How the eviction–crime connection actually works, what the newest research shows, and what it means for the people who run your properties.
If you've managed apartments for any length of time, you already know the eviction season has a different feel to it. Tempers run shorter. Conversations in the leasing office get harder. The walk to post a notice on a door carries a weight that a routine maintenance call doesn't. That instinct isn't just nerves — it lines up with what a growing body of research has found about the relationship between housing instability and crime.
This is a subject we've written about before, and it remains one of the most-read pieces we've ever published. So we went back, pulled the newest data, and rebuilt it — because the research has gotten sharper, and the operational takeaway for property teams has gotten clearer.
For years, the link between evictions and neighborhood crime was understood mostly in general terms: places with more housing instability tended to have more crime. Recent research has put hard numbers to it.
The most striking came in December 2025, when researchers at the University of Chicago published a study in JAMA Network Open analyzing eviction records and shooting data across the city. Their finding: every 1% increase in a census tract's eviction rate was associated with roughly 2.66 more shootings within 1,000 feet of residents' homes. Even more notable — the personal experience of eviction was a stronger individual predictor of nearby gun violence than a resident's race, income, or education level.
That study didn't come out of nowhere. It confirmed a pattern researchers had been documenting for over a decade:
The mechanism researchers point to is instability. Evictions don't just move one household — they fray the social fabric of a block: fewer long-term neighbors, less trust, less of the informal "eyes on the street" that quietly keeps communities safer. When that erodes, risk rises for everyone in and around the property, staff included.
An important distinction, stated plainly: this research describes neighborhood and community risk. It does not claim that any individual tenant being evicted will become violent toward your staff. The vast majority won't. The honest takeaway isn't "evictions make people dangerous" — it's that eviction activity is a reliable marker of an elevated-risk environment, and your onsite teams spend their entire workday inside that environment.
The second half of the story is timing. If evictions correlate with elevated risk, then the volume of evictions matters — and here the picture is nuanced, so it's worth getting right.
After cratering during the pandemic's moratoriums, eviction filings rebounded to near their historic averages, and in a number of major metros they've pushed past pre-pandemic levels. The Eviction Lab at Princeton has documented that in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Houston, landlords are now filing substantially more evictions than before 2020. Some states have set records outright: North Carolina recorded more than 200,000 eviction filings in 2025 — the most in its available data.
The nuance: nationally, 2025 filings (about 1.23 million across tracked sites) came in slightly below 2024 — the second straight year of a modest national decline — even as filings rose above average in 14 of the 48 places the Eviction Lab tracks. So the accurate headline isn't "evictions are exploding everywhere." It's this: evictions have returned to and often exceeded pre-pandemic norms and remain elevated, with sharp, persistent spikes in fast-growing Sun Belt and Southern metros. For an operator with properties in those markets, the local reality can look far more intense than the national average suggests.
Put the two findings together and the operational picture is clear: eviction activity is high and concentrated, and where it's high, risk is elevated. Many multifamily operators are running communities in exactly the markets where both are true.
Here's where the research meets the leasing office. Your onsite staff — leasing consultants, maintenance techs, community managers — are the human interface for every hard housing moment: the delinquency conversation, the notice on the door, the walk-through of a unit in a community under stress. They do this work alone, moving between occupied units, vacant apartments, parking areas, and common spaces, often out of earshot of a coworker.
That's not a reason to fear residents. It's a reason to make sure the people doing this work aren't doing it without a way to summon help. Consider what our own research and national data show about how that gap feels to staff:
When the environment carries elevated risk and staff feel unequipped for it, you get two costs at once: a human one, and an operational one — hesitation, avoidance, and turnover in the exact roles that keep a property running.
You can't single-handedly reverse eviction trends or neighborhood crime. What you can control is whether your team can get help instantly when they need it. That's the operational lever, and it's a small one to pull:
This is exactly the environment Apartment Guardian's PanicTap was built for. It's a single-button, direct-to-911 duress device with real-time location and automatic incident logging — designed for staff who work alone across a spread-out property, with no app and no IT project to stand up. It doesn't make the neighborhood safer. It makes your team ready — which, in an elevated-risk environment, is the part you can actually control.
The research is now hard to ignore: where evictions rise, crime tends to rise with them — a link that a landmark 2025 study quantified more precisely than ever. And evictions themselves have climbed back to, and past, pre-pandemic levels in much of the country. Your onsite teams work at the exact intersection of those two trends, every day, usually alone.
You can't control the housing market. You can control whether the people who represent you on the ground have a fast, reliable way to get help. In a higher-risk environment, that readiness isn't a nice-to-have — it's the most direct protection you can give the team that keeps your properties running.
Want to see how onsite teams stay protected in higher-risk environments? See how PanicTap works →