Rural Renting
Commentary by Cassie Chambers Armstrong
Cassie Chambers Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law and also serves in the Kentucky State Senate. Her teaching and research interests include rural court systems, access to justice, and poverty law. She is the author of Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains (Ballantine Books, 2020).
Like all Commentary here on The Rural Review, this post expresses the personal opinions of the author.
Many people have studied eviction, and rightly so: Eviction in America is at a crisis level, with an estimated 2.7 million households facing eviction filings each year. Eviction has an impact on people and communities, with research linking it to job loss, poor physical and mental health outcomes, and all-cause mortality. Eviction can disrupt every aspect of a person’s life.
Yet few studies have examined what eviction looks like in rural areas. Indeed, many people assume that eviction is a uniquely urban issue. The invisible nature of rural eviction means that policymakers often do not consider the unique needs of rural areas or design solutions tailored to these communities. That is one of the reasons why my colleague, Professor Christopher J. Ryan, and I decided to empirically examine the impact of rurality on eviction cases. We expected that rurality would have an impact, but even we could not have anticipated how large this impact would be.
What we found was shocking: Once a landlord has filed an eviction case against a renter, those in rural areas are much more likely to have that case proceed to judgment. In cities, 46.20% of people who had an action filed against them were eventually evicted. In rural areas, this percentage was 71.45%, and this difference was statistically significant. Notably, these disparities persisted even when we controlled for other census-tract variables like educational attainment, mean household income, unemployment level, percentage of rental units in a community, and more. It is rurality itself—and not one of these other factors—that drives this outcome.
What is it about rurality that results in these higher eviction statistics? There are many possible reasons for this disparity, ranging from fewer resources in rural counties, to transportation challenges, to differences in how judges utilize their discretion. In a previous study, I found that court clerks in rural counties were less likely to give litigants information about available supportive services. That may be at least part of the story here. Similarly, other research has documented the way that travel time impacts eviction outcomes, and those in rural areas are more likely to have longer commutes to get to court. The reasons underlying rural eviction statistics likely encompass a variety of factors interacting in complex ways. We plan to continue to investigate these findings so that we can better understand how and why rurality impacts eviction.
Another finding of our research was that renters in rural areas were significantly less likely to have legal representation, with just 1.71% having an attorney compared to 2.24% in urban areas. This finding matters because, as many others have noted, legal representation is associated with better outcomes: We found that renters with attorneys had a judgment of eviction entered against them 45.01% of the time compared to 65.78% for unrepresented renters.
Because many rural areas are legal deserts, this finding is especially important as policymakers and practitioners reimagine solutions to the rural justice crisis beyond increasing the number of rural lawyers. One intervention that has gained traction is community justice worker programs which utilize non-attorney professionals to assist low-income individuals with legal issues (see also second source). These programs have been adopted in various forms in rural states. Future studies should explore the success of these programs in the eviction context with the goal of understanding how access to justice worker assistance impacts outcomes.
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