Evictions in Houston After Harvey

Immediately after Hurricane Harvey, everyone in Houston figured that evictions were going to be a problem. There was a lot of media coverage about evictions of vulnerable populations, including some heart-wrenching stories about low income tenants and elderly residents of a Harris County subsidized living facility.

The Mayor of Houston pushed back, asking private landlords to be sensible and flexible with their tenants by suspending late fees for the month of September.

Over six months have passed since Harvey, and evictions have worked their way through the Harris County civil court system. We have data. So I set out to answer a handful of nagging questions:

• What are the year over year trends for evictions?
• How many evictions have there been after Hurricane Harvey?
• Where are these apartments located?
• Who are the landlords with the most evictions?
• How long do eviction cases take to work their way through the judicial system?
• Who wins eviction cases?

If you have additional questions, please send them my way.

Year over year eviction trends in Harris County

Evictions are on the rise. Houston was already eviction-happy, setting records for cases filed almost every month for a year leading up to Hurricane Harvey.

Looking at Harris County eviction data since January 2014, it’s also clear that evictions follow a seasonal pattern. Evictions peak in January and during the summer months, and hit low points in February and the winter months.

Eviction cases filed in 2017 trended upwards until a month or two before the storm. Then activity slowed down in September, overcorrected slightly in October, and settled back down to normal through the beginning of 2018.

In September 2017, there were only 2,387 eviction cases filed, representing a year-over-year decrease of 23%. Were landlords listening to the mayor of Houston? Not for very long, since the next month saw year-over-year increase of 7%. Through the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, the number of eviction cases filed fell back into the normal trend. If landlords were showing mercy on their tenants, it isn’t reflected in the number of cases filed.

Map of evictions since Hurricane Harvey

Aside from a short anomaly in eviction cases filed, Hurricane Harvey’s impact is a little harder to see. I wanted to know more about where people were getting evicted from. Did they live in flood prone areas? Are they getting evicted one by one, or complex by complex? What landlords own what properties?

This map represents all locations with two or more evictions since Hurricane Harvey. The first layer shows you circles proportionate to the number of evictions at a location. The second layer shows locations by markers, so you can see exactly where they are. The third layer sums up the total number of eviction cases by census block group, which can be useful to estimate against population, race, and income data from the US Census.

Who are the landlords with the most evictions since Harvey?

I was also curious about the companies that own these properties. When I was digging through eviction data, one of the first things I noticed were all of the misspellings and typos in the company names:

Lots of misspelled company names in the court records.

If you tally up the cases looking for an exact match, it won’t give you an accurate count. So I went through and corrected a lot of the mistakes.

Ultimately, I wanted to know which landlords were filing the most eviction cases, how many they filed, and how much they received in judgments.

Here’s what I found: