By disrupting their education, eviction harms children immediately and over the long-term
This policy brief was jointly produced by Notre Dame’s Willson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), the Inclusive Economy Lab at the University of Chicago, and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale University. The brief is based on:
Across the country, leaders face a complex housing crisis, often weighing the need to provide stronger tenant protections against a lack of affordable housing stock.
As housing costs soar, many families nationwide have found themselves at risk of eviction. Eviction affects millions of families across the United States, with an estimated 2.7 million households, including 3 million children, facing court-ordered evictions in any given year.
Policy responses to this crisis can be difficult to calibrate. Stronger tenant protections can reduce eviction in the short term, but may have the unintended consequences of increasing unpaid rent and pushing up overall housing costs in a region. For example, in Washington D.C.–where pandemic-era protections made it easier for tenants to certify hardships and avoid eviction–unpaid rent rose from $11 million in 2020 to $100 million in 2025.1 In response, the city has begun to roll back these protections, citing concerns about landlord foreclosure and decreased stock of affordable rental housing.2
These tensions are playing out nationally. The cost of constructing new units continues to rise. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed a two-year time limit on the use of Section 8 housing vouchers–a key channel through which low-income households are able to access stable housing. The result is U.S. cities caught in the middle and struggling to both prevent displacement and maintain a viable housing market.
As local communities and policymakers grapple with these challenges, new research from economists at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, Yale University, and the University of Nebraska highlights an important consideration: For children, the impacts of eviction go beyond a housing disruption. The researchers compiled a broad range of previously-unavailable data, including court records, public school records, homeless shelter records, and data on household composition collected as part of the Decennial Census survey. The research is the first to present rigorous, causal evidence that eviction has profound and persistent effects on children’s lives, exposing children not only to an increased risk of homelessness, but to severe disruptions to their education, among other stressors.
Communities deserve a carefully calibrated response that recognizes the long-term human and economic costs of eviction, especially for children, while accounting for the complex dynamics of housing markets. These new findings can directly inform decisions by policymakers seeking to reduce the short and long-term harm experienced by children who are evicted.
What We Learned
- Children facing court-ordered eviction are already experiencing poverty and other insecurities, but eviction is a hardship that tips the scales. Research consistently shows that households facing eviction experience significant financial, housing, and health challenges. However, most studies to-date do not establish that eviction can also directly cause these adverse outcomes. This new research establishes that, for children, eviction is a causal driver of many adverse events, with potentially lifelong consequences.
- Eviction increases the likelihood of a child experiencing homelessness. Eviction nearly triples the likelihood of homelessness in the first year after the case is filed.
- Eviction is disruptive to children’s educational attainment. As a direct result of eviction, children are nearly 20% more likely to change schools, 13% more likely to be chronically absent, and 34% more likely to be held back a grade by the second year after the eviction filing.
- Being evicted has about the same impact on high school graduation rates as juvenile incarceration. Eviction in middle school or later decreases a child’s likelihood of graduating high school by 18.5%.3
- Boys are especially harmed by eviction. While eviction reduces girls' high school graduation rates by 7%, the impact on boys is nearly five times greater at 34%. After eviction, girls are more likely than boys to move into multigenerational households and lower-poverty neighborhoods, while boys continue to live in similarly poor neighborhoods.
Policy Takeaways
Eviction can have extensive and long-lasting effects on children’s educational attainment.
Policymakers concerned about the effects of the affordable housing crisis on children should consider ways to protect children from eviction or lessen its harmful effects on their educational outcomes.
To-date, most programs that support evicted children at school have received funding through federal grants authorized by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act–a federal law that ensures educational rights and services for homeless children and youth. The FY26 White House budget proposal would significantly reduce the federal funding for those programs. If the funding is ultimately eliminated, states and cities interested in helping evicted children stay engaged at school will need new resources and policy solutions.
- Consider evidence on programs to stabilize housing for households with children. Three quarters of households with children needing rental assistance–about 5.2 million households nationwide–do not receive it.4 Resources for rental assistance are often oversubscribed and not always targeted to families. Some states and cities have programs that provide rental assistance to families with children, for example New York City’s Family Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (FHEPS). Research about the impact of evictions on children can help policymakers make informed decisions when weighing the costs and benefits of programs that provide or prioritize rental assistance for households with children.
- Support programs that stabilize education for children experiencing housing insecurity. Reduced educational engagement and attainment is a key channel through which children are harmed by eviction. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal law that ensures educational rights and services for homeless children and youth, aims to help school-aged children experiencing housing insecurity stay engaged at school. If funding authorized by the McKinney-Vento Act is significantly reduced or eliminated, evicted children would be even more vulnerable to severe disruptions to their education than the analysis finds above.
- Support further research on why boys appear more negatively impacted by eviction in several key ways. Graduating high school is a critical milestone for career and college readiness. More research is needed to determine why eviction appears more harmful to boys than girls, and policymakers should consider ways to close high school graduation rate gaps between boys and girls while helping all evicted children remain engaged in school.
Research Details
The Effects of Eviction on Children, NBER Working Paper # 33659, April 2025
Methodology
To conduct their study, the researchers spent six years building and analyzing new datasets that link public eviction court records in Chicago and New York City to confidential data from the local public schools and the Census Bureau.
To distinguish the causal effects of eviction from other factors that might lead to worse outcomes for evicted children, the research design used the fact that court cases in eviction court are randomly assigned to judges, and that cases are more likely to end in eviction under some judges than others. This allowed the researchers to study children who were evicted “on the margin” because their case was assigned to a strict judge. By comparing the outcomes of children whose family’s case narrowly resulted in an eviction to those children whose case narrowly avoided an eviction, but for the assignment to a different judge, the researchers were able to determine the role eviction played in children’s lives, isolating its effects separately from the effects of other hardships that led to eviction.
Related Work
The Effects of Emergency Rental Assistance During the Pandemic: Evidence from Four Cities, 2024, Robert Collinson, Anthony A. DeFusco, John Eric Humphries, Daniel Kang, Benjamin J. Keys, Vincent W. Reina, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger.
Eviction and Poverty in American Cities, 2024, Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas S. Mader, Davin Reed, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk.
Equilibrium Effects of Eviction Protections: The Case of Legal Assistance, 2024, Rob Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Stephanie Kestelman, Scott Nelson, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger.
Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market, 2024, Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Davin Reed, Daniel R. Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk.
1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/12/dc-mayor-bowser-housing-bill-evictions
2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/18/affordable-housing-dc-tenant-opportunity-purchase
3A study of 35,000 juvenile offenders over a 10-year period suggests that juvenile incarceration results in substantially lowers high school completion rates (Aizer and Doyle, 2015).
