The rent is too damn high — and, according to a new study, it can be fatal, too.
Indeed, new research has found that housing insecurity increased renters’ death rates during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic. The threat of eviction is always stressful, but for tenants who had to deal with it during the height of COVID, the chronic stress was one likely factor in making it a measurably mortal threat.
Published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Examining Excess Mortality Associated With the COVID-19 Pandemic for Renters Threatened With Eviction” points to a correlation between risk of death and receiving an eviction filing during the pandemic.
The authors studied 282,000 renters who received an eviction filing between the start of January 2020 and the end of August 2021, and observed a mortality rate 106% higher than expected.
In other words, the risk of death was 2.6 times higher for renters facing eviction over the general population, much higher than the authors found it was during the baseline period of 2010 to 2016 (1.4 times higher than the general population).
Notably, mortality was up for all renters at this time, but much less so in the general population, where it was just slightly more than usual. The report analyzed trends of eviction filings in 36 court systems covering some 400 counties in the US, meaning these findings are overall not nationally representative.
Accordingly, the authors surmised that “Housing instability, as measured by eviction filings, was associated with significantly increased risk of death over the first 20 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The fact that eviction filings were down by almost half (45%) during this period likely helped prevent the excess mortality rate from being even higher during this time, the study noted. But the grim reality of the findings is that the average renter who was threatened with eviction in this timeframe was just 36 years old.
That shelter is an important fact of human well being is well established, but “The pandemic has really highlighted how housing is so critical to health and public health,” lead study author Nick Graetz told CNN.
Graetz, who is also a researcher at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, added that though the threat of COVID may be subsiding, the more perennial problem of the current housing affordability crisis is not.
“As we move out of maybe the most intense period of COVID prevalence and mortality, we return to a normal that was already untenable, and it’s been getting worse,” Graetz said. “Rent burdens are as high as they’ve ever been, and eviction filings are now back and surpassing historical averages.”
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