Is everyone entitled to a fair process before being forced out of their home?
Author
- Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson
Associate Professor of Social Epidemiology, The Ohio State University
The state of Michigan says “yes,” but the reality is often very different and the consequences are severe. In Michigan, landlords need a court order to evict a tenant.
The formal eviction process includes several steps and concludes only when a judge signs an order saying a tenant has to move.
A landlord who wants to remove a tenant must work through the court system. This is true even if the tenant fails to pay rent, plays music too loud – or even if the landlord wants to do renovations. If a landlord chooses not to renew a lease at the end of its term, a 30-day notice to the tenant is required.
Landlords are not legally allowed to retaliate against tenants who request repairs by not renewing their lease.
Detroit had 20,370 eviction cases filed in 2025. But my research shows that official counts underestimate the real number of evictions in metro Detroit by half because many landlords ignore the law and skip the formal court process.
I am a tenured social epidemiology professor , native and resident Detroiter, and leader of the first and most comprehensive research study on court-ordered and illegal evictions among Black women in the U.S.
My study includes numbers and stories from nearly 1,500 Black women ages 18-46 from metro Detroit, including nearly 800 women who experienced a court-ordered or illegal eviction in their lifetime. Black women and children are the groups most affected by evictions, because of the intersection between structural racism and sexism.
Evictions can harm the health of babies
I lead the SECURE Study in partnership with a community advisory board of Black women who are local, national and international leaders in fields such as human rights and social justice, advocacy, education, healthcare and journalism. Some have been evicted themselves.
In our most recent study, my research team and I used participant stories to show, for the first time, how illegal evictions can undermine the reproductive justice rights of Black women . Reproductive justice is focused on a set of interconnected human rights. It includes the rights to bodily autonomy, to choose whether to have children, and the ability to raise your children in safe and sustainable communities.
Our research found that an illegal eviction caused more than 1 in 3 pregnant or postpartum participants to have nowhere to live.
We also learned renter protections are strongest for those with a formal lease agreement. Twenty-six percent of women who were pregnant or postpartum when they were illegally evicted lacked a lease, and 21% of all interview participants who were illegally evicted had a month-to-month tenancy.
Deepening our understanding
Not many other academics study the public health impacts of eviction.
One of the few studies links all birth records from 2000 to 2016 to court records from the same time in Georgia. It showed that mothers who experienced a court-ordered eviction during their second or third trimesters were more likely to have adverse birth outcomes , including low birth weight and premature babies, compared with those who were evicted during their first trimester.
Another study used data on both court-ordered and informal evictions, looking at medical record data for children and surveys of caregivers from four U.S. cities from 2011 to 2019. Researchers found that children who experienced eviction were at higher risk of developing intellectual, motor skills and behavioral issues, being hospitalized after an emergency room visit, and experiencing worse health compared to children who hadn’t experienced eviction.
Our research adds something new because we asked people to share what they’ve been through.
Mothers and pregnant women experienced violence
I had in-depth interviews with 55 women who reported being illegally evicted. Nearly a third of them reported also being evicted when they were kids.
We learned that illegal evictions of pregnant women could cause food insecurity. Removals often involved violence and affected multiple generations.
One mother told me she had been evicted as a kid. Later in life, she rented a home in need of repairs. She and the landlord agreed that she wouldn’t pay rent for three months until the landlord fixed her home.
“The guy, you know, threatened me, and he wouldn’t fix the house,” the mother said. “When I moved out the house, the work still hadn’t been finished. I was forced out of our house by threats of violence.”
The move affected her and her 17-year-old daughter, who was pregnant.
“The day we moved out the house to go stay in a hotel, she ended up having her baby,” she said. “So I end up having to pay for hotel rooms for two months. So my new grandson and my children had to go there to sleep.”
One participant described the stress of being illegally evicted when she was pregnant with her son.
“Many a day I went without eating. I was very sick for a while. I’m not a small girl. I’ve never been small, but I lost a lot of weight. I was 116 at one point. … We just struggled really, really bad,” she said.
Some participants lost custody of their children after they were illegally evicted.
“I didn’t have a house that was stable for them anymore,” one woman told me. “I was working on it, trying to stay there and save money and whatnot at that time.” At the time of our conversation, she had not regained custody of her children.
State and local policies and programs designed to address the eviction crisis address only half of the problem, because they rarely if ever protect against or provide interventions for illegal evictions.
Our research suggests that expanding these programs with the unique needs of mothers and babies in mind could help guarantee their human right to housing, cut down on homelessness and prevent family separations.
