Extra-Judicial Evictions and Changing Landlord Strategies in Response to the Eviction Moratorium

Restrictions on pursuing formal, judicial evictions during the pandemic may have led some landlords to rely on informal means of removing tenants. An assessment of whether landlords did, in fact, pursue this strategy is hampered by difficulties in measuring informal eviction actions. We rely on call data to a tenants’ support group to indirectly measure both formal and informal evictions in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area before, during, and after the statewide moratorium on evictions initiated in 2020. We find no evidence of a substitution effect. Although calls related to formal evictions declined during the moratorium, there was no commensurate rise in the incidence of calls related to informal evictions. The data indicate that landlords continued to pursue formal evictions, though at a lower rate, throughout the moratorium, and that the rate of calls about formal eviction filings post moratorium was great enough to bring aggregate calls to a level that would have occurred in the absence of a moratorium. Landlords seeking to remove tenants seemed to have pursued two strategies, ignoring the moratorium in a significant number of cases, and waiting out the moratorium in other cases, that together likely made a shift to informal evictions unnecessary.