Tenants across the United States have experienced a mounting level of social insecurity in the midst of the global pandemic. Even before the pandemic and its resulting recession, tenants in Los Angeles and in other urban areas around the nation were struggling under immense housing prices, low wages, high rent burden, and an elevated risk of displacement (Sisson et al., 2020). Outside of the facets of the affordable housing crisis which exists in urban areas around the nation, rural areas, particularly in the South, experienced some of the highest eviction rates in the nation in the years before the pandemic (Blau, 2019). The vulnerability of tenancy, then, is something experienced across the nation, and which no sole geography has a particular monopoly on. These issues surrounding tenancy vulnerability – rent-burden, stagnant wages, eviction, and the afterlives of eviction (physical and mental health impacts, residential instability, residence in poorer geographies, and discrimination in the housing market from ones’ eviction records) – matter severely for the status of life, the quality of life, and the opportunity within life for those who have prior been subject to these structural ailments (USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation, 2019; Desmond, 2012). In discussing the what of the problem, it’s essential to understand the who of the problem, through an intersectional frame. These multiplicitous issues surrounding housing and socio-economic status – eviction, coercive eviction filing, harassment, etc. – were and are still disproportionately experienced by BIPOC communities, particularly Black women and Latina lower-income renters (Hepburn et al., 2020). This page focuses on the problem of landlord harassment and illegal eviction in Los Angeles over the last decade, and specifically on these forms of tenant insecurity since the beginning of the pandemic. 

During the pandemic, many tenants who were unable to pay their rents were threatened by eviction, despite having municipally (as well as state or federally) declared eviction moratoria that granted them housing security on paper. Illegal eviction was hard to specifically quantify throughout this time period, and even generally, formal eviction data themselves are difficult to gather, especially in California (Cheng, 2021). Although in the earlier segment of the pandemic we didn’t have a granular and comprehensive account of illegal eviction, more recently published work has established that illegal evictions increased drastically over this period and that many tenants were subject to landlord harassment and illegal eviction (Zainulbai, Daly, 2022). Work from the LA Times (Dillon, Poston, 2020) established that in the first ten weeks of the pandemic following the mayoral order to cease evictions, there was a 17% increase in landlord/tenant dispute 911 calls. These calls represent landlords’ harassing tenants, which also include landlords or property managers illegally evicting tenants. They also noted that these calls were predominantly concentrated in South LA. Internally, the Eviction Defense Network noted that in the first half-year of the pandemic, illegal eviction cases had increased by 75%, and landlord harassment cases more generally increased by 352% (Eviction Defense Network, 2020). In light of this, we sought to track tenant vulnerability through quantifying illegal eviction and landlord harassment more generally, throughout the pandemic period, and before the pandemic period. The present analysis then builds off of the work of the LA Times (Dillon, Poston, 2020). In our analysis, we categorize and clarify these calls through text analysis, visualize them on a neighborhood map over the last decade, and plot a time series of these calls over the last decade. The results are striking and speak towards advocates’ claims that we should move deliberately towards establishing a Right to Counsel, a permanent Rent Relief Program, a permanent arrangement of eviction prevention measures, as well as judicial reforms in the way that Unlawful Detainers (or eviction suits) are processed in court. The findings furthermore speak towards the importance of strengthening the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance (TAHO) in the City of Los Angeles, and expanding the infrastructure to prevent both illegal evictions that occur outside of the court, and also formal evictions that occur within the court.