North Carolina is among the worst states for high eviction rates in the U.S., alongside several other Southeastern states.
A recent study by Princeton’s Eviction Lab found that the rural eviction rate is typically lower than that of urban areas, but certain parts of the Southeast show shocking vulnerability for rural renters.
The eviction rate in South Carolina is the worst of any state in the U.S., with nearly 18% of rural residents facing eviction each year. That’s more than 1/6th of families in rural parts of the state, every single year. North Carolina is also in the top five, with 7% of rural renters facing eviction annually
Researcher Carl Gershenson says there are a few reasons the two states differ.
“South Carolina in general has weaker tenant protections than North Carolina,” he said. “In South Carolina, a landlord can file for eviction only five days after a late rent payment. Whereas in North Carolina, the landlord would have to wait for 10 days, this gives a tenant twice as much time in North Carolina, to get some money together and cure their arrears.”
A surprising difference is simply the cost to file eviction notices in court. It’s only $30 in South Carolina, while North Carolina courts charge landlords $100 to $250 for the filing. Eviction Lab has found that inexpensive filing fees lead to more eviction filings, which is why there is “completely different eviction activity driven by these really small, technical aspects of landlord-tenant law,” Gershenson said.
But tenant protections aren’t the only driver of rural eviction rates.
In the short term, states can enact tenant protection laws, like the right to counsel in eviction court, or eviction diversion programs to help tenants, Gershenson says. But in the long term, lowering the overall cost of housing is the best method to prevent housing displacement.
Which populations are most vulnerable?
“We find that black tenants are at higher risk of eviction, no matter what the racial composition of a county is,” Gershenson said. “But when you have these counties that are 50%-60% Black, that's where you see filing rates of 20%-30%, much higher than you see even in major cities.”
According to the study, contemporary housing markets were created by past and present discrimination against non-white populations, and those disparities remain to this day. That’s notable in rural North Carolina, where largely Black rural counties like Vance and Wilson counties both saw very high eviction rates around 20% annually, while largely White rural counties like Pender and Brunswick saw rates around 4% and 5%.
Overall, rural eviction rates don’t tend to follow poverty rates, Gershenson said.
“That's because rural areas often also have extremely low rents. So places that have high rates of poverty are also very affordable,” he explained. “We're seeing a lot of evictions where rent burdens are high. That is where people have to pay over 30% of their income towards rent.”
And that’s important because evictions are not just a consequence of poverty, but a cause of it. Gershenson says eviction is a traumatizing experience, and a destabilizing event. And families with children are particularly vulnerable to eviction.
“Eviction is associated with more health problems, both mental and physical. And in fact, we can even link it to higher rates of early mortality when evictions occur to families with children, which is extremely common. We have another study that shows that the time in your life, when you are most likely to experience an eviction is actually when you are a child," he said.
Gershenson said childhood evictions are associated with learning loss, and there are downstream consequences for the community at large for those harms, “especially when they become so common that maybe 20% of households in that community are regularly dealing with this kind of disruption.”
Rural renters are often overlooked, because there are higher rates of homeownership than in urban areas. But rural renters are more vulnerable when they do face eviction because they have limited access to alternative housing, and access to fewer resources than their urban counterparts. The rise in rents across the country has pressed into rural areas, especially in coastal areas like Southeastern North Carolina, so Gershenson says those rental increases have been met with a “dramatic rise in eviction filings relative to where they were before the pandemic.
