Eviction Tracking
Boston, Massachusetts

Boston, Massachusetts

Eviction filings in Boston fell sharply after eviction proceedings were suspended across Massachusetts on March 17, 2020. A subsequent moratorium halted evictions through mid-October of 2020. Compared to equivalent periods in previous years (2012–2013, 2015–2016), eviction filings fell far below average beginning in April 2020, though filings rose modestly in November 2020 after the state moratorium expired.

The City of Boston enacted new protections in August 2021, prohibiting landlords and owners from serving or enforcing residential evictions, except in cases of serious lease violations or health and safety issues. These local protections were struck down on November 29, 2021.2

  1. Boston eviction filing data has a disproportionate number of cases with missing census tract information in recent months. We have temporarily pulled our tract-level analyses as a result.

  1. Data on renter population and median rent drawn from the American Community Survey (ACS). Details of the eviction process from the LSC Eviction Laws Database.

Filing Counts

Filing Rates Over the Past Year

Trends in eviction filings

This plot shows monthly eviction filings in Boston over the last year. Filings are displayed relative to the pre-pandemic average for the same set of months. You can toggle the plot to display filing counts and to extend the time frame back to January 2020.1 2

  1. Average eviction filings taken from Eviction Lab data for 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2016
  2. Filing data for 2020-2022 collected by January Advisors

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Eviction filings by defendant race/ethnicity and gender

There are often large racial/ethnic and gender disparities in eviction risk. Here, we estimate the demographic characteristics of those filed against for eviction over the last year. We compare to data from the ACS that show the share of renters in the same categories.1

Share of eviction filings

Share of renters

FILINGS OVER THE LAST YEAR BY DEFENDANT RACE/ETHNICITY AND GENDER

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  • Statistics rely on imputation of race/ethnicity and gender based on defendant names and addresses. We refer to “gender” throughout while acknowledging necessarily limitations of the imputation process and its inability to capture important subtleties in individuals’ gender identification. A complete description of this process can be found in the ETS methods page. ACS data are from 2015-2019 five-year estimates.

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