While the CDC-issued ban on evictions goes a long way to protect renters from being ejected from their homes for the remainder of the year, it does not address accrued missed rent payments, setting up the conditions for an even bigger wave of evictions at the beginning of next year. To help metro-area residents, advocates and policymakers better understand what may be coming down the road in their areas, ARC teamed up with Georgia Tech and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to develop a tool that tracks formal eviction filings at the Census tract level in five core metro counties: Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett. While eviction filings are not the same as evictions themselves, they do portend potential displacement and housing instability for those against whom the filings are initiated.

The tracker opens to a map that shows the eviction filing rate from January 2020. Users can select counties and months of interest to see the state of evictions filings at that point in time on the map. To understand how things are changing over time, they can click on the chart and look at trends by week or month. Data is updated weekly.

Sample insights

Using the chart below, we can see:

  • The lapse in the eviction moratorium and $600 unemployment add-on in August was evidenced by a 30% higher number of filings across the 5-county region for the last week of the August compared to 2019.
  • The largest YTY differences for the last week of August were in DeKalb (+89%)  and Fulton (+143%) counties.

By changing the map view to show August eviction filings (right), we can see that hotspots include neighborhoods in College Park, Clarkston/Stone Mountain, Norcross and Riverdale.

Click here to see the full tool.

Importantly, this tool only tracks evictions going through the formal court process, and many sources say informal evictions are much more widespread than these formal ones. While filings have been low during the lockdown (only spiking with the lapse of the eviction moratorium and additional UI assistance), the Eviction Tracker tool is in place to track filings (and soon other associated court actions like answers, dismissals, and judgments) for when the numbers begin to rise — as they surely will when protections lapse or are insufficient.