Social Determinants of Eviction
In a single month — December 2024 — Baltimore landlords filed more than 3,000 eviction warrants. That's roughly one in every 83 households. But most of those warrants never resulted in an actual eviction.
The social determinants of health — applied to housing
Public health has long recognized that health outcomes are shaped by social and structural factors — income, race, neighborhood — more than individual behavior. We applied the same lens to eviction.
What we found was surprising: which factors matter depends entirely on how you measure eviction. Warrant filings and actual evictions tell completely different stories.
The 4-step eviction process in Maryland
- Filing — Landlord files a complaint with the District Court
- Hearing — Judge issues a judgment (usually possession)
- Warrant — If tenant doesn't comply, landlord requests a warrant of restitution
- Execution — Sheriff executes the warrant — the formal eviction
Our data covers step 3. Fewer than 10% of warrants reach step 4. That gap is the central story.
Where are eviction warrants filed?
The geographic distribution of warrant filings doesn't map neatly onto the "Black Butterfly / White L" pattern that characterizes most inequities in Baltimore. That's the first hint that something different is going on.
See the interactive map to explore by neighborhood.
When we look at actual evictions, the pattern is familiar
BNIA's 2023 eviction data — which tracks formal evictions, not warrant filings — shows the expected correlations. Social determinants like race and income strongly predict eviction rates.
Race vs. BNIA eviction rate
Income vs. BNIA eviction rate
But warrant filings tell a completely different story
When we swap BNIA evictions for our warrant filing rate, the correlations collapse. Race and income are no longer significant predictors.
Race vs. warrant filing rate
Income vs. warrant filing rate
The strongest predictor: who controls the rental market
The only factor that significantly predicts warrant filing rates is ownership concentration — the share of rental units controlled by the top 10 landlords in each neighborhood.
Ownership concentration vs. warrant filing rate
Even with a single month of data, our eviction measure and BNIA's tell the same story: income and race predict formally recorded evictions, but not warrant filings — where ownership concentration dominates instead.
Who files the most warrants?
A handful of landlords are responsible for a disproportionate share of filings — and few of those warrants result in formal evictions.
Warrant filings are highly concentrated
Share of all warrants by landlord tier
Top 20 filers — warrants vs. evictions
Most warrants never result in a formal eviction
An asymmetry in consequences
For tenants
- Eviction records follow them for years
- Cases affect housing and credit access
- Difficult to expunge or seal cases decided in favor of the landlord
For landlords
- Filing patterns are largely inaccessible
- Frequent filers face no formal scrutiny
- No public record of cases decided against them
When eviction rates and health outcomes share a similar set of factors, why does our system protect landlords from negligent renters — without protecting renters from predatory landlords?
Explore the data yourself
The dataset is available for download and via a documented API. All tenant names are removed; addresses are truncated.