rent.

What Schields couldn’t have foreseen was how the continued lack of stable, affordable child care would launch her and her children — ages 10, five, four and an infant — down a spiral of high-stress financial and housing instability.

For more than three years, Schields, a college-educated nurse, has bounced between precarious and poorly paid temp jobs including catering, tax prep, sorting packages and driving DoorDash with her baby strapped into his car seat.

By the summer of 2023, with her savings depleted and car repossessed, Schields and her kids had been bouncing between a homeless shelter and cheap motel rooms. “I began having panic attacks. But I have to remain calm because at the end of the day, I have kids to raise,” Schields explained. “Child care. That’s my issue.”

As troubling as Schields’ story is, a new study evaluating data from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab and the US Census Bureau suggests that it’s hardly unusual.

The study linked 38 million court eviction records to US Census Bureau data, allowing researchers for the first time to pierce the veil of court filings and see who else lives in homes threatened with evictions, other than the leaseholder. What they found, overwhelmingly, were children. Small children, and Black children, to be exact.

Across America, we now know, children under five years old are the group most likely to be threatened with eviction. The eviction rate for households with children is about twice as high as for households without children present. In all, nearly 3 million kids are on the receiving end of eviction filings every year.

“The magnitude of the effect shocked us,” one of the study’s authors and Evictions Lab Director, Carl Gershenson, told us. “I mean, 2.9 million children. That was, on average, one child per every eviction filing in the country.”

The study also uncovered troubling racial and ethnic disparities. Black Americans make up only about 18% of all renters, yet account for 51% of all eviction filings. Even at higher income levels, the eviction rate for Black renters with children is more than double that of White renters with children. A staggering one in four Black infants and toddlers living in rental housing are in renter households threatened with an eviction each year.

Black women renters with children in the home, like Ms. Schields, face a double burden. They are the demographic group with the highest rate of eviction filings every year: The eviction filing rate for Black women with children in the home is nearly 30%, the study found, compared to about 6% of White women renters with children. And having an eviction record can make it harder to secure housing in the future, compounding the disadvantage.

“[An eviction] can follow you for decades,” Gershenson said.

Evictions are traumatic for anyone, but especially for children. According to one 2020 study, children who have been evicted are more than twice as likely to be food insecure than their peers and score substantially worse on cognitive assessments, equivalent to as much as a full year of schooling.

A little boy looks out the window. – Jose Luis Pelaez/Stone RF/Getty Images

For individuals under the threat of eviction, studies have uncovered links to a higher prevalence of depression, anxiety, suicides, high blood pressure and child maltreatment. These impacts can compound the trauma for children, who depend on trusted adults to overcome life disruptions.

It’s urgent to understand why so many small kids are being displaced from their homes. The eviction study offers no explanations. But we wondered, could it be that for parents, record-high rents — three in ten renter households now spend more than half of their income on rent (according to a 2024 study) — are being exacerbated by a lack of affordable, accessible child care?

In other words, could the convergence of a housing affordability crisis and a care affordability and availability crisis be forcing American parents to choose between paying for housing and paying for child care? Or, like Ms. Schields, could the inability to find child care, much less afford it, prevent parents from finding and keeping a job that would pay the rent?

Across the country, parents have trouble finding child care — about half of the US population lives in a child care desert.

When parents do find care, it’s difficult to afford. An analysis by the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau found that annual child care costs in 2018 ranged from more than $4,810 to $15,417 per child, depending on the type of care, a child’s age and the population size of a county. The high cost of child care eats up between 8% to 19.3% of median family income — far higher than the 7% that the Department of Health and Human Services considers affordable for families with low wages.

For single parents like Schields, the 2018 analysis found that infant care costs can eat up anywhere from 24% to 75% of family income. And that cost is climbing: Average household child care costs have climbed more than 30% from 2019 to 2023.“That’s where my savings got depleted,” Schields said.

During the pandemic, Congress allocated $24 billion to a Child Care Stabilization Program to keep the already fragile child care system afloat. The funds enabled more than 200,000 child care providers across the country to pay rent, lower tuition for families in their care and raise wages for child care workers, which helped stanch the loss of child care workers to higher-paying sectors and kept programs open.

But those funds expired on September 30 — the so-called child care cliff. Without them, as many as one in four child care programs is likely to shutter as a result. Could more families with young children lose child care, lose jobs and wind up losing their homes?

Already, the Department of Labor is reporting that the number of people who’ve had to reduce hours or can’t work because of a lack of child care skyrocketed from 112,000 to 179,000 workers in the two months following the September 30 child care cliff.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Congress could agree to allocate the $16 billion increase in funding for child care that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have been pushing for since October to replace the expired child care stabilization funds.

States can also step in. At least 11 states and Washington, DC have spent a combined $2.9 billion since 2023 to help support and stabilize local child care programs, according to a newly-released report by The Century Foundation. The New Mexico and Vermont legislatures have passed measures to create and fund universal public child care systems. And more states can dedicate unused pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to shore up their child care systems.

But as vital as these stabilization funds have been, they were never designed to fix the broken US child care system. To fix the system in the long term, we first need to shift long-held cultural biases.

Some Americans believe it’s better for a young child to stay home with a parent — namely the mother — and don’t want a universal child care system. That view was clearly on display when the Idaho legislature not only prohibited some ARPA funds from being spent on child care for children ages four or younger, but last year voted to return millions of dollars back to the federal government rather than spend it on child care.

Republican Rep. Charlie Shepherd of Idaho said in 2021 that he wanted to stop any bill “that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child.”

But that view is disconnected from many families’ everyday reality: A majority of children are raised in families where all available parents work. And research shows that about 70% of mothers can expect to be their family’s breadwinner at some point during their children’s first 18 years.

It’s time we accept reality, join other advanced nations and begin seeing child care as the vital public good that it is, like K-12 education, public libraries or national parks. We must get behind investing our resources in designing, building and running a high-quality universal child care system.

The US is the outlier among our peer nations in having no universal paid family leave policy. The cost of infant care outstrips in-state college tuition in a majority of states — $15,000 more in states like Hawaii and New York.

Yet in Vermont, since the state has universal child care, parents pay $5,000 less in child care than college tuition. And unlike other advanced nations that subsidize child care to keep costs affordable for families, the US government invests among the least in child care — in the form of annual tax credits that amount to a paltry $200 per family. (Other countries that similarly don’t spend much on child care include Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and Turkey.)

Germany, by contrast, provides a legal right to child care for children ages one to three — most parents care for their infants for their first year through a robust universal paid leave policy. Canada is committed to investing in universal child care infrastructure that costs families no more than $10 a day.

Publicly-funded child care subsidies through the federal Child Care and Development Fund, which are supposed to help low-wage families like Schields’, reach only one-fourth of the children eligible, the US Government Accountability Office discovered. Fully funding the subsidies and making them easier for families to apply for and keep is critical.

Beyond child care, the US government must continue to invest in the housing stabilization programs that emerged during the pandemic to save an estimated tens of millions of renters from eviction.

Between 2021 and 2023, the US Treasury Department’s Emergency Rental Assistance program distributed $46 billion to make over 10 million assistance payments. Meanwhile, right to counsel programs, like the one created in Kansas City, cut evictions in some places by an astounding 86%. (Historically, before the right to counsel program, only about 1% of tenants in eviction court had legal representation, compared to 90% of landlords.)

But most of these programs have now shuttered, eviction rates have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels and half of US renters now spend more than 30% of their incomes on housing: around a 10% jump from 2019.

After her second eviction, Schields and her children moved in with her mother, her brother and her niece, all crowded into a two-bedroom apartment for six months. A steady job as a volunteer coordinator at a homeless shelter with flexible hours and a $20-an-hour paycheck enabled her to move out on her own again. But the high cost of child care put her behind on paying rent.

At one point, Schields was earning $800 a week, but paying more than $600 a week in child care costs. The family moved out before being evicted for a third time.

In October, Schields started a new job at a call center and was finally approved for a child care subsidy. The family moved into a one-bedroom, $1,400 a month apartment in Marietta. The kids share the bedroom, Schields sleeps on the couch. When her youngest starts kindergarten in the fall and her children age out of child care, she hopes she can finally begin the long climb out of the chaos caused by poverty.

Until then, she said, “I’m just trying to manage.”

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