1.23 Million Eviction Filings 123 万次驱逐

Most evictions don't make headlines; they happen one at a time. So the figure on this map feels alien even though it is enormous: 1.23 million eviction cases were filed across 41 American cities last year, roughly one for every 13 renter households living in them. The map forces the reader to stare at a number that is usually buried in a sentence.

The dots are not where rent is highest. New York has some of the highest rents in the world and a 5% filing rate. Atlanta has roughly half of New York's median rent and a 19.8% rate — one in five Atlanta renters faced an eviction filing last year. Philadelphia, same pattern: real-world rent, but a filing rate near 6%. The variable that matches the map is not the rental market; it is the legal apparatus around eviction.

In states tinted sage, tenants have at least one of three protections: a right to counsel in eviction court, a just-cause requirement that landlords explain why they are filing, or aggressive sealing of eviction records so that one filing does not blacklist a tenant from future rentals. In the un-tinted states, a landlord can typically file by paying a small court fee, with no obligation to show cause and no automatic counsel for the tenant. When the cost of filing is low, the volume of filings rises to meet it. The map shows what that procedural difference looks like at scale.

None of this is hidden — Eviction Lab researchers, legal aid lawyers, and the cities themselves know it. What a map can do that a paper can't is fold the explanation into a single look. The same renter, with the same back-rent, in the same kind of building, faces dramatically different odds depending on which side of which state line their unit sits on.

A small disclosure. Filing counts and rates are reconstructed from the Eviction Lab's monthly Eviction Tracking System and its 2025 preliminary report (April 2026). Tenant-protection categorisation here is binary; the Legal Services Corporation's database scores along multiple dimensions, and several states sit on the boundary. The map reflects 41 cities and 10 states only — coverage is not nationwide because state court records vary in public access.

多数驱逐不上新闻——一次只发生一起。所以即便这个数字本身巨大， 地图上的总量对大多数人仍然陌生：123 万起驱逐起诉，发生在 41 个美国城市，相当于每 13 户租客中就有 1 起。这张地图把读者 目光按在一个通常只埋在一句话里的数字上。

这些点不在租金最高的地方。纽约的租金是世界顶级的，filing rate 只有 5%；亚特兰大的中位租金大约是纽约的一半，filing rate 是 19.8%—— 去年每五户亚特兰大租客中就有一户面对过驱逐起诉。费城同样的故事： 真实的高租金，filing rate 大约 6%。能与这片地理对得上的变量 不是租房市场，而是关于驱逐的法律装置。

染浅 sage 色的州，租客至少拥有三项中的一项：在驱逐法庭中有权 获得律师协助 (right-to-counsel)、房东必须证明"正当理由" (just-cause) 才能起诉、或者主动封存驱逐记录，使一次起诉不至于让租客被未来租房 市场拉黑。没染色的州，房东只需缴一笔小额法庭费用就能发起驱逐， 不需要证明任何理由，租客也没有自动配置律师。filing 的成本越低， filing 的数量就会涨到与那个低成本相称。这张地图，就是那种程序差异 在大尺度上的样子.

这一切并不隐性——Eviction Lab 的研究者、法援律师、这些 城市本身都清楚。地图能做、论文不能做的一件事，是把解释折叠成 一眼。同样一个租客、同样的欠租金额、同样的住房类型，他/她 只因住房单位落在哪条州界的哪一边，面对完全不同的胜负概率。

附注：filing 数量与 rate 由 Eviction Lab 的月度 Eviction Tracking System 与其 2025 年初步报告（2026 年 4 月）重构。租客 保护的分类此处采用二元划分；Legal Services Corporation 数据库 为多维评分，部分州处于边界。本图覆盖 41 个城市与 10 个州， 并非全国——美国各州法院记录的公开程度差异很大。