In the analysis, The Coming Wave: COVID-19 Evictions: A Growing Crisis for Families in Berks County, we estimate the number of renter households in Berks County at risk of eviction when the local or state eviction moratoriums expire. This analysis estimates renter households at imminent risk of eviction: the number of renter households in which workers have lost their jobs and have no replacement income — considered imminently at risk of eviction — as well as the estimated number of children in those households. This is an estimate of those most at-risk: many other households could face eviction if unprotected by an eviction moratorium. Below are the methods and data sources used for estimating these numbers. Note that in the below headings and in the fact sheet we round our estimates of households to the nearest hundred.

2,700 Renter Households at Imminent Risk of Eviction

To produce this estimate, we closely followed the methodology for estimating eviction risk developed by Gary Blasi at the UCLA Luskin Institute in the report UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles. To determine recently unemployed workers we start with data from the Pennsylvania Center for Workforce Information & Analysis on the number of workers that filed initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims between March 28, 2020 (the start of the COVID-19 crisis) through August 1, 2020 (the most recent data available at the time of this analysis). This is 36,240 workers in Berks County. The number of UI claimants, however, understates the true number of recently unemployed workers because not all of the recently unemployed file for unemployment insurance. Workers might not apply because they are ineligible for benefits (including undocumented workers, self-employed workers, and workers in the informal economy such as street vendors), or they assume ineligibility based on hours worked. There are an estimated 91,000 undocumented workers in Pennsylvania’s labor force. Other workers attempt to apply for unemployment but face difficulties doing so. To account for these newly unemployed workers not captured in initial unemployment insurance claims, following Blasi, we multiply the number of workers that have filed claims by 1.5 (a 50 percent increase). This multiplier reflects the experience of the Great Recession, when the total number of unemployed workers was 1.5 times the number of workers who applied for unemployment insurance. Based on this calculation, there are 54,360 Berks County workers that are newly unemployed, including 18,120 non-filers.

Next, we estimate the number of these workers who do not receive benefits. This includes all of the filers who do not receive benefits. According to claims data for Pennsylvania compiled by The Century Foundation, 2,076,407 Pennsylvanian workers applied for unemployment insurance and pandemic unemployment assistance, and 348,682 did not receive benefits, or 17 percent. If 17 percent of Berks County filers do not receive benefits, that is 6,161 who do not receive benefits, for a total of 24,281 newly unemployed Berks County workers with no replacement income.

To understand how many of these workers are renters at imminent risk of eviction, we need to estimate how many of them live in rental housing. Twenty-nine percent of all housing units in Berks County are rental units according to 5-Year American Community Survey Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data (which represents a 2014-2018 average), but it is possible that the share of newly unemployed workers that are renters varies from the overall share of renters. To estimate the rentership rate of the newly unemployed, we looked at the rentership rates of workers in industries with a disproportionate share of recent UI claims, based on data from the Pennsylvania Center for Workforce Information & Analysis, using 2018 5-Year American Community Survey Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data. For Berks County this includes the following industries: manufacturing; trade/transportation/utilities; and education/health services. In 2018, 26 percent of workers in these industries were renters so we use that multiplier to estimate that 6,313 of the newly unemployed workers with no replacement income are renters.

We estimate the distribution of these 6,313 workers into renter households based on the composition of renter households from the 2018 IPUMS data. In Berks County, among employed adult renters, 41.5 percent are in households with one employed adult, 42.9 percent are in households with two employed adults, and 15.6 percent are in households with three or more employed adults. Applying the share of workers by household composition to the newly unemployed renters with no replacement income, we estimate that 2,620 live in single-worker households, 2,708 live in households with two employed adults, and 985 live in households with three or more employed adults.

We consider all of the one-worker renter households at imminent risk of eviction since they have no replacement income and very likely have little to no savings. But for the unemployed workers with no replacement income living with other workers, we need to determine how many live in households where the other adults also are unemployed with no replacement income. For renter households with two employed adults, our estimates suggest there are 2,708 newly unemployed adults with no replacement income out of a total 18,970 employed adults — or 14.3 percent. Assuming that the newly unemployed with no replacement income are randomly distributed across these households, it follows that about 2.04 percent of them, on average, would share the same household. The result is an estimated 55 renter households with two adult workers, both unemployed with no replacement income. For the three or more working adult households, the odds all working adults would be newly unemployed with no replacement income gets very small so we assume it to be zero.

Adding the one- and two-worker households together there are 2,675 Berks County renter households with no adult who is employed or with replacement income to pay rent and are therefore at imminent risk of eviction. Note that in our estimation methodology, to be conservative, we assume that the workers who lose their jobs and have no replacement income and live with other working adults are not at imminent risk of eviction because the adults with income will continue to pay rent so as not to be evicted, even if it causes debt or financial hardship.

Lastly, we estimate the number of children in these at-risk households by multiplying by the average number of children in renter households with one or two employed adult workers in Berks County (about 0.73 and 1.04, respectively), and summing the result to get 1,975 children in households at risk of eviction.

Additional Analyses

• Homeless population by race/ethnicity: Berks County Homeless population share by race/ethnicity from the Berks Coalition to End Homelessness 2019 point-in-time report and county population share from the 2018 5-Year American Community Survey (which represents a 2014-2018 average). We adjusted the homelessness data to create mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories by assuming the non-Hispanic share of each racial group among those experiencing homelessness is the same as the non-Hispanic share of each racial group among the overall population.
• Annual eviction filings: Eviction Lab, number of formal evictions filed in 2016 in Berks County. The eviction rate is defined as the share of renter households that received an eviction judgment in which renters were ordered to leave. Learn more about Eviction Lab data and undercounting of evictions which applies to Berks County.
• Rent burdens in Berks County (total and economically insecure renters by race and gender): PolicyLink/ERI analysis of 2018 5-Year American Community Survey Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. Rent-burdened is defined as spending more than 30 percent of income on housing costs. Data for 2018 represents a 2014-2018 average. Household income is based on the year prior to the survey while housing costs are based on the survey year. Data by race and gender are determined by the race and gender of the household head and are only reported if the sample size is sufficient. Economic insecurity is defined as below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $50,000 for a family of four with two children. Latinos include people of Hispanic origin of any race and all other groups exclude people of Hispanic origin.
• Renter savings: According to a national analysis of 2015 Panel Study of Income Dynamics data by Pew Research, renters who were rent-burdened (paying more than 30 percent of income on rent) had an average of $10 in savings and renters who were not rent-burdened had an average of $1,000 in savings.