The Numbers Are Real, and They’re Here
Let’s start with what the data tells us, because it’s easier to talk about feelings than to sit with actual numbers. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University tracks every eviction filing in America going back to 2000. In 2025, they recorded 3.6 million eviction filings nationally. That’s the highest level they’ve ever documented. This isn’t abstract policy talk. This is your neighbor, two blocks over. This is the family that’s been in the corner apartment for eight years.
You probably remember 2020 and 2021, when eviction moratoriums felt like a genuine federal intervention. We had a moment where the government said: people cannot be thrown out of their homes during a catastrophe. That moment lasted about three years, and it’s now mostly gone. As of mid-2025, fewer than a dozen states still maintain any pandemic-era rental protections. The Emergency Rental Assistance programs that helped people stay housed ran out of money and capacity by the end of 2024. What replaced them? Mostly nothing.
The Protections That Worked Actually Worked
Here’s what matters: we can measure what worked, and we have proof. The Urban Institute looked at cities with right-to-counsel programs, which means the city provides free legal representation to tenants facing eviction in court. Those programs aren’t flashy. They don’t make the news. But they reduce eviction rates by 27 percent compared to otherwise similar cities without them. A 27 percent reduction is enormous. That’s the difference between your neighbor staying housed and your neighbor’s kid switching schools in the middle of the year.
Why does this matter? Because it tells us that tenant protections aren’t just feel-good policy. They’re interventions that demonstrably work. When someone has a lawyer in eviction court, they win more cases, or they negotiate better settlements. Landlords know this, which is partly why some cities implemented these programs in the first place. But most cities don’t have them. Most people facing eviction go to court alone, which is like showing up to a legal proceeding where the other side is a professional and you don’t know the rules.
The Spillover We Didn’t Plan For
HUD released their 2025 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, and researchers found an 18 percent increase in family homelessness year-over-year. They traced much of this increase directly to the expiration of state-level eviction protections. This isn’t coincidence. This is causation. When eviction protections expire, people lose their homes. When people lose their homes, they become homeless. When families become homeless, children don’t go to school consistently. People can’t keep jobs because they don’t have an address. The entire scaffolding of stability collapses.
This is the part where we have to sit with something uncomfortable. We had a policy that prevented this outcome. We’ve stopped enforcing it. And now it’s happening. The homelessness isn’t some separate problem that arrived from nowhere. It’s the direct result of specific policy choices.
What Some Places Are Actually Doing About It
Here’s where I’d normally pivot to something bleak and stay there, but I won’t, because that’s not honest. Twelve major cities, including Minneapolis, Denver, and Columbus, introduced new “just cause” eviction ordinances in 2025. “Just cause” means a landlord can’t evict someone arbitrarily. They need a legitimate reason: failure to pay rent, violation of lease terms, something concrete. These cities did this locally, at city council level, because their state legislatures weren’t acting. The National Housing Law Project Local Tenant Protections tracks these local efforts and has found that this is becoming the new frontier for tenant advocacy.
These ordinances exist in the real world right now. They’re not theoretical. They’re on the books. They didn’t come from federal mandates. They came from city councils that decided this was worth doing. That means other cities can do it too. The work isn’t hopeless. You can actually affect whether your city joins that list or stays off it.
What This Means for Your Specific Street
You can check Princeton Eviction Lab Data Dashboard right now and see how many evictions have been filed in your zip code this year. You can see the trends for your specific neighborhood, not just national averages. You can know who’s affected. You can know whether your city is moving faster or slower than the national pattern.
The conversation about tenant protections isn’t happening because it’s trendy. It’s happening because people are losing their homes at the highest rate we’ve documented in a quarter century. The protections that were in place measurably prevented this. The question isn’t whether tenant protections work. We know they work. The question is whether your city is going to adopt local versions now that the federal and state ones are mostly expired. That’s a question your city council can actually answer, and probably should be asked to answer. Whether it does depends partly on how many people show up asking.