This is an incredibly important article with alarming conclusions for evictions and associated data in South Carolina. It is open access, so unlike most academic work, there's no paywall.

And yes, that's @just_shelter of "Evicted" and @evictionlab fame on the byline.

Thread: 1/ https://twitter.com/HousPolDebate/status/1288156973989605376

On the data quality of SC eviction records:

"The state with the highest overall inaccuracy rate is South Carolina, where 46.57% of eviction records contain inaccuracies."

9,769 cases between 2011 and 2015 did not have a final adjudication on record. 2/

SC has a lot of serial evictions, where there are multiple cases for the same tenant at the same home.

"In South Carolina, where 43% of cases are serial cases ... Removing ambiguous and false evictions from the records lowers the eviction rate to 11.5%, a reduction of 46%." 3/

11.5% is still a lot!

This opaqueness causes problems for SC tenants:

"In states like Alabama, which has a relatively low duplicate and serial rate, tenants have a much lower risk of accruing a false eviction record compared with those living in a state like South Carolina." 4/

These facts would all be alarming in normal times.

With a pandemic and recession causing hundreds of thousands of renters to be at risk of eviction, this is quite simply an emergency not just for those households, but for the communities statewide in which they live. 5/5