Almost half of evicted women and families in metro Detroit say they were illegally pushed out of their homes

Every year, 2.7 million households nationwide face a court-ordered eviction filing.

Michigan has one of the highest eviction filing rates in the country, tied with Mississippi. Fourteen percent of all Michiganders who rent homes were threatened with eviction between 2006 and 2016.

Due to historical and contemporary structural racism in the U.S., Black renters and their children are affected the most. For example, 20% of Black adult renters compared with 4% of white adult renters lived in a household that received an eviction filing.

I am a Black woman, proud native and resident Detroiter, and tenured social epidemiology professor.

Social epidemiologists like me are interested in naming specifically who and what is accountable for inequities in the health of different population groups. I’m interested in documenting root causes of community ill health to provide data-driven analysis to inform policy change, interventions and social activism.

My project on evictions in metro Detroit is called the SECURE Study. Contributing to the study is a team of trainees, early-career researchers and a multigenerational community advisory board of Black women. Members of the board are local and international leaders from multiple sectors, including some who have lived experience with evictions.

My intention for convening the board was to center the expertise and creativity of Black women in service of reproductive justice for Black communities.

Reproductive justice is focused on a set of interconnected human rights. It includes the ability to choose whether to have children. And for parents it protects the right to raise your children in safe and sustainable communities. Evictions can undermine reproductive justice.

My research uses numbers and stories to document, for the first time, the scope and impact of court-ordered and illegal residential evictions among Black women, families and communities in metro Detroit.

The available court-ordered eviction data, while alarming, underestimates the true extent of the housing crisis caused by eviction. In fact, my study shows only 55% of the evictions experienced by Black women in metro Detroit were court-ordered, which means the other 45% were illegal.

Residential evictions are not events that unfold in easily predictable ways. Rather, they are complicated processes that often drag out.

Eviction policy varies by jurisdiction, but in Michigan it is illegal for a landlord to take any action to force the removal from or prevent the entry into or the use of a rental property by a tenant without a court order.

Even legal evictions can involve some illegal activity by landlords or property managers. For example, landlords may repeatedly threaten to evict tenants through the courts and force residents out of their home before a formal eviction judgment occurs.

Court-ordered evictions usually start with a landlord notifying a tenant of a lease violation – but this can happen only if a formal lease exists. As part of our work, we collected data about how prevalent renting without a lease or formal agreement is for our participants, and we plan to release this data in the coming months.

Illegal evictions are forced residential moves and can include – but are not limited to – a landlord’s use of strong-arm lockouts or threats to force a tenant to leave a rental property.

Here’s how my study worked. My team and I recruited 1,470 reproductive-age Black women, most of whom have biological children, from July 2021 to July 2024 and asked them to share their experiences. Women completed surveys, participated in focus groups and in-depth interviews, and answered questions about both individual and neighborhood-level impacts of court-ordered and illegal evictions.

After the surveys were complete, I conducted 55 in-depth interviews in 21 days with survey participants who experienced an illegal eviction.

We focused on Black women between the ages of 18 and 45 because this group is disproportionately impacted by eviction, yet their unique experiences are understudied and therefore insufficiently understood.

More than 50% of our survey participants reported being evicted in their lifetime.

What’s missing from this stat and much of the official data are recent numbers and in-depth accounts of how people experience illegal evictions.

I know of only one other quantitative study examining illegal evictions, and it is over a decade old. It was based on limited evidence collected in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between 2009 and 2011. The researchers looked at a group of 1,086 low-income adults of all racial, ethnic or age groups and found that 48% of all evictions in their study were illegal. The study concluded that illegal evictions are significantly less expensive and more efficient than court-ordered evictions for landlords.

Preliminary data from our own study, which included women from all socioeconomic groups – unlike the work done in Wisconsin – found that 45% of all evictions experienced by SECURE Study participants were illegal.

While the data tells part of the story, the stories of those who have experienced an illegal eviction tell a much richer tale.

One woman I interviewed told me how it felt to lose her home after an illegal eviction. “My God, a whole house worth of stuff: kids’ beds, clothes, toys, my stuff,” she said. “It’s material, yes, but when you have to literally walk away and like, close the door and leave everything you own … you leave a piece of yourself.”

Research ethics do not allow me to name the SECURE Study participants.

Some of the most frequently reported ways Black women told us they experienced illegal evictions were having their belongings removed from the property, being illegally locked out or having utilities shut off, and being forced to relocate because their landlord failed to provide a habitable residence.

Many of the women who participated in our study experienced threats or actual violence and sexual harassment.

“Me being a single female, they go to the threatening tactics,” one study participant told me. “I think they know … I can’t fight against … a man, I can’t beat you.”

“Me and my children got to pack up and move out of the house to avoid my house being shot up or somebody tells me they gonna drag me and my children out of the house by gunpoint,” one participant said. “Now I gotta stress. I’ll move my children.”

“He would ask me personal questions,” another said. “Am I dating, or, where’s my kid’s father? And then, that kind of escalated into him, OK, well, if we do this, then you don’t have to give me the money for the rent.”

“I feel like they’re preying on people like, they know you’re a single mom,” another woman said. “Oh, yeah. Come on in here with that Section 8. So, we can not fix nothing to get this guaranteed money. Come on in here with you working three jobs and your kids is at home all the time, and you got that teenage daughter, she kinda cute.”

“I couldn’t afford for my children to be homeless, so he took advantage,” said another participant.

The role that discrimination plays in evictions is not well understood, so we collected data on this. Forty percent of our participants reported experiencing housing discrimination. These experiences were connected to multiple factors, including their race, economic status, family size, ethnicity, age and relationship status.

In my assessment, misogynoir – or contempt for Black women – is a major yet unacknowledged factor in the eviction crisis.

Six months after completing those interviews, with the help of weekly therapy and various other self-care and self-soothing interventions, I am finally beginning to feel my nervous system restabilize after hearing so many violent stories.

I see the current eviction crisis as a human rights issue and a clear example of the disrespect, lack of protection and neglect of Black women in America that Malcolm X drew attention to more than 60 years ago.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson, The Ohio State University

Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson receives funding from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and National Institutes of Health.