Denver's record-high number of eviction cases continued to surge during Mayor Mike Johnston's first 6 months in office.
In 2023, 12,910 Denverites faced eviction actions in court, according to Denver County Court records.
That's a massive hike above the norm. On average, in Denver County Court, over the previous 15 years, there were 8,023 eviction cases annually. The second highest year for eviction cases in Denver courts records was in 2010, when 10,241 households faced eviction cases in court.
So what does this number mean?
The eviction case filing number simply shows how many court cases landlords filed to begin a formal, legal eviction process.
Each household facing eviction is facing housing instability and potentially homelessness, but there's a lot we don't know from this number.
The number of cases does not take into account the impossible-to-track total number of people who left their homes at the first sign of eviction but before a case went to court. That number would likely be significantly higher, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
Also, not all eviction court cases lead to removal by the Sheriff Department. Some cases are settled. Tenants occasionally win. And often they leave before sheriff deputies arrive.
As of September, 2023 had already seen 1,400 evictions completed by deputies, noted Daria Serna, a spokesperson for the Sheriff Department, in a statement.
What about the final quarter of the year? We won't know immediately.
The report that pulls completed eviction numbers is broken, she explained.
So why are eviction-case numbers so high? Well, staying housed is hard in Denver.
Paying for rent is expensive.
Average rent in Denver in 2008, the first year the courts tracked, was $876. Now it's more than doubled to $2,201, according to RentData -- a 151% increase, far outpacing most Denverites' growth in income.
Because demand on the current housing stock is so high, landlords have leeway to evict when things aren't going that well and will often raise rents between tenants. When people are desperate to find a home, landlords worry less about leaving units empty.
Finally, and most significantly, during the pandemic, the federal government offered historically significant eviction prevention money to cities and states.
That money has dried up, and finding assistance to cure what tenants owe landlords has become harder in recent years.
By the end of 2023, the city had shut down its portal for rent assistance. Doing so made it nearly impossible for the city-funded eviction defense attorneys to keep tenants being evicted for non-payment in their homes, unless they had access to private money.
Now that 2024 is here, the city has invested nearly $30 million in eviction prevention, and the online portal for rental and utility assistance is open again.
The consequences of eviction are devastating -- and in some cases deadly.
People who go to court can have long lasting eviction records that make it harder for them to rent again. And research has found that both their physical and mental health suffer and their chances of becoming homeless rise.
The Centers for Disease Control has established that eviction and housing insecurity are health issues, and eviction can be a precipitating factor in suicide.
Yet evictions are not carried about by social service workers or medical professionals and instead are treated like criminal cases by armed Sheriff deputies in Denver and most municipalities.
There are few systems in place to help people going through an eviction at the same time as a mental health crisis, and in a few cases, evictions have led to suicides in Denver -- though how many is hard to say, since the city does not track the correlation between eviction and suicide.
Researcher Juan Pablo Garnham, who works at the Eviction Lab and in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, told Denverite earlier this year that the presence of armed officers at an eviction can lead to violent encounters.
"There's an opportunity there to have alternative ways of dealing with it, whether that is a social worker, rather than someone with guns," Garnham said. "All of those are other options that could be considered that will help not only lower the tensions but avoid some really, really bad outcomes."
