Cook County evictions reach their highest monthly total in more than four years
Millions of dollars in rental assistance has helped prevent thousands of evictions, but a mounting housing affordability crisis remains.
By Amy Qin
Cook County evictions reach their highest monthly total in more than four years
Millions of dollars in rental assistance has helped prevent thousands of evictions, but a mounting housing affordability crisis remains.
By Amy QinTens of thousands of evictions during the height of the pandemic in Cook County were avoided due to an eviction moratorium and hundreds of millions of dollars in rental assistance.
But most of those protections and funds were temporary, and evictions are largely back to, and at some points have surpassed, pre-pandemic levels in Cook County.
In May, more than 800 tenants were evicted from their places of residence. That’s the highest number of evictions enforced in a single month by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in the last four years.
Overall, in 2022, landlords submitted about 29,000 eviction filings — just 300 fewer than the 2019 total and a number roughly equivalent to the population of a Chicago suburb like Highland Park or Niles.
Some eviction resources that started during the pandemic are still available, although the federal funds for several will run out in 2024. Advocates also say those resources aren’t enough to address a root cause of evictions: a mounting housing affordability crisis.
For many in the Chicago area, wages aren’t keeping up with the rising cost of rent. Minimum-wage earners need to work nearly two full-time jobs in order to afford rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment, according to a recent study from the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
WBEZ analyzed rental data to show the increasing cost of housing and multiple sources of eviction data to measure the impact of the return to pre-pandemic levels of eviction filings. Here are a few takeaways from what the numbers show.
The increase in eviction filings is driven by rapidly rising rents
Eviction filings are back at pre-pandemic levels mainly because many people are still unable to afford rent, said Michelle Gilbert, legal and policy director at the Law Center for Better Housing.
“Rental assistance prevented evictions for people who can’t pay their rent during the pandemic, but many people experience housing instability because their rent greatly exceeds 30% of their income,” said Gilbert. “When you have to pay that much of your income for your rent, what happens is that there’s some emergency, and then you get behind.”
Since the pandemic, rents have grown at a much faster pace than before the pandemic, making it harder for tenants who are already struggling. “We’re definitely seeing people get really high rent increases,” said Gilbert, who works with clients facing eviction on a daily basis.
From January 2021 — when rents reached their lowest point since the start of the pandemic — to May 2023, the average rent in Cook County grew by 25%, according to a WBEZ analysis of Zillow rental data. In comparison, average rent increased by just 6% during the same length of time — from October 2017 to March 2020 — before the pandemic began.
Meanwhile, minimum wage hikes aren’t keeping up. In Chicago and Cook County, the minimum wage rose by just 10% and 3%, respectively, from January 2021 to May 2023.
The number of evictions enforced is catching up to pre-pandemic levels
While it was clear eviction filings were back to pre-pandemic levels as early as last year, the number of evictions carried out by the sheriff’s office has taken more time to catch up.
There is often a lag of several months in the eviction process — from a landlord filing an eviction case, a judge hearing that case and issuing an eviction order, which is then enforced by the sheriff’s office — according to a WBEZ analysis. In 2022, there were roughly 4,800 evictions enforced, about two-thirds the number enforced in 2019. But in the first five months of 2023, there were roughly 360 more evictions enforced than during the first five months of 2019, according to a WBEZ analysis of eviction records provided by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
Some eviction orders may not ultimately get enforced for many reasons, including cases where a tenant self-evicts before someone from the sheriff’s office shows up. But attorneys say existing pandemic-era eviction diversion and rental assistance programs may have played a part.
“We were resolving a lot more cases with alternative resolutions, and that was a real promising thing,” said Bob Glaves, executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation. But as case volumes continue to grow, Glaves said the county’s eviction diversion program, which is currently funded through 2024, is hitting capacity constraints.
“Being able to staff up the legal aid programs and the case managers and the folks who work on this in the court to fully meet this volume has been hard in this job market,” said Glaves. “We think that is having some impact on the number of cases getting settled and the sheriff’s numbers ticking back up.”
In Chicago, a court-based emergency rental assistance program is restarting July 5. It was put on pause on May 15, when the city’s Department of Housing canceled its contract with the nonprofit managing the program. Since October 2021, the program has provided more than $17 million in rental assistance, according to Rima Alsammarae, director of public affairs for the department. Alsammarae could not comment on why the contract was canceled.
The pandemic moratorium did not stop all evictions — at least 1,600 evictions were carried out during the moratorium. These represent evictions that were exempt from the moratorium protection because a judge determined the tenant posed a direct threat to the health and safety of other tenants. There are likely many more informal evictions from illegal lockouts or tenant intimidation during the moratorium that aren’t tracked in court data, advocates said.
How Chicago eviction filing trends compare to other cities
Glaves says the distribution of emergency rental assistance prevented many evictions for nonpayment of rent from getting filed. He says that’s a major reason why Chicago avoided a “tsunami” of eviction filings that other cities saw after eviction moratoria ended.
Some cities finished 2022 with drastically more eviction filings than their annual average in the years before the pandemic while other cities saw significantly fewer cases last year, according to eviction filings in 34 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.
Cook County falls in the middle of the pack, with just 5% fewer eviction filings last year than the county’s average of annual filings from 2016 to 2019, while Chicago falls slightly below, with roughly 9% fewer eviction filings last year compared to its pre-pandemic average, according to a WBEZ analysis.
Pre-pandemic racial disparities in evictions persist
In Cook County, roughly half of all evictions happen in majority-Black ZIP codes, a pre-pandemic disparity that continues to persist after the statewide eviction moratorium expired.
Since the end of the moratorium in October 2021, 51% of evictions were in majority-Black ZIP codes, 21% were in majority-white ZIP codes, 16% were in ZIP codes with no racial majority and 12% were in majority-Latino ZIP codes.
South Side and south suburbs continue to have the highest eviction rates
ZIP codes on the city’s South Side and in south suburban Cook County were hit hardest by evictions before the pandemic and continue to be the areas with the highest number of evictions.
The 60649 ZIP code, which covers much of the South Shore neighborhood, has had the highest number of evictions of any Cook County ZIP code annually since 2019. The ZIP code just to the west, 60619, which includes parts of the Burnside, Chatham and Greater Grand Crossing neighborhoods, has consistently had the second-highest number of annual evictions since 2019.
There were 506 evictions in 60649 during 2019, more than 12 times the average for all Cook County ZIP codes that year. As a rate, that’s about 30 evictions per 1,000 rental households in 60619.
Tenants facing an eviction in Cook County can call 855-956-5763 or visit cookcountylegalaid.org to get free legal help and to get connected to rental assistance resources.
Amy Qin is a data reporter for WBEZ. Follow her at @amyqin12.