Legal or illegal, Black women are still the most likely to be evicted. And a new report found that Black women of reproductive age who have experienced eviction as adults or children reported poorer health outcomes.
We wanted to know why.
In a SECURE survey of more than 1,400 Black women in three different counties in Michigan, 50% had experienced a court-ordered or illegal eviction. The participants were not overwhelmingly single mothers or low income — meaning the majority didn’t have the characteristics typically associated with being evicted.
“Our focus was to document the problem of residential evictions, and the strength of character and resistance strategies of Black women,” Dr. Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson says, lead author of the report.
Why does this matter?
Black women are more likely to be evicted than any other group because of reasons other than nonpayment of rent or lease violations. This study helps explain how these experiences contribute to worse health outcomes.
Evictions happen for several reasons, non-payment of rent is one, but the data suggests many other reasons, most of which should be illegal based on the Fair Housing Act — like sexual harassment, retaliation, and illegal lockouts, Sealy-Jefferson explains.
The study was not limited to low-income renters, those with low educational attainment, the unemployed, single or teen mothers, or other vulnerable families, she adds. And it surprised her that 50% of respondents experienced an eviction in their lifetimes, and almost half of those were illegal.
How does it lead to worsening health outcomes?
“Court-ordered and illegal evictions are a source of violence, and they clearly are not health-promoting,” Sealy-Jefferson says. “These are traumatic experiences that families sometimes never recover from, and the trauma impacts people’s mental and physical health, long term.”
In the study, researchers used a self-rated health measure to determine someone’s health. This is a general indicator because it includes biological, mental, social, and functional characteristics. This measure has been shown to predict overall health status, disease burden, and death rates.
Participants were asked, for example, how would you rate your physical health compared to most people your age? Response options included: a lot better, a little better, average, a little worse, or a lot worse. As a result, researchers found strong evidence that multiple eviction exposures correlated with worse physical health.
What’s the solution?
Although the Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing based on a number of factors. It still leaves loopholes for Black women, in particular, to be evicted despite paying rent. Sealy-Jefferson offers a few solutions so that Black women and girls don’t continue to bear the burden of traumatizing evictions.
Federal government-funded reparations for the descendants of African Chattel Slavery have to be a part of the solution to racial inequities in structural racism related exposures like eviction, and their adverse impact on population health among Black communities.
Policy solutions to protect tenants from illegal eviction and accountability for landlords who violate the Fair Housing Act are warranted.
Paying people living wages, enacting rent control, and increasing federal investment in housing assistance.
This problem is structural, so it will require structural solutions in addition to the harm reduction and mutual aid strategies that grassroots organizers and community-based organizations have done for centuries. We need structural solutions because those are the only REAL sustainable solutions to the dual crises of eviction and health inequities.
