Rural Renters at Increased Risk of Eviction

Eviction notices are putting many rural renters in a precarious housing situation, reports Jaime Adame for The Daily Yonder.

According to Adame, who lives in a small Texas town, “The rise of out-of-state corporate landlords leads to especially burdensome eviction practices in small cities and towns like mine, with rural renters more likely than urban tenants to struggle and lose in court, researchers and tenant advocates say.”

Adame notes that a mobile home park owned by an out-of-state corporation is one of the most frequent filers of evictions in his county. “This fits a national trend observed by Gershenson with Princeton’s Eviction Lab, who said in an email interview that corporate landlords are more likely to file evictions, although the correlation to out-of-state ownership is less clear.”

Adame’s piece highlights the problems with corporate ownership of housing such as mobile home parks, which are a crucial source of affordable housing in many rural (and urban) U.S. communities. Researchers from the Princeton Eviction Lab say rural renters are often more likely to lose eviction cases. “When [rural] renters do receive a filing, they will have more trouble than their counterparts in urban areas, because rural areas have a less developed ecosystem of legal service and tenants’ rights organizations.”