According to Eviction Lab, nearly half of all 2023 eviction filings in Los Angeles were against Black renters. What makes this even more troubling is that Black tenants only make up 31 percent of the city’s rental population. The disparity is certainly not accidental. It’s a predictable outcome of a housing system that is built on exploitation, and Black families are the ones stripped of their economic security.
Here, we take an in-depth look at why Black families are the target of this eviction pandemic and how grassroots organizations are fighting back against housing as a commodity.
A history of dispossession
It’s no secret that today’s housing market is based on profiting off the basic need for housing. While most renters are feeling this squeeze, after years of deliberate housing discrimination. Black renters are experiencing the worst of it.
In a 2019 Princeton interview, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, author and professor of African American studies at Princeton, summed up this housing epidemic, saying, “We have a society in which homeownership is the key to the good life, and African Americans have not had fair access to it."
In 1924, the real estate industry created a rule that warned brokers from introducing people of a different race into a neighborhood, or else they would lose their license.
Within the next decade, the U.S. government discriminated against Black homeowners formally with a process known as redlining. This discriminatory process was a consequence that was born out of the policies of the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) created in the 1930s, which was one of the first formal housing policies. To determine eligibility and mortgage risk, the government had created color-coded risk maps of neighborhoods. The most desirable group was blue and the red areas were the ones that were excluded, or redlined. In her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Taylor explained that while HOLC was originally designed to help homeowners refinance their mortgages, the same risk maps later become used to deny or limit loans based on racial makeup of a neighborhood.
Then, added to this was the creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934, which created mortgage insurance. But here’s the catch: to get the loan, homeowners had to move into communities outside the city that are racially homogeneous. At the time, the communities were mainly white. So, as Black people began moving into the big cities, the government was not backing their loans because they’re now in what the government deemed a high-risk or redlined area.
You would think it would have gotten better after the ’64 Civil Rights Act banned the use of racial discrimination in federally funded housing, but the damage was done. Urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s compounded the harm. During this period, city governments had demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. At the peak of urban renewal, it is estimated that a shocking minimum of 50,000 families were displaced, while a 1964 House of Representatives report said this figure was 66,000.
By the 1990s, neoliberal housing reforms had shifted housing from a community anchor to an investment asset. Housing policies are now less about shelter and more about creating markets. Corporate landlords and private equity firms are now the ones profiting from housing instability.
The numbers don’t lie
The eviction crisis is well-documented, and the numbers are scary.
Data from the Princeton Eviction Lab reveals that Black renters, especially women, are facing the highest risk of eviction. According to data from the last year, the Eviction Lab estimates that 54 percent of the people facing eviction were Black and Hispanic women. Overall, landlords have filed for 67,035 evictions over the past month in states across the country.
A UCLA study by researcher Alexander Ferrer on corporate landlords has found that large firms disproportionately target Black tenants in the Los Angeles area with aggressive eviction filings used as intimidation tactics. The worst offenders? Equity Residential, Essex Property Trust, and Avalon Bay Communities. All three have a history of financing the California Apartment Association’s anti-tenant protections work.
In the study, Ferrer’s goal was to “identify a pattern of eviction in which Black tenants are surgically evicted from neighborhoods host to relatively few Black renters, which has thus far been unobservable in other studies.”
He added, “Innovations in corporate practice in screening and eviction, which responded to the risk and regulatory environment of the pandemic, further contributed to saddling these Black tenants with disproportionate rent debt, redoubling the extirpative character of Black tenancy.”
In other words, corporate landlords were using predatory business practices to make quick and outsized profits, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ferrer explained that landlords would relax screenings and offer low security deposits to attract Black tenants and then charge high utility fees and rent to evict the tenants when they couldn’t keep up. This reveals that eviction is not about bad tenants but about maximizing profit through legal dispossession.
A report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development backs up this data. According to the report, “White households in the sample pay less rent ($683) on average than African-American ($730).” This means that Black households are more vulnerable to eviction when unexpected costs arise. Ultimately, resulting in eviction as a cause and consequence of poverty.
Evictions are a business model
The sad truth is that for corporate landlords, eviction is no longer a last resort and more of a business strategy. Landlords are prioritizing profit over tenant welfare, and evictions are a tool to pressure tenants, collect fees, and cycle units to higher-paying tenants.
A prime example of this is the private equity firm, Blackstone. As one of the country’s biggest landlords, Blackstone has filed hundreds of eviction cases and is a large contributor to housing instability. The firm benefited significantly from the 2008 financial crisis by buying foreclosure properties and turning them into higher-priced rentals. This firm is an example of how eviction is used as a profit mechanism, and current legal systems still reinforce this imbalance.
Justice Douglas summed up the crisis: “Summary eviction proceedings are the order of the day. Default judgments in eviction proceedings are obtained in machine-gun rapidity, since the indigent cannot afford counsel to defend. Housing laws often have a built-in bias against the poor. Slumlords have a tight hold on the Nation.”
To fight evictions, tenants need to lawyer up, and for many, the system appears too intimidating or unaffordable. Findings from the Columbia Human Rights Law Review reveal that 90% of tenant-litigants are forced to navigate eviction proceedings without counsel representation.
The human toll on Black families
But this is more than just numbers. Behind every eviction is a family that is forced into crisis. For Black families, the loss of a home deepens existing inequalities and means losing stability. This affects everything from their jobs and schooling continuity to their community ties.
Studies have shown that eviction can cause long-term harm. Children from evicted homes experience higher rates of school absenteeism, and adults suffer from elevated stress. A study from the National Library of Medicine found that evictions harm health and can be linked to mortality, injection drug use, food insecurity, and acute healthcare utilization, as evictions reduce patients’ healthcare access.
This human cost is not incidental. It is the price that Black families are paying for a system that is ultimately designed to profit from their displacement.
Fighting back with resistance and advocacy
But all hope is not lost as Black renters and allies are fighting back. Across the country, tenant unions have emerged to rally against corporate landlords. Advocacy groups like Right to the City and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) fight for tenant rights and provide resources. For Example, Right to the City has a campaign initiative called “Homes for All.” The campaign focuses on addressing the housing crisis and tenant organizing through political education. Currently, they have a training series on “Rooted & Ready Eviction Defense to educate renters on what their options and rights are.
Grassroots groups are fighting hard to reframe housing as a human right and not a commodity.
Housing justice equals racial justice
The current eviction crisis is not a policy failure but the deliberate outcome of a housing system that is deeply rooted in racial capitalism, and Black families are feeling the squeeze. But the resistance is growing, and tenant unions and advocacy groups are proof of this.
Their work also makes one thing clear: the fight for housing justice is linked to the fight for racial justice. Breaking this cycle of discrimination requires collective action that challenges corporate landlords and demands better legal protections for tenants, and resistance is growing.