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Rental housing in pandemic boom towns has become so expensive that many areas are seeing a huge spike in evictions.
According to data from the Eviction Lab, a research group at Princeton University, evictions are surging in a handful of cities throughout the Sun Belt region of the US.
Eviction filings are up 35% compared to pre-pandemic in metro areas tracked in the region. That's partly due to high rent prices, researchers said, fueled by big shifts in where Americans lived and worked during the pandemic, a trend that drove many renters to the Sun Belt.
In Nashville, Tennessee, one such boom town in the Sun Belt, evictions have climbed 31% since 2019, Eviction Lab data shows. Fort Worth, Texas, another area that saw a big uptick in housing demand, saw evictions rise 25% in that time frame. Jacksonville, Florida, saw evictions climb 14%.
US rent increases peaked at around 17% year-over-year in early 2022, with cities in the Sun Belt rising at the fastest pace in the country, according to Realtor.com.
"As the United States moves past the COVID-19 pandemic, low-income renters face an increasingly difficult housing market. The country lacks millions of units of affordable rental housing, and in those units that are available, a record number of tenants are paying well-beyond their means," the researchers at the Eviction Lab said in a note earlier this year.
Rents, though, are now falling, with units in the Sun Belt seeing some of the steepest price drops as vacancies pile up. Austin, Texas, reported one of the largest rent declines in the nation, with prices falling 6.6% on an annual basis in April. Meanwhile, rent prices dropped 5.9% in Nashville, Tennessee, and 5.6% in Jacksonville, Florida, according to real estate listings site Redfin.
