What's at stake?
With rent costs increasing and wages stagnating, more and more renters are facing evictions across the country.
In Fresno County, what gains were made with reduced eviction rates during the pandemic have been mostly wiped out, according to records from the state superior court and county sheriff's office. It's a trend seen most everywhere else in the country.
Dozens of people like Dawnielle Carter wake up bright and early every Tuesday with their heads hanging low, waiting for final judgement.
The hallways of Fresno’s M Street courthouse are a daily gridlock of rushed and harried drivers scrambling to pay off traffic tickets and parking fines. But once a week, down the hall, past the tangled knot of disgruntled drivers, dozens of county residents wait, tired and frightened, to fight to stay in their homes and off the streets.
Carter, 47, has been here before.
This particular Tuesday marks the third time in about 10 years that she’s facing homelessness. She’s learned through experience that there’s not much suspense for what’s about to happen next.
“I told my daughter that this feels like déjà vu,” Carter said. “We’re doing this all over again.”
She knows that today is the day she loses her home.
Carter’s story is starting to become tragically common.
Fresnoland requested and analyzed tens of thousands of eviction records in Fresno County between 2018 and 2025 from the state superior court and county sheriff’s office. The records show that the number of evictions in the county have surged back to pre-pandemic levels.
Eviction rates across the country plummeted to all-time lows during the pandemic as the government scrambled to pass tenant protection policies. But the COVID-era of renter protections has been over for years now, and evictions have returned and even surpassed pre-pandemic levels virtually nationwide.
Many locals facing eviction declined to speak on the record with Fresnoland about their experience, citing a fear of retaliation from their current or future landlords.
The trends in Fresno mirror those seen across the state and country, according to experts like Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University — the only collector of nationwide eviction data in the country.
“So we’re pretty much back to normal, which is not good news,” Garnham said, “because the normal in the U.S. is pretty high.”
But the size and scope of the eviction problem isn’t clearly understood even by the people studying the issue the most. Available eviction records tend to only capture the tip of the iceberg for local housing instability.
Experts who spoke with Fresnoland say the data suggests Fresno’s true number of evictions may be exponentially higher than the available numbers.
After looking at the data, Tim Thomas, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley, and the director of the school’s Eviction Research Center, said Fresno County’s true number of local evictions in 2025 alone “could be anywhere from five-, ten-, twenty-thousand people.”
“It’s unclear, but it’s definitely not close to 2,000,” Thomas said, referring to the number of evictions reported last year. “That number is way smaller than anything else.”
Through publicly available annual reports from the state’s judicial council, Fresnoland was able to record some data for court filings for evictions in Fresno County.
The court and sheriff’s data show a similar trend, but there are some issues that make it hard to draw a direct comparison.
The court’s eviction records do not distinguish between residential and commercial properties, though most of the data is likely for homes, Thomas said.
Also, the judicial council’s report is collected by fiscal year, whereas sheriff’s data was provided by calendar year.
Still, Thomas said eviction numbers are worth analyzing because they’ve often been seen as a way of understanding the affordability crisis.
“More and more people are falling behind because wages are not meeting rent, so it’s really a classic story on poverty,” Thomas said. “But what’s problematic is more and more people are kind of falling into that pot, into that population.”
Fresno continues to boast one of the hotter rental housing markets in the US, after decades of being considered the “cheap” part of California. In 2026, rents are up 2.6%, according to Apartment List, a rate that’s been consistent with preceding years, and remains higher than the national average.
Informal ‘evictions’ are common
There are cases — like Carter’s in Fresno — of people who lose their homes, over and over without ever actually entering the eviction “system.”
Carter has been booted from her home three times. In all those instances, she said her evictions were mostly due to changes in property management, which were often followed by rent hikes. She said her evictions have been largely brought on by circumstances she could not control.
The time it took for her to get her eviction notice and appear in court took less than a week. Through mediation with her landlord’s attorney, Carter agreed to move out by the end of June. She did not show up to court with a lawyer, and she didn’t want to risk going through the court process only to lose the case.
“I mean, who wants an eviction on their record? … Because you’re not going to have an easy time getting in anywhere else once you have one of those,” Carter said.
She said she tried to first get legal representation through Fresno’s Eviction Protection Program, a city service that offers legal counsel to tenants facing illegal evictions. She said the EPP referred her to Central California Legal Services, the largest Central Valley-based law organization offering legal assistance to tenants. But she was referred too late.
“I feel like I didn’t have a chance to get help from either of the programs because of how rushed the process was,” Carter said. “I don’t feel like I got a fair shake.”
Another tenant, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity over fear of retaliation, had their case dismissed after they moved out before their court date. The tenant is a local artist who packed their life up into their car and was planning to live temporarily at a motel on Fresno’s Motel Drive.
“All I got from defending my rights was harassment and retaliation,” they said.
That tenant left their home following an eviction notice. Their eviction will likely not appear on any official record either since their case was dismissed.
Such cases don’t get recorded as official evictions, but people lose their homes anyway.
“But I mean, for me and you, probably that person is evicted, right?” Garnham said.
More evictions due to failure to pay rent, says attorney
Steve Hrdlicka is a local attorney for property owners and property managers throughout the Central Valley. Before landlords can evict their tenants, they must go through the legal process to get permission from the courts to remove the resident. They typically go to people like Hrdlicka to get it done.
“I kind of came by it naturally,” Hrdlicka said of his job. “My grandfather was a landlord. My father was a landlord. I’m a landlord. My son’s a landlord. So that’s kind of in our DNA. And I grew up, you know, kind of in that environment.”
Hrdlicka said that, in his experience, evictions before the pandemic usually stemmed from “behavioral issues” — things like loud parties or consistent calls to law enforcement.
“Now,” Hrdlicka said, “I would say there are certainly more evictions done for failure to pay rent.”
Renters tend to have between $300 and $1,800 in their savings, according to a 2026 study by Harvard University on the state of rental housing.
Carter, a Bay Area native, moved to Fresno in 2009 as a single mother seeking cheaper Central Valley rent. She said when she first moved to Fresno, she paid $535 a month for a two-bedroom apartment with a garage. Her most recent landlord charged her $1,010, a rental payment she was getting partially subsidized through Medi-Cal.
Carter works as a county in-house supportive services specialist, and drives for Instacart part time.
“A lot of Americans are one crisis away from an eviction,” Garnham said, “and I think that’s what matters for people to understand, that this could happen to them, this could happen to their neighbor, this could happen to many of us.”
Hrdlicka also noted that he felt some of the eviction cases he saw stem from a lack of personal responsibility.
“I’ll never forget, I had a young lady in court. I asked her (why she had failed to pay rent), and she said, ‘Oh, well, the fair was in town.’
“I’m not proud of it, but I got in her face a little bit, and I said, ‘OK, let me get this straight. It was more important to take your kids to the fair and get a little pink bunny after they threw darts at balloons than it was to pay the rent?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’
“I realized that the vast majority of people are just making bad life decisions.”
Can solutions to evictions be implemented on time to help?
Garnham said he doesn’t think there is “a silver bullet” to solving evictions.
He and Thomas said that the dip between 2020 and 2022 was largely due to the unprecedented amount of resources thrown to tenant protection programs during the pandemic.
“We had both the (eviction) moratorium, but also because we had a once-in-a-lifetime effort toward rental assistance at a national level,” Garnham said.
Thomas said he believes a four-pronged approach that mixes both proactive and reactive solutions could help solve the problem.
“All of these things are kind of necessary for trying to understand the structural components that help not only prevent evictions,” Thomas said, “but also eventually help people stay away from getting evicted.”
Some jurisdictions have managed to keep evictions at or below pre-pandemic levels.
Cities like New York tend to be exceptions because of their higher access to resources or their unique housing laws, some of which were present before the pandemic.
New York City provides tenants with a right to counsel, meaning all tenants get to go into eviction court with an attorney by their side, a rarity for eviction cases.
In 2021, Washington became the first state in the country to provide tenants with a right to counsel in eviction cases, a policy a local law project report says has brought success.
Also in 2021, a coalition of Fresno residents advocated for the city to introduce their own right to counsel program for tenants facing eviction during the pandemic.
The city ultimately introduced the Eviction Protection Program — a plan that has the city attorney’s office offer legal counsel to tenants, but only those facing unlawful evictions.
The EPP is popular. It is the only pandemic-era tenant protection program that the city continues to run. The program also received $1.8 million in the city’s recently passed budget without any need to fight for the funds, something it’s had to do in the past.
Thomas said he believes the right to counsel should become standard nationwide.
Garnham also highlighted some local policies that have brought benefits to local communities, like how a Minnesota school district hired an eviction specialist to keep track and oversee trends in evictions for the district’s students. The specialist has successfully helped families stay in their homes.
There are ultimately many levers to pull to try and help solve the issue, but many of them take time to install.
Meaning there’s no help coming for people like Carter.
After a prior eviction in 2018, Carter was homeless for a year. Her youngest daughter, Daelynn, was about 8 or 9 years old at the time. As a way to protect her from the experience, Carter sent her daughter to live with relatives in Phoenix.
“It was just supposed to be for the summer, and she was unaware of me being evicted,” said Carter. Daelynn spent about a year in Arizona before moving back.
“She was shocked,” Carter said. “She would ask when she’d be able to come back home and why we didn’t have a house anymore. It was hard on her, too.
“I mean, the year went fast, but it was long. It was definitely long.”
In that year, Carter slept in her car and couch surfed with friends and family from Fresno and the Bay Area.
Now, she said it feels like her past is chasing her again. She moved from the Bay Area to the Central Valley to live comfortably in a region with a historically low cost of living. Now, that place has priced her out, too.
She’s considering uprooting her life again, but she doesn’t know where that next new affordable place might be.
Daelynn, who is about to start her senior year of high school, will be visiting family in San Jose while her mother figures out what to do next. As it stands, Carter will likely spend at least a brief period homeless.
“I really don’t want her to be worrying,” Carter said. “But I mean, for the most part, I don’t know what my next move is going to be.”
Thomas said ongoing federal funding cuts by the Trump Administration to social safety nets risk exacerbating housing insecurity issues for renters like Carter, and that they could lead to disastrous results.
“I wouldn’t be surprised that the State of California implements its own eviction moratorium in the next year or two,” Thomas said, “just based on how many more evictions are about to come, because of what’s going on at the federal level.
“I pray that I’m wrong,” Thomas continued, “but I’m afraid that we’re about to see the worst crisis in our history. We thought the pandemic was bad. Imagine the pandemic without eviction moratorium, without renter assistance, without right to counsel, and without 50 states trying to pass some of the most aggressive tenant protections in its lifetime.”
The true number of evictions could be exponentially larger, experts say
The federal government does not collect eviction data, and many states across the country don’t either. That responsibility is largely relegated to local courts, each with their own policies and procedures that can make reviewing records a wholly painful process that could turn out inaccurate data.
“Any kind of number won’t really tell the whole picture,” Garnham said. “And what you, what researchers do, what anyone interested in this topic is trying to do, is to try to find some way of getting a window into this problem.”
The eviction process generates three key documents — a notice to evict delivered by a landlord to the tenant, an eviction filing, more commonly known as an unlawful detainer, and a writ of possession delivered by the court to the landlord pending successful litigation.
Writs are usually given to the sheriff’s office to have a deputy physically lock a tenant out of their home. The sheriff’s office is the only agency legally allowed to carry out this process.
Without a standard agency to provide a uniform method to collect this data, the process to get these records can vary wildly.
Fresnoland requested from the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office records for lockouts carried out by deputies between 2018 and 2025. The records cost about $91.84, but they became available in about two weeks.
However, because lockouts are only initiated after a writ of possession has been issued, these records only capture the smallest available dataset for people who have entered the eviction process.
Fresnoland also requested from the Fresno County Superior Court records for “Writs Of Possession and Unlawful Detainers” for residential evictions between 2018 and 2025.
The records released by the court incorrectly claimed there were months where few-to-no evictions occurred in the county, claims that were refuted to Fresnoland by local eviction attorneys whose caseloads said otherwise.
When asked why the records differ so greatly, the superior court essentially shrugged, saying in part, “the data provided was what it retrieved based on the parameters you provided. It is the only report available. I hope this helps.”
Without a uniform reporting process, the true scope of the problem can only be guessed at.
The City of Oakland requires landlords to submit a copy of an eviction notice to the city to start their eviction process, but they are an exception to the rule.
These documents also only capture data on legal evictions. Illegal evictions are a different situation entirely.
