Carl Gershenson On Eviction and the Rental Housing Crisis in the Rural United States

Siers-Poisson [00:00:05] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m Judith Siers Poisson. For this episode, we’re going to be talking with doctor Carl Gershenson about the paper that he coauthored with Professor Matthew Desmond, titled “Eviction and the Rental Housing Crisis in Rural America.” You can find a link to the paper in the program note for this episode. Carl Gershenson is Lab Director at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of housing instability, with a special focus on how eviction leads to further economic and residential insecurity. Carl, thanks for joining us today.

Gershenson [00:00:47] Thank you very much for inviting me.

Siers-Poisson [00:00:49] I’d like to start with some basic information about housing. First, how many people in the U.S. rent versus own?

Gershenson [00:00:57] In the United States, about two thirds of Americans own their homes. And, you know, that’s one of the reasons when we think about who the political system is operating for, to a large extent, it’s operating for homeowners. Now, the homeownership rate peaked around 69% in 2005 before the great financial crisis. That crisis unwound a lot of progress and the increasing rates of homeownership. Around 2016 is when the decline in homeownership hit its bottom and has been climbing since then. Now, of course, this headline number obscures a lot of variation. So the majority of households earning under $30,000 a year are renters. And also, the majority of Black households are renters. Hispanic households are split around 50/50. And you know, of course, relevant to the research we’re going to talk about later, in the rural United States, homeownership rates are much higher than in the rest of the country. Only about 25% of rural households are renters.

Siers-Poisson [00:01:56] So of those renters, which it’s a larger population depending on who we’re talking about or where they are, what percentage of those renters will be evicted or face eviction in their lifetime?

Gershenson [00:02:09] So that’s a really good question. And it’s one that we have not calculated yet. And I, I really think we should. So what I can say is we know that around 6% of renter households receive an eviction filing each year. Now, not all of these families receive an adverse judgment from the courts. So that means not all of them get a formal order to vacate their homes. Still, a filing alone is pretty predictive of an unstable housing situation. The majority of households who receive a filing are going to move within a year, either because they go on to get a judgment, maybe because of extralegal behavior by the landlord, or simply because they want to escape a bad or untenable housing situation. And, you know, that’s an important distinction to keep in mind throughout this presentation. We do have some data on eviction judgments, but eviction filings are much easier to get and they’re more comparable across jurisdictions. So a lot of this conversation we’re going to be talking about eviction filings. Now, as for what percentage of these households face multiple evictions, I don’t have this number exactly handy, but we can think of it this way. We estimate that 25% of Black renter households with children in them receive a filing in any given year. So within any subpopulation with a filing rate that high, I mean, obviously you can’t have a 25% filing rate in that subpopulation without certain households getting eviction filings year after year after year.

Siers-Poisson [00:03:35] You also note in the paper that we’re discussing that, especially in a rural setting, there might be more what might be considered informal eviction proceedings than in a place where a housing court is a landlord’s first step or most obvious step.

Gershenson [00:03:52] That’s right. And I think there are a lot of different reasons that this might be the case. And, you know, I should preface this by saying this is a quantitative paper. And, you know, we do encourage follow up studies, you know, where people go in and find out what do evictions look like in rural areas. And now, I have to, you know, back up again, and rural America is so diverse. I mean, it’s a it’s a very large country, right? We’re talking about everything from, you know, counties in Idaho all the way down to the deep South through Alaska and so forth. So eviction is going to look different in all these different counties. But one thing that we do know. Large property owners are concentrated in urban areas, right? Your big professional property owners. And they tend to run things by the book. Or at least by a book, let’s say. Right. You have someone who has been trained in how to deal with tenants in a systematic manner. That is both, maybe because they’re using some sort of tenant management software, or maybe because they are concerned with being sued for discrimination. Right. One way that you can avoid being sued for discrimination is by treating treating everyone the same. Sounds good, but that could also mean you will evict everyone who is at least five days late on rent, right? That’s a way to avoid being sued for discrimination. In rural areas where people own fewer properties, there’s just going to be a lot less pressure, I think, to operate in the way that an urban landlord who kind of feels the eyes of tenants unions and legal aid upon them. I think also there could be just, you know, more of like a cultural inclination to self-help in rural areas. You can think about a really large county with not many residents. County court be like a really long drive away. The county might only have 1 or 2 sheriffs to serve evictions, and it might just be like, why go through all of that hassle when you could just tell your tenant to vacate and maybe they’ll listen?

Siers-Poisson [00:06:08] So the most obvious outcome of an eviction is that a household, a family, an individual loses the place that they’ve been living. But there are also a lot of other documented outcomes that are associated with eviction. Can you share some of those with us?

Gershenson [00:06:24] Yes. So we always say that eviction is not just a consequence of poverty. Of course it is. But it’s also one of the leading causes of poverty. Right. Without a home, every other part of your life becomes more difficult. So, you know, we can start by thinking of the economic consequences. Most obviously, you lose not just your house, but in many cases, your material possessions. Right. If you walk around a neighborhood with a high eviction rate, you’ll regularly see garbage bags filled with, you know, children’s clothes, mattresses, furniture out on the curb. In some cases, maybe that gets hauled to a storage locker until you can, you know, pay arrears and get that back. But in a lot of cases, people lose things that they may have taken years to accumulate. We also see that people who receive an eviction, they have lower levels of income going forward. That could be because of job loss. So we do have a study link in evictions to job loss. And that can be for a multitude of reasons. But, you know, say that you used to live within walking distance of your job or you live next to a bus or took you right to your job. Now you’re living in a shelter or on the other side of town. It gets that much harder to get to work. And if you have kids, you know, now you have to get your kids to their school. And then from the school to your job and all that kind of stuff becomes so much more complicated after an eviction. Also, an eviction is just a very stressful event. You could have been a wonderful employee before the eviction. While you are dealing with the fallout from that eviction, trying to reestablish your life, maybe you are, you know, temporarily, a less ideal employee. And in a lot of cases, you know, low-wage employees are treated as disposable so that can disrupt your employment situation. But we even see that people who rely on social benefits, they also experience a decrease in material resources after an eviction. We see that people who are enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid, they make less use of those programs following an eviction, even though we suspect that there’s like an increased objective need for medical care after an eviction. But again, it would be more difficult to get to the doctor’s office. So, yeah, the social safety net is used less after an eviction. Another big category of consequences are related to health. I think in a very straightforward manner that doesn’t need explanation. Eviction is linked to decreases in mental health, right? Increased rates of anxiety, depression, increased rates of suicide. In the event that an evicted person spends a spell on the streets or in a homeless shelter, you know, you have more subject to violence, drug usage and things like that. But we also, you know, we know that people who are evicted, say they have like a chronic health issue that requires, maybe like a, you know, medical device in the home or, really regimented medical, like taking pills at a certain time, all of that gets disrupted, right? And so people with chronic health issues also have worse health outcomes following an eviction. And we were able to actually quantify this in a study where we were able to link eviction records to death records maintained by the Social Security Administration. And in a period of, I think about six years, you know, we looked at people who received an eviction judgment relative to otherwise similar people who did not. And we saw a 40% increase in the mortality rate for people receiving an eviction judgment. So just a huge, huge effect. And I mean notably, even receiving an eviction filing without a judgment, that led to increased mortality and even just having a high level of rent burden, that led to an increased rate of mortality. So housing  — just inextricably tied to health. And, I’ll give you one more example and then we’ll move on. We had another study where we able to link eviction records to birth records. So if you found a person who was evicted in this second or third trimester of pregnancy, they had much higher chances of adverse birth outcomes. So a premature birth, a low weight birth, an extended stay in the NICU. Again, this all linked to being evicted during pregnancy. So eviction is just an extremely traumatic event that can really set people on downward trajectories.

Siers-Poisson [00:10:56] Carl, you just mentioned rent burden rates, which is the percentage of their income that people are paying for rent. And whether it’s under the, I believe 30% that’s considered an acceptable ratio. That being one of the risk factors to be vulnerable to eviction, what are some of the other risk factors that make people more likely to have a filing against them, or an actual eviction?

Gershenson [00:11:21] So I think of breaking this down into four main risk factors economically. Like you just mentioned rent burden. And this is more predictive than just income at the individual level and at the aggregate level. Like in this paper, we looked at eviction rates in high poverty areas. And there’s not much of a correlation between high poverty and eviction rates, at least in rural counties. Right. But there is a very strong relation between rent burden and evictions among families earning under $30,000 a year. It’s estimated that after paying rent, they only have around $300 left over for all of their other expenses, right? I mean, that’s food, clothing, transportation, utilities, medicine. You know, that’s not not a lot of money to go around. Obviously, these are not families that are saving money for an emergency. So in any situation where that much of your income is going towards rent, you are one unexpected event away from an eviction, whether that be your car breaking down, a medical expense, job loss, whatever. You are very vulnerable to eviction. So rent burden, that’s number one. Number two is race. Black households are at much higher risk of eviction than any other kind of household in the United States. Black households make up about 18% of the renter population, but they represent over 50% of evictions that are filed. And I want to emphasize that this relationship cannot be explained by income. So in another paper we have that came out in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we found that a Black renter household with children that earned around $60 –70,000 still had a higher risk of eviction than a White renter household, with children earning around $20 — 30,000 a year. So income and rent burden are an obvious part of, you know, the explanation of eviction risk. But it does not explain the dramatic risk differentials for Black and White households. Third, we can layer children on top of this. So during your lifetime, you’re at highest risk of being evicted when you’re a child, literally from birth until you are 18 or 19. The age group that is most represented in our eviction filings is actually the age bracket from 0 to 5. And not coincidentally, that’s also the age range when you’re most likely to be a resident of a homeless shelter. Now you intersect age and race. And, you know, I already mentioned this statistic, but it always bears repeating. 25% of Black renter households with children in them receive an eviction filing each year, which….. I don’t know …..that that number is, every time I say it, it’s just, it’s enormous. Now I want to mention one other kind of predictor, because the other three predictors we just mentioned operate at the individual level. We can also look at your state of residence. There are dramatic differences between eviction rates in different parts of the country. So the eviction belt, as I call it sometimes, you know, runs from Maryland, Virginia, down the coast and then, you know, curves west into Texas, right? Those are all low-cost states for the most part, but they have extremely high eviction rates. Very high. Meanwhile, we have really low eviction rates along the West Coast and much of the Mountain West. And those are some of the most expensive housing markets in the country. So this really speaks to the importance of law and regulation in determining eviction rates. And, you know, I always think this is important to keep in mind, because when you talk to certain kinds of audiences about eviction, they say, you know, “why bother studying this? Why are you collecting all these statistics? You know, isn’t it obvious that people can’t pay the rent, they’re going to get evicted?” And yeah, that’s like, that’s a part of the story. But we have really strong evidence that rental markets can be structured in ways that increase or decrease the risk of eviction.

Siers-Poisson [00:15:17] And we’ll definitely talk more about those policy and practice possible solutions a little later in our conversation. For now, I want to turn really to this issue of rural eviction and the rural eviction crisis, as you call it. I think for a lot of people, when they hear rental housing and eviction, they think of it in an urban or a suburban setting. But in your paper, you note that there are more than 17 million rural renters, and that number is increasing. In what ways do you see similarities and then differences between urban and rural renters and rental housing in broad terms?

Gershenson [00:15:54] I think that one of the other interesting differences between urban and rural areas is that some rural areas are so isolated and segregated that rents, like the low, low rents really do protect people from eviction. Whereas even the most segregated urban neighborhood is still a part of a larger and more dynamic rental market. And so we see that a 90% Black neighborhood in an urban area has a higher level of renters who are rent burdened than the 90% Black rural county. I think that’s one of the most interesting differences between these markets. But then there also is, I mean, we can also talk about like what’s going on in rural housing markets since the pandemic where there has been population growth. There’s, you know, remote work, demand for second homes, sprawling suburbs pushing into rural areas. And this is where we get to the point that there’s not like active construction industries in a lot of rural homes. There’s older homes being passed down through the generations. And just like a relatively set set of rental housing. And yeah, you know, as anywhere, it’s a question of more demand for affordable housing than than exists.

Siers-Poisson [00:17:15] So one of the things that you point out in your paper, Carl, is that rural communities seem more likely to have one or ywo really dominant industries or employers. Can you talk us through the most common types and how they affect housing and eviction risks?

Gershenson [00:17:32] Sure. So the rural economy, you know, is often stereotypically thought of as agricultural. But, you know, actually very few people are employed in agriculture. And the counties where agriculture is the predominant industry have really low rates of eviction. So that’s, that is not where we are seeing an eviction crisis. The counties that had the highest eviction rates were classified as manufacturing counties or unspecialized counties. And, you know, I kind of think of these as being a little bit related. I mean, we know that there used to be a lot of manufacturing in rural America, especially the rural southeast, which is where we see these really high eviction rates. And we know that the industrial base has gone abroad, shut down, and so forth. So a lot of poverty in these counties that previously had a lot of population employed in manufacturing, we see we see a lot of evictions there. Another category are counties that are characterized by mining and extraction. And when we analyze this kind of county nationally, it looks like they have low eviction filing rates. But we actually have another paper now that we publish in Society and Natural Resources, looking at Williams County in North Dakota, which is the heart of the fracking boom in that state. And we showed that evictions correlate almost perfectly with the volume of oil production in that county. And you know, the explanation here is that to produce more oil, you need more people. So the population of Williams, you know, doubled in a in a rather short period of time, but you can’t increase housing at the same rate that the people can move into a boomtown. So rents skyrocketed there. And we were able to show that a lot of long-term residents of Williams County really suffered. Eviction rates went from almost nonexistent to 7 or 8% higher than a city like Philadelphia or New York City. And this is because of the pressures, you know, brought on by a really active commodities boom.

Siers-Poisson [00:19:57] I thought it was really interesting that you talked about counties or areas where tourism is a main driver of the economy, because that seems to put a squeeze on rural renters in a couple different ways. Can you talk about how tourism affects this issue?

Gershenson [00:20:15] Right. Counties with a lot of tourism I believe were sort of an intermediate county in terms of eviction rates. But when a county with, as they call it, you know, “high level of natural amenities” begins to attract people from urban and suburban areas, that drives up the cost of housing enormously. Incomes tend to be higher in urban areas. People come in with a lot of money to spend. They can buy up a lot of land, a lot of the existing housing stock. And that can push the people who would service that tourism economy further and further from the jobs into places with less developed housing stock. You know, there was just in the news that a road in Wyoming collapsed, that connected… it was like the only road to get between the high-amenity resort town and the community where all the workers had to live, that road collapse. And now no one knows, you know, who’s going to be cooking the meals in the resort town this summer. But that that kind of arrangement is really common in touristic counties and in the United States.

Siers-Poisson [00:21:25] Well, and there might be some tourist areas that have a very steady influx of tourists throughout the year. But it seems to me that it would be more likely that it’s a place people go in the summer, or it’s a place people go in the winter. So that would seem to add an extra level of vulnerability for the workers, because they probably don’t have the same income year round to be paying their rent, which is the same month after month.

Gershenson [00:21:52] Exactly. Yes. Yes. And even if you are a summer only resident, when you buy that house, you took it off the market for the entire year.

Siers-Poisson [00:22:01] You also talked about rural renters having higher transportation and often utility costs. And I was also thinking, Carl, when you were talking about someone getting evicted and maybe ending up in a homeless shelter or maybe doubling up with family, there might not be a shelter that’s within a 45 minute drive if you’re in a really rural area, and you might not have family much closer either. So it seems like there are those extra layers for these rural renters who are facing eviction.

Gershenson [00:22:31] Right. And this is where it’s important again, to remember that 75% of rural residents are homeowners. So you have fewer renters as a percentage of the population, and these are already smaller populations, less dense. So you don’t have a rich organizational ecosystem growing up to serve renters in these communities like you do in any major city. So when you are evicted, especially, you know, if it’s your first time facing something like this, you might have no idea where to turn. It doesn’t occur to you to call Community Legal Aid, if Community Legal Aid even operates anywhere near you. Or like you mentioned, right? Rural counties are much less likely to have shelters, and it could be an extremely inconvenient place, even if they do have one. You know, homeless rates, as reported by the point in time estimates, are lower in rural counties. And this has something to do with homelessness just being lower in places that have affordable housing. But it also is, it’s harder to observe homeless people in rural areas because maybe they’re camping, you know, in the woods or squatting in an abandoned building or something. It’s much harder to find people going through a housing crisis. And so you can get services to them either. Right? You have to find someone in order to give them services.

Siers-Poisson [00:23:59] We’ve talked a lot about different risk factors. We’ve talked about the particular characteristics of rural eviction and rural housing instability. I want to come back to that issue of race, because it seems to be such a dominant risk factor. And I guess, where do we see that coming in the process? Or if we don’t know, what needs to be done to figure out how race is playing such an outsized role in the eviction crisis?

Gershenson [00:24:30] So yeah. They’re, they’re… I mean, there’s so many ways to think about how race is related to the American housing market. I mean, you know, so much of it is predicated on racism. One important way to think about this is the rural counties with really high eviction filing rates, right, these are the rural counties in the southeastern Black Belt. These are in states that also have very high urban eviction filing rates. So they tend to be states that have very few tenant protections. And when you remove tenant protections, it is predominantly going to be, you know, marginalized communities that that suffer. So strengthening tenant protections. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and so forth, that’s going to help, Black renters in urban and rural communities alike. And the other thing, I mean, you know, I know I did say that income alone can’t explain racial disparities in eviction rates, but we can ignore the fact that Black Americans just have higher rates of poverty overall than White Americans. And when we’re talking about rural communities, you know, there are also areas with high poverty rates that are predominantly American Indian, predominately Hispanic as well. So, you know, rural America has a lot of pockets of persistent poverty. Bringing up income levels in these neighborhoods or just getting more subsidized affordable housing in these communities would also do a lot to stabilize renters.

Siers-Poisson [00:26:13] What are some of the policy and practice implications of your research on who’s the most at risk of rural eviction specifically?

Gershenson [00:26:23] So given that the strongest predictors of rural eviction were, one, being a Black-renter household and two, being a highly rent burdened household, those are, you know, those are the two areas that we would really want to think about. So again, to decrease eviction rates in these heavily Black states, we’d want to increase tenant protections generally. Some surprisingly minor solutions can actually go a long way in reducing eviction filing rates. One is just increasing the cost to file an eviction. It sounds so straightforward, and it is, but there’s extreme variation across the country in what it cost to file an eviction from, I think like 15 or 20 bucks in Maryland to $300 in Alabama. And Alabama stands out as actually having a very low filing rate in the southeast. It’s not a rich state, you know, it’s a state with very large Black rural populations, but they have a low filing rate. And maybe it’s because if a landlord has to pay $300 before filing, they think twice about it. And, you know, we don’t, like, have a favorite filing rate for states to adopt. We don’t have that kind of prescription. But when we looked into this, states did not sort of sit down and land on a filing fee for any sort of, you know, rational reason. A lot of these are just like the standard filing costs for any civil case that, you know, they came up with 50 years ago and they’ve never revisited. And, you know, maybe it should cost something different to file for a divorce versus filing for an eviction. It’s something for state legislators to think about. Something else is slowing down the eviction process a little bit. So in some states, you don’t need to give a tenant notice that you intend to file for an eviction, right? As soon as they are late on rent, you could begin the court process. In other states, you might have to give notice. And then there is a period ranging from, you know, 1 to 3 days up to a week where they would have the opportunity to cure their arrears before you file for an eviction. It turns out if you give people notice, especially low income people who might need to, you know, maybe they’re waiting for their paycheck to come in. Maybe they can go ask a friend or family for a loan. Just giving them a little bit more leeway actually does a lot to reduce eviction filing rates. So again, I think these are relatively minor adjustments to the way the civil legal system operates that actually have huge impacts on on people’s lives. The other thing that we would want is just to increase the amount of affordable housing in rural areas. A lot of affordable housing in the rural United States comes from programs operated by the United States Department of Agriculture. Those programs have not been well funded. And a lot of that housing, the subsidy is expiring, meaning that the owners of those properties will no longer be required to rent them out at what is deemed an affordable rate. We would really expect to see eviction spike after those units expire. Now, because there isn’t a really mature construction industry in a lot of rural communities, again, just because there’s not that much demand to be building new houses, month after month, like there is in an urban area, a lot of new affordable housing is manufactured housing, which people also call mobile homes. Which is a little bit of a misnomer because it’s actually very costly to move mobile homes. In a lot of cases, it destroys the structural integrity of mobile homes. But the great thing about manufactured housing is it’s cheap to build. It can be built offsite, transferred to a site, plopped down, and it’s the best way to create affordable housing on the private market. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of regulatory issues here holding back manufactured housing as a solution for rural renters. One of these is zoning, which, you know, you have to talk about zoning at some point when you’re talking about affordable housing. A lot of communities consider manufactured housing to be a blight, or they think it will attract undesirable renters. And so they use zoning to restrict where manufactured housing can be put up. So manufactured housing might be put on large lots on sort of the peripheries of, you know, small towns where the jobs and amenities would be. The other issue is that in a lot of cases, you have sort of mixed land ownership with manufactured housing. So you could rent a manufactured house, that does occur a lot, but in other instances you buy the manufactured housing, but you are renting the land that it’s on. And this makes you very vulnerable to exploitation, because if the owner of that land sells or decides to evict you, you are now in a position where you know most of your wealth is tied up in the equity in this manufactured house. But you might have to spend, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on relocating that home that will eat up all of your equity. And so in a lot of cases, people just abandon their their manufactured housing. You know, this is a situation that obviously, if like if you’re going to buy a stick-built house and you were renting the land underneath, you wouldn’t do that. It’s crazy. Like you would realize how vulnerable you are. But people who live in manufactured housing are exposed to this all the time. So one solution here is imagining different ways to create manufactured home communities. You could have publicly-owned land that leases to people who own manufactured homes. You could have co-ops, things like that. Nonprofits could operate mobile home parks. And that would, I think, really do a lot to increase the affordable housing supply in these areas.

Siers-Poisson [00:32:15] Obviously, there are a lot of people, both urban and rural, who are dealing with eviction and the many implications of going through that experience. But do you see any bright spots that might give us hope for when there are policies and practices designed to really make a dent in this issue, that could work?

Gershenson [00:32:38] If you want something a little optimistic, you know this is in the paper, too, urban eviction filing rates have been falling. And I think that’s, you know, a little bit because of Eviction Lab and our work, where a lot of elected politicians in major cities have been taking eviction very seriously. I live in Philadelphia, where the eviction rate has fallen from around like 7% during the 2010s, it’s now down to 4%. Yeah, that’s like a city with a lot of poverty, but city council wanted to deal with eviction and they have. Rural areas, though, the eviction filing rate has been extremely stable across our entire time period. And I think that there’s not that awareness that when we have a problem and two, there are solutions. So hopefully, yeah, hopefully people hear this and do something about it. One more thing I would say to that point to is that a reason I’m optimistic about rural housing is because the rents really are so low that federal rental assistance can just go so far there. And we know that a lot of people who are evicted, maybe they have some temporary issue. They’re dealing with an emergency and they, you know, they fell behind on their rent. They just need a one-time emergency payment to stabilize their housing situation. And again, in the rural context, it’s so much more affordable than than trying to do the equivalent in California or New York City.

Siers-Poisson [00:34:10] Carl, as we wrap up. What further research would you like to do or see done on the topic of rural housing instability and eviction?

Gershenson [00:34:20] You know, I think that there is a lot to be done here, especially around the role of informality that we talked about earlier. You know, at Eviction Lab, we are we are very aware that we rely on the evictions that go through the court system. That’s how we are putting together a national snapshot of eviction activity. But yet we think that informal evictions are probably higher in rural areas. And, really the only way to study that would be ethnographic or interview based. I think there’s also some interesting things going on in rural housing searches. In an urban area, you have a dense enough rental market that you can rely on. Your Zillows, Craigslist, etc. to find housing. Or you have the large professionalized companies that are going to list, you know, here are the ten different multifamily units that we operate. There’s not so much the case in rural communities. So one, how do you find housing, and then what does the screening process look like for that? In communities where a lot of people may know each other, how much is the screening process based on, you know, word of mouth, family, reputation and so forth? And does that create a situation where, say, migrants coming into these communities for jobs are necessarily going to be locked out of, say, the more desirable rental stock in a community and maybe sort of shunted into these properties where we observe the incredibly high eviction filing rates. And, you know, I think that, you know, we know that the meatpacking industry in the Midwest is highly dependent on migrant labor. A lot of agricultural production in the United States, of course, is now reliable on migrant labor. And their housing situation, again, is just not something that we can easily observe through the sorts of national statistics that we rely on.

Siers-Poisson [00:36:21] Well, thank you so much for spending time with us today and for sharing your research about the rural eviction crisis. It’s really interesting and really important work.

Gershenson [00:36:30] Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s just wonderful.

Siers-Poisson [00:36:33] Thanks so much to Dr. Carl Gershenson for talking with us about his research on the rural eviction crisis. You can find a link to the paper in the program note for this episode. The production of this podcast was supported in part by funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. But views expressed by our speakers don’t necessarily represent the opinions or policies of that office or of any other sponsor, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Music for the episode is by Poi Dog Pandering. Thanks for listening.