1.23 Million Eviction Filings 123 万次驱逐

Most evictions don't make headlines because they happen one at a time. The figure on this map is therefore unfamiliar 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 asks the reader to look 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, similar story: real-world rent, but a filing rate near 6%. The variable that lines up with the geography is not the rental market; it is the legal apparatus around eviction.

In states tinted sage, tenants have at least one of three things: 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. The cost of filing is low; the volume of filings rises to meet it. The map is what that procedural difference looks like at scale.

None of this is invisible — Eviction Lab researchers, legal aid lawyers, and the cities themselves know it. What a map can do that a paper can't is collapse 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，因为它们一次只发生一起。所以即便这个数字本身巨大， 地图上呈现的总量对大多数人来说仍然陌生：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。这张地图请读者 正视一个通常只被埋在一句话里的数字。

这些点不分布在租金最高的地方。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。费城是类似的故事： 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，租客至少拥有以下三项中的一项：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。

这一切并不是隐性的——Eviction Lab 的研究者、法援律师、以及这些 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 会因为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。