New research sheds light on the people most at risk of being evicted from their homes in the US.

And the findings are startling.

Children under the age of five make up the largest group of those whose households have had an eviction filed in the last year.

And the racial disparities are worse.

About a quarter of black babies and toddlers in rental households face the threat of eviction, forcing them to endure instability during the most critical years of their development.

The research comes from a collaboration between Princeton and Rutgers University, along with the US Census Bureau.

It demonstrates that not only does the average evicted household include one child, but that the most common age to experience such a traumatic event is during the earliest years of a child's life.

For more on the report, I'm joined by Nick Graetz.

He led the collaboration for the Princeton Eviction Lab.

Nick, thanks so much for joining me.

Up until now, we have known very little about the individuals and the families who have faced eviction.

The research you helped lead really connected the dots there and what did you find?

Yes, the study is motivated by the fact that we've never truly known who gets evicted nationwide.

We you know, we've compiled eviction court records across the country to try to track how many evictions happened.

But this court records just lists the names and addresses of tenants filed against.

So they don't tell you anything about who these people are.

We don't know their race, their age or who else is living in those homes.

For example, children are typically invisible in the legal documents that track eviction cases and that only name adults and leaseholders who are actually summoned to court.

So through our partnership with the Census Bureau, we flanked eviction records to Census data to finally understand who's actually at risk of eviction in America.

And so, yeah, I mean, what you found was really stunning because having children didn't, in fact, shield you from eviction, but it exposes families.

Right.

So we found that eviction overwhelmingly affects households that have children present.

We found that about 7.6 million people are threatened with eviction each year, 40% of whom are children.

And we actually found that the most common age across a life to experience eviction is during childhood.

So we're talking about the very youngest, the most vulnerable babies and toddlers.

What do we know about the long term consequences when children as young as that and their families face displacement?

Yes, I think there's a lot of reasons to think this causes a lot of issues across the life as those children are going to age, experience.

Eviction has a lot of material consequences for children, including how their family acts as a future housing and something like food security.

Having an eviction filing on your record makes it a lot harder for those families to find new housing.

Especially these families have constrained housing choices, given that most affordable units are not large enough to comfortably house children.

And then also schools are required by federal law to identify and provide resources to homeless children, for example.

But low income children have really little formal support.

So previous research found, you know, about 1.3 million homeless children each year enrolled in public schools.

But we found there were twice that amount exposed to addiction each year.

So we know those have compounding effects on things like health and stress and cognitive development for these really young kids.

Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, that certainly makes sense.

What are the reasons beyond what you've just cited, which sounded like affordable housing and obviously some extra financial burdens burdens you to take that how you will for families that they're facing this more because of the fact that they have young children.

Yeah.

So it's tough.

I mean, almost all eviction filings are for nonpayment of rent.

And we know families are especially squeezed with housing costs and that particularly high risk of severe rent burden and falling behind on rent.

And landlords often won't stay there evicting a renter because of children.

But when tenants fall behind on rent, it leaves them vulnerable to landlords really deciding who to be more or less lenient with.

So we said that I think families are particularly experienced in that way of already being really squeezed up against that cost burden every month.

Nick Graetz is a research associate with the Princeton Eviction Lab.

Nick, thanks so much.

Thanks so much for having me.