{"id":378120,"date":"2026-06-28T09:46:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T09:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/378120\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T09:46:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T09:46:24","slug":"how-many-californians-face-eviction-each-year-the-state-cant-say-for-sure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/378120\/","title":{"rendered":"How many Californians face eviction each year? The state can’t say for sure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0This article<\/a> was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.<\/p>\n

A little more than\u00a0two years ago, a\u00a0state audit<\/a>\u00a0found that despite spending $24 billion over the previous five years to combat homelessness, the state of California\u00a0couldn\u2019t be sure<\/a>\u00a0how effective some of its programs were because of insufficient data.<\/p>\n

The problem of poor data tracking and reporting on homelessness issues, though, is hardly confined to sweeping programs like\u00a0Project Homekey<\/a>. And when it comes to one of the primary reasons people wind up on the street \u2014 being evicted from their homes \u2014 that information gap is glaring.<\/p>\n

Despite expert estimates that hundreds of thousands of California residents face eviction each year, the data reporting on the issue is so fragmented \u2014 and in some cases, missing altogether \u2014 that more precise numbers are virtually impossible to find, let alone what those numbers indicate.<\/p>\n

That all stems from the purely patchwork nature of the state\u2019s counties reporting out their own data on eviction filings and results. And it leaves state lawmakers and analysts essentially guessing where to focus energy and resources to prevent more evictions from happening.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have the data to do data-driven policy,\u201d said Kyle Nelson, director of policy and advocacy for the economic justice nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. \u201cAnd as the state is investing unprecedented amounts of money in homelessness prevention, we have no idea whether or not we\u2019re actually addressing the root cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The number of California\u00a0residents who face eviction every year isn\u2019t clearly known. By actual eviction filings by landlords, the count has hovered between 130,000 and 135,000 a year since 2019, with a significant dip during the COVID-19 pandemic years as tenant protections and assistance were increased.<\/p>\n

Those numbers, though, represent only the cases brought through the court system. The outcomes of those cases aren\u2019t specified, only the fact that they were filed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beyond that, housing experts\u00a0say<\/a>\u00a0the total does not include vast numbers of renters who, once they\u2019ve received a preliminary eviction notice from their landlord giving them a certain amount of time to pay their rent, move out of their homes because they fear a court filing is on its way and don\u2019t want the proceeding to show up on their rental history.<\/p>\n

Nelson, who has used public records requests to study evictions in the state for a decade, puts the likely total of people facing such displacement at several hundred thousand annually. The downstream effect of those kinds of numbers on homelessness is grim; according to recent research by UC San Francisco, roughly\u00a0one-third<\/a>\u00a0of California\u2019s unhoused adults had their name on a lease or mortgage just prior to becoming homeless.<\/p>\n

Overall, California\u2019s system for tracking eviction filings \u2014 and then following those cases out to their conclusions \u2014 is remarkably lacking. As Nelson notes in his organization\u2019s\u00a0recent report<\/a>, each of the state\u2019s 58 counties has its own approach to documenting outcomes in eviction cases\u00a0and\u00a0in deciding how much of that information (if any) to make available to the public or the state\u2019s Judicial Council.<\/p>\n

Further, California doesn\u2019t mandate what eviction data should be tracked. In fiscal year 2023-2024, the latest year included in the nonprofit\u2019s study that covers 15 years, eight counties didn\u2019t report their eviction outcomes at all to the Judicial Council, which oversees the superior court system that processes eviction filings.<\/p>\n

That group \u2014 including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento and Riverside counties \u2014 comprised 57% of the state\u2019s eviction filings that year. While the counties themselves presumably know the outcomes of those cases, the state doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

For many counties, the reporting process is complicated by a very straightforward problem: outdated programs or methods. \u201cFor a long time, Los Angeles, which is the largest trial court in the state, was keeping paper records,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cThey had very, very basic electronic data architecture. And I think that\u2019s the story for a lot of these counties. They don\u2019t have a way of easily incorporating their local data into [a state system].\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

A bill working its way\u00a0through the state Legislature would force some transparency on this process. Carried by State Sen. Maria Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles), the\u00a0measure<\/a>would require superior courts in each county to report eviction case outcomes to the Judicial Council every three months, and also publish the results online.<\/p>\n

Some provisions of the bill would begin in 2027, including an assessment by the council of how soon each of the counties could begin reporting the data. In several counties, Nelson said, that\u2019s going to require upgrades to the various county courts\u2019 technology systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt costs money, and it takes time,\u201d Nelson said. In the past, that\u2019s been enough to defeat other versions of this legislation, including a\u00a0veto<\/a>\u00a0by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 and another try by Durazo that\u00a0died in committee<\/a>\u00a0last year.<\/p>\n

Nelson testified in support of the most recent effort before the Assembly Judiciary Committee earlier this week, which subsequently passed the bill, SB 1160. It now goes to the Assembly Appropriations Committee, where the cost of implementing the plan will be scrutinized.<\/p>\n

Cost and court staffing issues form the basis of\u00a0much of the opposition<\/a>\u00a0to the measure, which has had bipartisan support from legislators themselves in all of its versions. The Judicial Council has\u00a0estimated<\/a>\u00a0a one-time cost of $6.1 million to set up the system and $5.4 million annually to run it. The state Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office, meanwhile, put the cost of implementing and running the program at only about $1.8 million per year in a letter to Sen. Durazo\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

Either way, it\u2019s not free. At some point, though, the state is going to have to reckon with the larger cost of not knowing what\u2019s happening with its eviction cases, which supporters say is consistently hamstringing lawmakers\u2019 ability to understand whether they\u2019re committing resources in the right places.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving the data would give us a sense of where we can make interventions to maximize the investments we\u2019ve already made,\u201d Nelson said. Without that basic information, the state is grasping in the dark when it comes to understanding whether its spending is having any impact on the eviction aspect of its homelessness crisis.<\/p>\n

Capital & Main<\/a> is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues of our time, including economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to democracy, hate and extremism and immigration.\u200b<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission. A little more than\u00a0two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[28175,16784,1011,153039,12199,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-378120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-evictions","tag-homekey","tag-housing","tag-housing-uncertainty","tag-project-homekey","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}