Where Chicago Files Evictions and Who Bears the Filings

Abstract

Every eviction starts as a line in a court docket. A landlord files, names a tenant, states a sum owed, and asks a judge to order the household out. That line is the earliest part of the process that leaves a permanent, countable record, and it is the unit this paper uses. We ask a narrow question. Where in Chicago do those filings pile up, and does the pattern hold? Working from a decade of Cook County eviction records cleaned and geocoded by the Law Center for Better Housing for 2010 through 2019, we describe where residential eviction filings concentrate and how little that geography shifts. The paper is a synthesis of published research set beside our own descriptive reading of one real public dataset. We make no causal claim. Citywide, the mean annual filing rate over the decade was 3.70 per 100 rental units. A small cluster of South and West Side community areas ran roughly two to three times that, led by Riverdale at 9.39 and South Shore at 8.73, against North Side neighborhoods like North Center at 0.64. South Shore was the only community area to sit in the top ten by filing rate in all ten years, and its rate never fell below 8.04 even as citywide filings dropped about a quarter. Ten community areas carried 38 percent of the decade's filings on 25 percent of its rental stock. In completed cases, landlords had a lawyer 80.6 percent of the time and tenants 11.0 percent. Most filings sought under 2,500 dollars. We report these patterns plainly and mark their limits. ^[1][8]

A filing is the smallest unit of an eviction

An eviction has many faces, and most of them are hard to count. A sheriff at the door. A pile of furniture on the curb in January. A family squeezed into a relative's spare room on the other side of the city. It can also be quiet and leave almost no trace, a tenant who reads a notice, does the math, and is gone before any officer arrives. Each of those outcomes depends on what a household did once the legal machinery had already started, which is exactly what makes them slippery to tally. One thing always comes first. Before the lockout, before the moving truck, before the doubling up, a landlord walks into court and opens a case. That filing is the smallest legible unit of an eviction, and it is where this paper begins.

We chose the filing on purpose, and the choice has consequences we want stated up front. A filing is not a judgment. It is not a lockout. A tenant who has been filed against may win the case, may settle it, may move before the hearing, or may stay put for years. Plenty of filings end with nobody leaving at all. So when we count filings, we are counting the moment a household lands in housing court, not the moment it loses its home. That is a narrower thing to measure than "eviction" in the everyday sense, and a more honest one, because it does not ask us to guess what happened after the docket entry.

It is also worth measuring on its own terms, because a filing does damage before any judge rules. Eviction court records are public, and the tenant-screening industry harvests them. A filing can surface on a screening report whether the case was won, lost, dismissed, or settled, and it can trail a renter from one application to the next for years. A prospective landlord running a background check often sees only that a tenant's name once appeared in an eviction case, not the outcome, not the merits, not whether the tenant prevailed. That mark alone can be enough to deny an application. The effect is to narrow the set of buildings a family is allowed into and, often, to push it toward worse housing and less scrupulous landlords, which is one of the mechanisms by which a single court entry compounds into a longer housing penalty. Desmond's work documents how this kind of mark follows a household and shapes where it can next live. ^[2] Being taken to eviction court, in other words, is an event in a household's housing life whether or not the landlord wins the case, and it is an event the public record preserves. Counting filings counts those events. It does not pretend to count the smaller, harder number of households physically removed, which would require a different dataset and a different paper.

The dataset behind this paper is a single public release, and we read it rather than build it. It is the Law Center for Better Housing Chicago Evictions Data, Release 2, the organization's cleaned and geocoded extract of Cook County Circuit Court residential eviction records. It covers filings at addresses inside Chicago from 2010 through 2019, a full decade that closes just before the pandemic. The underlying records are the court's own. The Law Center, a Chicago legal-aid organization that represents tenants, obtained the case-level data, standardized it, attached each case to a geography, and aggregated it to several geographic levels before publishing it. We downloaded the public archive, opened the comma-separated files inside, and aggregated them further. That is the entire method on the data side. We ran no experiment. We interviewed no one. We did not scrape a site, train a model, or estimate a causal effect. Every figure we report from the data is a sum, a share, a rate, or a ranking taken straight from columns the Law Center had already filled in.

The release is not a single spreadsheet but a small set of files. It ships geographic eviction files at the community-area, ward, and census-tract levels, a citywide file, and supporting American Community Survey extracts and crosswalks, along with a methodology document. We work mainly from two of these. The community-area file is the spine of the paper. It carries 770 rows, one for each of the city's 77 community areas in each of the ten years, across a wide set of fields covering filing counts, the filing rate, case types, back-rent bands, legal representation for landlord and tenant, and eviction-order and default outcomes. It has no missing values and no suppressed cells, so every one of the 77 areas is present in every year with a full set of fields. ^[1] The second file we draw on is the citywide file, ten rows, one per year, which gives the baseline against which the neighborhoods are measured. A third file, the census-tract file with 804 tracts across the decade, travels with the paper for readers who want a finer map than we draw here. The community-area level is the right altitude for our question. It is fine enough to separate South Shore from Lincoln Park and coarse enough to chart and to name, which the tract level is not.

Around that descriptive core we set a body of published work. Our numbers describe where filings concentrate in one city over one decade, and that is all they can do. They cannot say why the map looks the way it does, what eviction does to the families inside it, or how Chicago stacks up against other places. For those questions we turn to researchers who studied them directly, and we attach every borrowed claim to its source. The architecture of the paper is a synthesis of that literature joined to our own reading of the Law Center files, with a bright line between the two held visible throughout. When a number is ours, it carries the citation for our analysis. When a claim belongs to someone else's study or to a reporter's account, it carries that source. We do not let the boundary blur.

It helps to picture where these filings go once a landlord decides to bring one. In Cook County, residential eviction cases are heard in the First Municipal District of the Circuit Court, and for most of the period we study the bulk of Chicago's cases ran through the housing call at the Richard J. Daley Center downtown. These are high-volume calls. A single morning can move through dozens of cases, each one a household, many of them resolved in minutes. A tenant who does not appear can lose by default before lunch. A tenant who does appear, usually without a lawyer, faces a landlord who usually has one, in a forum built for speed. We describe the representation imbalance with numbers later in the paper, but the physical setting is worth holding in mind from the start. The filings we count are not abstractions working their way through a leisurely process. They are entries on a fast-moving docket, and the speed is part of why being filed against is consequential even when a tenant ultimately keeps the apartment.

The measure we use most is the filing rate, and it needs a careful definition, because the name invites a misreading. The filing rate here is the count of residential eviction filings per 100 renter-occupied units in a given place and year. It is a filing rate. It is not a judgment rate, and it is not a rate of physical eviction. When we say a community area had a filing rate of 8, we mean that for every 100 rental units there, landlords filed roughly eight eviction cases that year. We do not mean eight households were forced out. The denominator, the count of rental units, comes from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, so the rate weighs filings against the size of the local rental stock rather than against the number of distinct households or people. Across the whole city and the whole decade, the mean annual filing rate was 3.70 per 100 rental units. ^[1] The Law Center's own public portal puts the same fact more plainly. The citywide average works out to about one in 25 renters being filed against in a typical year. ^[8] That framing is worth holding onto. One in 25 is not rare. It is an ordinary hazard of renting in Chicago, common enough that most renters know someone it has reached.

The paper follows the filing through a sequence of questions, and the sequence is spatial before it is anything else. We start with where filings land, ranking the community areas by filing rate and showing that the busiest sit together on the South and West Sides rather than scattered across the map. Then we ask how durable that geography is, walking the decade year by year to see whether the same neighborhoods carry the weight as the citywide total rises and falls. From the map we move inside the courthouse, using the fields the Law Center computes on completed cases to describe who arrives with a lawyer and who does not, and how often a case ends in a default order. We finish on the ledger, reading the dollar amounts behind filings to ask whether the cases crowding the docket chase large debts or small ones. Each step stays descriptive. We are drawing a map and reading what it shows, not accounting for how it came to be.

One word on register before we begin. A filing is a number, and the paper treats it as one, counting the way any careful analyst counts. A filing is also a household, a real address where someone opened the mail and found a court summons, and we try not to lose that even while we aggregate. The two readings do not pull against each other. The map matters precisely because every point on it stands for people, and the people come into focus more sharply, not less, when the pattern around them is drawn plainly. What follows is that map, with its limits marked as carefully as its findings.

What researchers already know about where eviction lands

A map is only as useful as the questions you can set beside it. The Law Center files tell us where filings gather in Chicago and how the pattern moves over a decade. They are silent on what eviction does to the families inside the pattern, on why the burden falls where it does, and on whether Chicago looks like the rest of the country. A substantial literature speaks to all three, and we draw on it for the context our own numbers cannot supply. We lay that work out here, careful not to claim more for it than its authors do and careful not to let its findings bleed into ours.

The most influential account of eviction in recent American social science is Matthew Desmond's. His book Evicted followed tenants and landlords through Milwaukee and made an argument that reset the subject. Eviction is not only a consequence of poverty. It is a cause of it. ^[2] The familiar logic runs one way. People get evicted because they are poor. Desmond's ethnographic case is that the arrow points both ways at once, that losing a home deepens and prolongs poverty by stripping people of their possessions, their jobs, their children's school stability, and their footing in a neighborhood. ^[2] He follows the cascade closely enough to show how it works. A forced move pushes a family into worse and more expensive housing, often in a hurry and from a position of weakness, while a court record makes the next landlord wary. The loss of a stable address ripples into work and school. The book also recorded something about who absorbs eviction and where. It is routine in poor Black urban neighborhoods, and within those neighborhoods women are evicted at strikingly high rates. ^[2] The line that distills the gender pattern is blunt. If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from poor Black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of the women. ^[2] The work won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017, and it shaped how a generation of researchers and reporters came at the topic. It also did something methodological that matters for a paper like ours. It moved eviction from a private misfortune, the kind of thing that happens to individuals one at a time, to a measurable structural pattern with a geography and a demography that can be counted.

Desmond's earlier scholarship laid the foundation for the book and stated the neighborhood and gender pattern in sharper academic terms. In a 2012 study he argued that eviction is a commonplace event in inner-city Black neighborhoods rather than a rare crisis, and that women in those neighborhoods are evicted at significantly higher rates than men. ^[4] The point is not a footnote to his argument. It is the argument's spine. The geography of eviction and its demography are fused, so that to map where eviction concentrates is, in practice, to trace a pattern that falls heavily on Black renters and, within Black communities, on women. That bears directly on how we read our own Chicago map. When we find filings clustered in particular South and West Side community areas, the literature tells us those are, in the main, predominantly Black neighborhoods, and that the weight inside them does not sit evenly on everyone.

Proof that the pattern is national, not a Chicago peculiarity, comes from work that left ethnography behind for the scale of court records. Hepburn, Louis, and Desmond assembled millions of eviction-court records from 2012 through 2016 across 39 states and broke them out by race and gender. ^[3] Across that enormous dataset, Black renters received a disproportionate share of eviction filings and faced the highest filing and judgment rates of any group, and Black and Latina women were filed against most often. ^[3] The disparity was not a rounding error at the edges of the data. It was the central finding, holding across regions and housing markets that otherwise have little in common. They also documented serial filing, the practice of filing again and again against the same address, sometimes month after month against the same tenant, and found it too concentrated by race. ^[3] Serial filing matters for how a filing count should be read. Where landlords use the court as a routine rent-collection tool, filing repeatedly to compel payment rather than to remove a tenant, the filing count climbs without every filing ending in a lockout. That is one of the reasons a filing rate and an eviction rate are different measures, and it is a reason our filing-based map should not be read as a map of households put out on the street. The value of that study for us is its scale and its method. It is built from the same raw material we use, court filing records, but pooled across most of the country, and it reaches a finding about racial disparity that no single city's descriptive map could establish alone. Our Chicago numbers sit inside that national picture, not off to one side of it.

If the question narrows to why one particular family ends up evicted, a single study speaks straight to the role of place. Desmond and Gershenson asked what predicts whether a given household is evicted, weighing individual circumstances, neighborhood conditions, and social networks against one another. ^[5] They found that neighborhood factors, specifically local crime and the local eviction rate, are robust predictors of a family's own eviction even after accounting for whether that family had fallen behind on rent. ^[5] Put plainly, living in a high-eviction neighborhood raises a household's eviction risk beyond what its own missed payments would predict. That is the closest the literature comes to tying the concentration we map to consequences for the people caught inside it, and it does the tying carefully, as a claim about predictors rather than a tidy chain of cause and effect. We cite it for what it says and nothing further, that eviction risk is bound to place, which is one reason a map of concentration earns its keep.

Eviction concentration has also been linked to harms well outside housing. A 2025 study in JAMA Network Open by Statchen and colleagues looked at Chicago at the census-tract level, using Cook County Sheriff eviction data from 2018, and tested how tract eviction rates related to nearby firearm violence. ^[6] Each one-point rise in a tract's eviction rate was associated with roughly 2.66 additional nearby shootings, a relationship the authors read through the idea of collective efficacy, a neighborhood's capacity to act together toward shared ends. ^[6] The logic of that framing is worth spelling out, since it is the bridge between a housing measure and a violence outcome. When households turn over rapidly, neighbors do not stay neighbors long enough to know one another, watch one another's children, or organize against a problem on the block. Eviction churns the residents of a place, and a churned place has thinner social ties to draw on. The study reads its statistical association through that mechanism rather than asserting a direct line from a court filing to a gunshot. We cite this for one narrow purpose. It suggests that neighborhoods carrying heavy eviction burdens tend to carry other burdens too, that eviction concentration does not sit sealed off from the rest of a place's troubles. It is an association the authors report, drawn from a different data source than ours, the Cook County Sheriff's 2018 tract data rather than the Law Center's filing records, and at a finer geographic grain than the community area. We present it that way rather than folding its estimate into our own work.

Closer to home, two local sources confirm that the broad Chicago pattern we describe is not a product of how we sliced the data. When the Law Center released this eviction data, Crain's Chicago Business reported on it and found that eviction rates in predominantly Black Chicago neighborhoods ran roughly double the citywide figure. ^[9] That reporting rested on the same underlying records we use, and its headline, a rough twofold gap between Black neighborhoods and the city as a whole, anticipates the concentration our ranking will show. We treat it as independent corroboration of the geography, not as the origin of our specific numbers, which we compute ourselves. The Cook County Sheriff's Office, which actually carries out court-ordered evictions, gives a second local anchor. In its 2023 annual reporting the office counted nearly 12,000 court-ordered evictions that year and noted, in the report itself, that the impact falls disproportionately on minority communities. ^[7] The Sheriff's count is a different and smaller universe than ours, since it tallies completed court-ordered evictions rather than filings, and it falls in a year outside our window. We point to it for a sense of scale and as a reminder that the disproportion we map is one the responsible county office has named in its own documents.

Set side by side, this literature supplies the why and the elsewhere our data leaves open. From Desmond we take the claim that eviction can drive poverty rather than merely trail behind it, and that it lands heavily on Black renters and on women within Black neighborhoods. From the national court-record work we take the assurance that the racial disparity is not local color but a feature of the American eviction system at large. From the predictor study we take the careful finding that place itself raises a family's risk, above and beyond that family's own arrears. From the Chicago violence study we take the suggestion that eviction churn travels with other harms. None of that is our finding, and we are careful not to dress it up as one. What we add is narrower and, we hope, useful precisely because it is narrow, a careful descriptive geography of eviction filings in one city across one decade, computed from public records and reported with its limits attached. The literature is the surrounding country. Our map is the one county within it that we have walked and measured ourselves.

The map of filings tilts south and west

Line the 77 community areas up and rank them by how often landlords filed against their renters, and the city is anything but flat. Over the decade from 2010 through 2019, the mean annual filing rate across all of Chicago was 3.70 per 100 rental units, and that average sits between two very different cities. ^[1] At one end are community areas where filings barely register against the local rental stock. At the other are neighborhoods where the rate runs two to three times the citywide figure, year in and year out. The high end is not scattered. Almost all of it sits together on the South and West Sides.

The single highest mean filing rate over the decade belongs to Riverdale, the far South Side community area, at 9.39 filings per 100 rental units, which is 2.54 times the citywide mean. ^[1] Just behind it comes South Shore at 8.73, or 2.36 times citywide, the lakefront South Side neighborhood that recurs throughout this paper as the most persistent high-burden area in the city. ^[1] Washington Park follows at 8.47, then Chatham at 7.44, Greater Grand Crossing at 7.15, Auburn Gresham at 7.12, and Austin at 7.08. ^[1] Rounding out the ten highest are South Chicago at 7.05, West Garfield Park at 6.98, and West Pullman at 6.97. ^[1] Across that top ten the filing rate runs from 1.88 to 2.54 times the citywide mean. The busiest neighborhoods for eviction filings ran roughly twice to two and a half times the rate of the city as a whole over the decade. ^[1]

The shape of the distribution tells its own small story before any single neighborhood does. The citywide mean annual filing rate, weighting the city as a whole, was 3.70 per 100 rental units, but the median community area sat lower, at 3.40, and the simple average across the 77 areas was 4.10. ^[1] Those three numbers are close, but the gap between them is informative. That the unweighted average across areas runs above both the citywide mean and the median is the signature of a right-skewed distribution, a long tail of high-rate neighborhoods pulling the area-level average upward while the typical area sits a notch below the city's overall rate. In plainer terms, most community areas are quieter than the citywide figure suggests, and a minority of high-burden areas does the work of lifting the average. That is exactly the pattern a concentration story predicts, and it is visible in the summary statistics before we name a single neighborhood.

Read the names off the list and the map draws itself. Riverdale and West Pullman anchor the far South Side. South Shore, Washington Park, Chatham, Greater Grand Crossing, Auburn Gresham, and South Chicago fill in a broad band across the South Side proper, several of them sharing borders. Austin and West Garfield Park sit on the West Side. Set aside how far south Riverdale lies, and these are not isolated pockets. They form a contiguous geography, a swath of the South and West Sides where the eviction docket stays fullest. The concentration is the finding. Filings gather in particular, neighboring places rather than dispersing across the city, and they do so plainly enough that the ranking and a glance at a Chicago map tell the same story.

The other end of the ranking sharpens the point. The community areas with the lowest mean filing rates are North Center at 0.64 per 100 rental units, Lincoln Park at 0.94, and Lake View at 1.01. ^[1] Just above them sit Lincoln Square at 1.12 and Armour Square at 1.30. ^[1] These are North Side neighborhoods, by and large, and their filing rates run near a fifth of what the busiest South and West Side areas record. North Center's 0.64 is less than a fifteenth of Riverdale's 9.39. A renter in North Center and a renter in Riverdale live in the same city, under the same housing law, in the same court system, and the rate at which their landlords turn to that court differs by more than a factor of fourteen. The gap needs no statistical apparatus to see. It is sitting in the raw ranking.

We want to be careful about what the comparison does and does not establish, because the slide from a gap to an explanation is an easy one. The filing rate is filings divided by rental units, so a high rate could in principle reflect any number of things about a neighborhood, the conditions its renters face, the practices of its landlords, the kinds of buildings and ownership that predominate, the local economy, or some tangle of these we cannot separate with this data. We are not claiming to know which. What the ranking shows is the pattern itself, that filings concentrate in a specific set of adjacent South and West Side community areas and thin out sharply elsewhere. The why belongs to the literature we have already cited and to research we have not done. The where is ours to report, and it is not ambiguous.

That where lines up with what others have found in the same city. The Law Center's public portal, drawing on these records, sets the citywide baseline at a filing rate of roughly 3.7 per 100 rental units, about one in 25 renters in a typical year, which matches the decade mean we compute and gives the anchor against which the high-burden areas stand out. ^[8] Crain's, reporting on the release, found eviction rates in predominantly Black neighborhoods running roughly double the citywide rate, a finding that sits comfortably alongside our ranking, since the South and West Side areas at the top of our list are in the main predominantly Black community areas. ^[9] We did not coordinate our cut of the data with either source. That the broad shape agrees across an independent news analysis, the data steward's own portal, and our ranking is a modest reassurance that the concentration is real and not an artifact of method.

It is worth slowing down on the human texture behind the ranking, because the numbers flatten it. A mean annual filing rate of 8.73 in South Shore over ten years means that, year after year, for every 100 rental units in the neighborhood, something close to nine eviction cases were filed. In a neighborhood with thousands of rental units, that is hundreds of households a year handed a court summons over their housing, and the same blocks carrying that volume across a whole decade. The steadiness is part of the weight. This is not a neighborhood that had one bad year. It is a neighborhood where being filed against was an ordinary feature of renting for ten years running. The contrast with North Center, where the rate stayed below one across the decade, is a contrast between two completely different experiences of what it means to rent in Chicago, separated by a few miles of the same city.

A note on the denominator belongs here, since it governs how the rate should be read, and we will come back to it. The rental-unit count under each rate comes from the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau's rolling estimate of housing and population. ^[1] So the filing rate weighs filings against the estimated size of a neighborhood's rental stock, not against the number of distinct households or the number of people. A neighborhood with more rental units will, all else equal, absorb more filings before its rate climbs, and a neighborhood losing rental housing could see its rate rise even with flat filing counts. We flag this not because it undercuts the ranking, which holds regardless of the general shape of the rental stock, but because precision about the measure is part of reporting it honestly. The rate is filings per 100 rental units, and the concentration it reveals is a concentration relative to where rental housing sits.

What the map does not do is explain itself, and we will not pretend otherwise. We can see that the South and West Sides carry the heaviest filing rates and the North Side lakefront the lightest. We can see that the high-burden areas cluster. We can corroborate the broad pattern against independent reporting and the data steward's portal. What we cannot do with this dataset is say why Riverdale's rate is fourteen times North Center's, or pin the gap on any single cause. The ranking is a description of where the filings landed over a decade. It is a starting point for the questions the literature has taken up, not an answer to them.

The names on the high-burden list are worth dwelling on, because they are not arbitrary to anyone who knows the city's housing history, and that history is the backdrop our numbers sit against. We offer it as context, not as a new finding and not as a cause we have measured. South Shore, Washington Park, Greater Grand Crossing, Chatham, and Auburn Gresham trace the southern reach of the corridor that mid-century Chicago called the Black Belt, the narrow band on the South Side where restrictive covenants and the color line confined Black residents for decades, holding them in place while denying them the mortgages that built equity elsewhere. Austin and West Garfield Park, the West Side names on our list, sit in the part of the city where contract selling did its quiet damage in the 1950s and 1960s, the arrangement that sold homes to Black families on terms that built no equity and let a single missed payment erase years. The federal government's own redlining maps, drawn in 1940, graded much of this same South and West Side geography as hazardous and steered lenders away from it. None of that is in the Law Center files, and we measured none of it. We raise it because a reader looking at a list topped by South Shore and Washington Park should know that these are neighborhoods with a long, documented history of being denied ordinary access to housing credit and stable ownership, and that the rental-heavy, disinvested housing markets such histories leave behind are the markets in which eviction filings now concentrate. The connection is one the broader literature has drawn. Our contribution is only to show, with current public records, that the eviction docket still tilts toward the same ground.

With the geography in hand, the next question is whether the map merely reflects where renters live, or whether the South and West Side areas carry more filings than even their share of the city's rental housing would lead us to expect.

More filings than the housing stock would predict

A filing rate already accounts for the size of the rental stock. It divides filings by rental units, after all. But a rate can hide a question of scale. To see whether the high-burden neighborhoods carry a genuinely outsized share of the city's eviction activity, it helps to step away from rates and compare two shares head to head, each area's share of all citywide filings against its share of all citywide rental units. If filings were spread in proportion to where rental housing sits, those two shares would track each other, and every neighborhood would carry filings roughly in line with its slice of the rental market. They do not track. A handful of South and West Side areas carry far more of the city's filings than their share of its rental housing would imply.

The arithmetic starts from two totals. Across all 77 community areas over 2010 through 2019, Chicago saw 225,710 residential eviction filings. ^[1] Summed across the same areas, the rental stock came to 626,862 renter-occupied units in the American Community Survey 2014 to 2018 estimate. ^[1] Against those denominators we can compute, for any area, what fraction of citywide filings it absorbed and what fraction of citywide rental units it held. The ratio of those two fractions is a concentration ratio. A value above 1.0 means an area carried more of the city's filings than its share of rental housing would predict. A value below 1.0 means it carried less.

The headline is the ten highest-volume areas combined. Those ten community areas absorbed 38.0 percent of all 225,710 citywide filings over the decade while holding just 25.0 percent of the city's rental units, a concentration ratio of 1.52. ^[1] In plain terms, a quarter of the city's rental housing carried well over a third of its eviction filings. The disproportion is not dramatic at this aggregate level, but it is real and it runs one way. The neighborhoods where the most filings happen are not simply the neighborhoods where the most renters live. They carry a heavier load than their housing stock would lead anyone to expect.

The individual areas inside that group show the pattern more sharply. South Shore alone held 8.06 percent of all citywide filings while holding only 3.22 percent of the city's rental units, a concentration ratio of 2.51. ^[1] That is the highest among the high-volume areas, and it means South Shore carried filings at roughly two and a half times the rate its share of rental housing would predict. Austin is the next-largest contributor by volume, with 6.70 percent of citywide filings on 3.30 percent of rental units, a ratio of 2.03. ^[1] Chatham carried 3.23 percent of filings on 1.50 percent of units, a ratio of 2.16, and Greater Grand Crossing carried 3.00 percent of filings on 1.51 percent of units, a ratio of 1.99. ^[1] Auburn Gresham sits at 3.26 percent of filings against 1.68 percent of units, a ratio of 1.93. ^[1] These are the same neighborhoods that topped the rate ranking, surfacing now a second way, as areas pulling a share of the city's total eviction activity well out of proportion to their share of its rental homes.

The clearest way to confirm that this is genuine over-concentration, and not just a restatement of where renters happen to be, is to find a neighborhood thick with rental housing whose filing share does not keep pace. Near North Side is that case. It held 5.54 percent of the city's rental units, more than any of the high-burden South and West Side areas, yet absorbed only 2.98 percent of citywide filings, a concentration ratio of 0.54. ^[1] Near North Side is one of the most rental-heavy parts of Chicago. If filings simply followed renters, it would sit near the top of the volume ranking. Instead it carries barely half the filings its rental stock would predict. The contrast with South Shore is the whole argument in two lines. Two neighborhoods, both full of renters, one carrying filings at two and a half times its housing share and the other at barely half. The difference is not in how many people rent. It is in how often, per unit of rental housing, those renters get taken to eviction court.

Other rental-heavy North Side areas tell a similar story at the edges of the top-volume list. Rogers Park lands among the larger contributors by raw volume, with 2.90 percent of citywide filings, but it held 3.22 percent of rental units, a ratio of 0.90, just under the line where filings outpace housing stock. ^[1] A neighborhood can climb a volume list simply by being large and full of renters, without carrying a disproportionate filing burden. Rogers Park does exactly that. South Shore, by contrast, lands high on the volume list and carries a ratio of 2.51, which is a different and heavier fact. Telling the two apart, the merely populous from the genuinely over-concentrated, is what the share comparison is built to do, and it confirms that the South and West Side concentration is not an illusion produced by population.

The over-concentration is not confined to the very top of the list, either. Several South and West Side areas a step down in volume show the same imbalance. Chicago Lawn carried 2.70 percent of citywide filings on 1.65 percent of rental units, a ratio of 1.63. ^[1] North Lawndale, the West Side area at the center of the contract-selling history, carried 2.52 percent of filings on 1.47 percent of units, a ratio of 1.72. ^[1] Humboldt Park carried 2.64 percent of filings on 1.86 percent of units, a ratio of 1.42. ^[1] None of these is as extreme as South Shore's 2.51, but each sits well above the even line of 1.0, and each is on the South or West Side. The areas that fall below the line, by contrast, are the rental-heavy North Side and central neighborhoods. Near North Side at 0.54 and Rogers Park at 0.90 are the clearest cases, places thick with rental housing that nonetheless carry fewer filings than their stock would predict. The two groups sort cleanly by geography. The areas pulling more than their share of filings sit south and west, and the areas pulling less sit north and central.

We owe a clear statement of this section's main limit, and we want it inline rather than buried, because it bears directly on how much weight the ratios can hold. The rental-unit denominator in every one of these comparisons is a single snapshot, the American Community Survey 2014 to 2018 estimate, applied uniformly across the decade. ^[1] The filing counts span ten years, 2010 through 2019, but the rental-stock figures they are weighed against come from one five-year window near the middle and end of that span. We use one snapshot because the share-of-filings analysis needs a single, consistent denominator to be coherent, and the 2014 to 2018 estimate is the ACS window that best overlaps the filing period. The cost of that choice is that the rental stock does not move year to year in our calculation, even though in reality it surely did. A neighborhood that gained or lost rental units over the decade is measured against a fixed estimate of its housing. The concentration shares are therefore an approximation, accurate as to direction and rough magnitude, not a precise year-by-year accounting. ^[1] We state the ratios as what they are, a careful but approximate comparison, and we would warn any reader against treating a figure like 2.51 as exact to the second decimal.

With that caveat in view, the finding keeps its shape. By rate, the South and West Side cluster runs two to three times the citywide figure. By share, the same neighborhoods carry filings well beyond what their rental stock would predict, South Shore at a concentration ratio of 2.51 and the top-volume ten together at 1.52, while a rental-heavy North Side area like Near North Side carries barely half its predicted share at 0.54. ^[1] Two different cuts of the same records point at the same set of neighborhoods. The eviction docket is not a mirror of where Chicago's renters live. It tilts, and it tilts toward the South and West Sides, by more than the distribution of rental housing alone would lead anyone to expect.

The totals fell but the map barely moved

Volume and geography moved on different clocks across the decade. Citywide residential filings fell from 24,390 in 2010 to 18,220 in 2019, a drop of 25.3 percent, and the citywide filing rate eased from 4.12 to 2.89 per 100 rental units over the same span. ^[1] The decline was no single cliff. It was a slow glide off a peak. The annual counts trace the arc cleanly. Filings rose from 24,390 in 2010 to 25,334 in 2011 and 26,389 in 2012, the high point of the decade, then turned downward, to 25,201 in 2013, 24,507 in 2014, and 23,356 in 2015. ^[1] The steeper fall came after that, to 20,439 in 2016, 19,529 in 2017, 18,345 in 2018, and 18,220 in 2019. ^[1] The rate followed the same path, climbing to 4.39 per 100 rental units in 2012 before slipping to 3.31 in 2016 and into the high-2 range by the close of the decade. ^[1] Whatever drove the decline, it was gradual and citywide, the kind of broad easing a reader watching only the totals might reasonably read as eviction pressure lifting across Chicago.

The map tells a quieter, more stubborn story underneath that decline. As the citywide rate dropped by roughly a quarter, the highest-burden neighborhoods did not follow it down. South Shore stayed inside the 8.04 to 9.76 band in every single year from 2010 through 2019, its floor holding above 8 even in the year the city as a whole bottomed out near 2.9. ^[1] The community area opened the decade at 8.12, climbed to 9.76 in 2013, and finished at 8.72 in 2019, a year when the citywide rate was 2.89. ^[1] That 2019 pairing puts South Shore at 3.02 times the citywide rate, a gap wider at the end of the decade than the 2.36 ratio its decade-long mean carries against the decade-long citywide mean. ^[1] The city eased. South Shore did not.

The persistence is not a one-neighborhood quirk, and it is worth being precise about how we measure it. For each of the ten years we ranked all 77 community areas by filing rate and noted which sat in the top ten that year, then asked how stable that top-ten membership was across the decade. The answer cuts two ways, and both ways tell the same story. On the one hand, only one community area, South Shore, held a top-ten position in all ten years. ^[1] On the other, just 25 distinct areas ever reached the top ten at any point across the decade, out of 77. ^[1] Hold those two numbers together. A top ten that reshuffled at random year to year would, over a decade, pass through far more than 25 of the city's 77 areas, and no single area would be likely to appear all ten times. Neither happened. Instead a compact set of South and West Side neighborhoods cycled through the top of the ranking, the same names returning, with South Shore anchored at or near the top every single year. The band of high-burden neighborhoods is small, it is stable, and it is geographically of a piece. That is the difference between a city where eviction pressure roams and a city where it settles. Chicago, on these records, is the second kind.

Reading the lead areas one at a time shows where the floors sit. Englewood ran from a low of 5.42 to a high of 8.27 over the decade, with a mean of 6.72 per 100 rental units. ^[1] West Englewood moved between 5.57 and 7.79, mean 6.50. ^[1] Auburn Gresham ranged from 6.07 to 8.44, mean 7.12. ^[1] These are not areas that spiked once and subsided. Their lowest years still landed above the citywide rate in every year of the series, and in most years they ran close to or above double it. Englewood's weakest year, 5.42 in 2019, still nearly doubled the 2.89 the city posted that same year. ^[1] When the citywide tide went out, these neighborhoods stayed near high water.

What changed and what held are worth separating cleanly, because the two are easy to run together. The count of filings fell across Chicago, and it fell in the high-burden areas too in absolute terms, since fewer filings citywide leaves fewer everywhere. The relative position of the South and West Side cluster is what barely moved. A neighborhood can watch its raw filings decline while its rate holds at two or three times the city's, because the rate is measured against its own rental stock and the citywide comparison is a ratio of rates. South Shore in 2019 carried fewer filings than South Shore in 2013, yet its distance from the rest of the city was, if anything, a touch greater at the close. ^[1] The burden did not so much shrink as stay put while the backdrop receded.

This distinction between absolute decline and relative persistence is the heart of the section, so it is worth being concrete about why it matters. A city report that announced a 25 percent drop in eviction filings over a decade would not be wrong, and it would sound like progress. ^[1] Read against the geography, the same drop looks different. The decline did not close the gap between the South and West Side cluster and the rest of the city. It left that gap roughly where it was, and at South Shore it widened the gap slightly, since the citywide rate fell while South Shore's held. ^[1] An improvement in the total that leaves the worst-off neighborhoods exactly as far behind as before is a particular kind of improvement, the kind that lifts the floor for the city as a whole without reaching the places that needed it most. The totals moved. The distribution did not. Anyone reading the citywide trend as a sign that Chicago's eviction problem was concentrated in the past, rather than in particular present-day neighborhoods, would be reading it wrong.

The 2019 snapshot makes the endpoint concrete. South Shore stood at 8.72 per 100 rental units against a citywide 2.89, a ratio of 3.02. ^[1] Behind it that year sat a familiar set of South and West Side areas, Chatham at 7.61, Washington Park at 7.55, Avalon Park at 7.40, West Garfield Park at 7.24, Greater Grand Crossing at 6.89, West Pullman at 6.83, and South Chicago at 6.52, each running between roughly two and three times the citywide figure and each on the South or West Side. ^[1] The names rotate slightly from the decade-long ranking, but the geography does not drift north or to the lakefront. It stays anchored in the same band of neighborhoods that led at the start of the decade.

These figures stop at 2019 by construction, and the limit matters. The Law Center for Better Housing release covers 2010 through 2019 only, so the series ends before the COVID-era eviction moratorium and before whatever rebound followed it. ^[1] Nothing in this dataset speaks to the pandemic years or to the present. Pointing past the window is something we do cautiously, and only through others' reporting, never our own data.

That said, later court-clerk reporting describes a geography that looks much like the one in our window. Block Club Chicago, drawing on Cook County court-clerk data covering more than 40,000 eviction filings since 2022, found that the South Shore ZIP code led every year, that the top-ten ZIPs sat in neighborhoods such as Woodlawn, Bronzeville, Austin, North Lawndale, and Little Village on the South and West Sides, and that majority-white Wicker Park recorded just 99 filings over the period. ^[10] The unit there is the ZIP code and the years fall outside our dataset, so we draw no equivalence and make no claim that our numbers run forward. We note only that the descriptive pattern others report after 2019 rhymes with the one our 2010 through 2019 records show, with South Shore again at the front. The decade we can measure ended with the map close to where it began, and the reporting that comes after sits comfortably alongside that observation without our needing to overreach.

Inside the courtroom, an uneven contest

A filing is a beginning, and what it becomes turns partly on who stands on each side of the case. The completed-case fields in the release let us look past the map to the courtroom, with one boundary stated plainly at the outset. Representation, eviction-order, and default fields are computed on completed cases only, meaning unsealed cases with clear results, per the Law Center for Better Housing field definitions, so the shares below describe completed cases rather than every filing. ^[1] The filing rate carries sealed and unclear cases. These courtroom measures do not. We keep that line visible because it governs every number in this section.

Pool the completed cases across 2010 through 2019, and the imbalance in counsel is impossible to miss. Landlords were represented by an attorney in 80.6 percent of completed cases. Tenants were represented in 11.0 percent, which leaves 89.0 percent of tenants appearing pro se, without a lawyer. ^[1] Four in five property owners walked into housing court with counsel. Nine in ten tenants walked in alone. Default eviction orders, entered when a tenant does not appear or respond, were recorded in 14.5 percent of completed cases citywide. ^[1]

The neighborhood differential exists but is modest, and it points the way the rest of the paper would lead a reader to expect. Tenant representation in the ten highest-rate areas averaged 9.9 percent of completed cases, against 12.5 percent across the other 67 areas. ^[1] Default judgments ran at 14.8 percent in those top-ten-rate areas versus 13.6 percent elsewhere. ^[1] The high-burden neighborhoods, in other words, paired their elevated filing rates with somewhat thinner tenant representation and somewhat higher default rates, though the spread between the two groups is narrow on both measures. We report this as descriptive association and nothing more. These are pooled neighborhood rates, not a causal estimate of what representation does to outcomes, and we make no claim that the gap in counsel explains the gap in defaults. ^[1]

Looking inside the top-ten-rate set shows real variation around those averages. Landlord representation ran from 56.1 percent in West Pullman up to 97.6 percent in Riverdale, where nearly every completed case had a landlord with counsel. ^[1] Between those poles the gradient is steady. South Shore stood at 89.4 percent, Washington Park and Chatham each at 84.3 percent, Greater Grand Crossing at 77.9 percent, Auburn Gresham at 76.0 percent, Austin at 72.9 percent, South Chicago at 67.8 percent, and West Garfield Park at 66.0 percent. ^[1] Tenant representation across the same ten areas stayed in a tight, low band, from 8.9 percent in Riverdale and South Shore to 11.7 percent in West Pullman. ^[1] Default rates within the group moved between 12.1 percent in Riverdale and 16.3 percent in South Shore. ^[1] The two sides of the docket behave differently. The landlord side varies a good deal from neighborhood to neighborhood, swinging more than forty points across these ten areas. The tenant side barely lifts off the floor, every one of the ten areas falling between 8.9 and 11.7 percent. Whatever else differs across these neighborhoods, the near-absence of tenant counsel is close to constant.

The gap reads as a structural feature of housing court rather than a story about any one case. When one party appears with a lawyer four times out of five and the other appears alone nine times out of ten, the contest is uneven before any fact about the underlying tenancy gets weighed. National court-record work frames the same imbalance at scale, finding across millions of 2012 through 2016 cases in 39 states that the eviction process bears down unequally and that Black renters absorb a disproportionate share of filings and judgments. ^[3] Our completed-case figures sit inside that national picture as one city's descriptive detail. A tenant in a high-filing South or West Side neighborhood is both more likely to face a filing and, on these numbers, slightly less likely to face it with counsel of their own. ^[1] We describe that pairing. We do not assign it a cause.

One more caveat belongs here rather than only in the closing section, because it bounds everything above. The representation and default shares cover completed cases, so any filing that was sealed or never resolved to a clear outcome falls outside these counts. ^[1] The courtroom we are describing is the courtroom of cases that reached a clear end, a real and large slice of the docket but not the whole of it. Read with that boundary in mind, the picture is of a forum in which the party seeking eviction almost always arrives represented and the household facing it almost always does not.

Small sums, large consequences

It would be easy to assume a filing marks a large unpaid debt, the kind of arrears that piles up over many months. The back-rent fields in the release complicate that assumption, and they carry the same completed-cases boundary as the courtroom measures, since the back-rent bands are computed on completed cases and the median excludes zero-dollar cases by construction. ^[1] Among the 202,132 completed cases citywide with a back-rent band recorded across 2010 through 2019, the amounts sought cluster low. ^[1]

The distribution is concrete. Of those completed cases, 17.9 percent sought zero dollars in back rent, 14.1 percent sought 1 to 999 dollars, and 36.3 percent sought 1,000 to 2,499 dollars. ^[1] Above that, 21.3 percent sought 2,500 to 4,999 dollars and 10.4 percent sought 5,000 dollars or more. ^[1] Stack the lower bands and 68.4 percent of completed cases sought under 2,500 dollars, with 32.0 percent under 1,000 dollars. ^[1] Roughly two-thirds of these filings rested on arrears below 2,500 dollars, and nearly a third on arrears below a thousand.

The zero-dollar share deserves a careful word. That 17.9 percent of completed cases recorded no back rent does not mean those cases had no basis. A filing can rest on grounds other than money owed, and the band simply records that no back-rent figure attached. ^[1] We read it as what it is, a count of completed cases with no back-rent amount recorded, and nothing more. It sits in the distribution alongside the dollar bands without our inferring a reason for it.

The yearly median fills in the trend behind the pooled bands. Citywide median back rent sought, which excludes the zero-dollar cases by construction, ranged from 1,850 dollars in 2013 to 2,390 dollars in 2019. ^[1] It opened the decade at 1,957 dollars in 2010, dipped to 1,872 in 2012 and 1,850 in 2013, held in the high 1,800s through 2015, then climbed in the later years, to 2,027 in 2016, 2,180 in 2017, 2,230 in 2018, and 2,390 in 2019. ^[1] Even at its decade high, the typical amount sought in a completed case with back rent recorded stayed under 2,400 dollars. ^[1] The median rose, but it rose inside a range that keeps the central case modest.

The direction of that drift is worth noticing alongside the filing trend, though we read it cautiously. Filings fell across the decade while the median back rent sought climbed, from under 1,900 dollars in the early years to nearly 2,400 by 2019. ^[1] We do not have the data to say why the two moved in opposite directions, and we will not guess at a single cause. We note only the descriptive shape. As the volume of filings came down, the typical dollar figure behind a completed case edged up, consistent with a docket that grew somewhat less likely to carry the very smallest claims even as small claims remained the bulk of it. That reading is a description of the numbers, not an explanation of them, and rising rents over the same years are an obvious confound we cannot separate out with this dataset. We flag the co-movement and leave the cause to work we have not done.

Set against the literature, the size of these sums is sobering rather than reassuring. Desmond's work establishes eviction as a cause of poverty and not merely a symptom of it, and documents how commonplace eviction is in poor Black urban neighborhoods. ^[2][4] A body of arrears that reads as small on a court docket can be the exact amount that tips a low-income household out of stable housing, and the displacement that follows can deepen the very hardship that produced the missed payment. We do not claim our numbers prove that sequence. The literature describes the mechanism, and our figures describe the amounts. ^[2][4] What the back-rent distribution shows, plainly, is that the filings concentrated on the South and West Sides are not, for the most part, chasing extraordinary debts. They rest on sums many households elsewhere in the city would cover without a court ever hearing of it.

The completed-cases boundary holds here as everywhere. These bands and medians describe completed cases with a back-rent figure recorded, not the full universe of filings, and the median sets aside zero-dollar cases by its own construction. ^[1] With that fixed in view, the finding is a quiet one. Most of the filings we can examine rest on relatively small amounts of money, and small amounts, in the neighborhoods where filings pile up, are not small in their consequences.

What this map can and cannot say

A descriptive map earns its keep by being honest about its edges. The source here is the Law Center for Better Housing Chicago Evictions Data, Release 2, published December 17, 2020, downloaded directly as a public archive with no login and shipped with this paper as unmodified LCBH files. ^[1] Coverage is residential eviction filings in the Cook County Circuit Court for addresses inside Chicago, 2010 through 2019, and nothing outside that. ^[1] The decade ends in 2019, which places the entire series before the COVID-era eviction moratorium and the rebound that followed in the 2020s. ^[1] Any reader wanting the pandemic years or the present will not find them here. The community-area file we lean on is complete, 770 rows for 77 areas across 10 years, with zero missing values and no suppressed cells. ^[1]

Two field universes run through this paper, and conflating them would distort every comparison. The filings total and the filing rate include sealed and unclear cases, so they speak to the full volume of filings. ^[1] Every other field, namely legal representation, eviction orders, default judgments, and back-rent bands, is computed on completed cases only, meaning unsealed cases with clear results, per the LCBH field definitions. ^[1] When we say a neighborhood's filing rate was 8.72, that draws on the full-volume universe. When we say tenants were represented in 11.0 percent of cases, that draws on completed cases. ^[1] We have flagged the completed-cases boundary at every point it applies rather than only here, because the two universes are not interchangeable and a number from one should never be read as a number from the other.

The rate denominator carries its own limit. The filing rate is filings per 100 renter-occupied units, with the rental count drawn from American Community Survey five-year estimates. ^[1] For the share-of-rental-units analysis, we used the 2014 to 2018 ACS estimate as a single housing-stock snapshot, the recent period overlapping the filing window, which means those concentration shares do not vary year to year and are an approximation rather than a year-matched figure. ^[1] A neighborhood whose rental stock grew or shrank across the decade is measured against one fixed denominator. The concentration ratios hold as a broad description of over-concentration. They are not precise annual accounting. The back-rent median, separately, excludes zero-dollar cases by its own construction, as noted where we used it. ^[1]

Some things we chose not to chart, and the reasons are worth stating. The release ships a census-tract file covering 804 tracts across the decade, 8,040 rows in all, and that file travels with this paper for anyone who wants to extend the map. ^[1] We did not render it as a chart because 804 tracts cannot be shown legibly in eight or fewer categories, and a tract map forced into a categorical chart would mislead more than it informed. ^[1] A per-area default-judgment contrast was the other omission. We folded it into the citywide representation finding because the neighborhood differential is modest, 14.8 percent in the top-ten-rate areas against 13.6 percent elsewhere, while the dominant and honest signal is the citywide gap between landlord representation at 80.6 percent and tenant representation at 11.0 percent. ^[1] Charting a narrow spread as if it were the headline would have inverted the real weight of the evidence.

The firmest boundary is the one we have held throughout. Every cross-neighborhood difference in this paper, in filing rates, in representation, in defaults, in back rent, is reported as descriptive association and not as cause. ^[1] We did not run an experiment, build a model, or estimate any effect. We read public files and aggregated them. The map shows where filings concentrate and how that concentration persists. It does not explain why, and we have declined to dress description as explanation at any point.

It is worth saying plainly why a descriptive map is worth drawing even so, because the limits above could be read as a confession of weakness rather than a statement of scope. Description is the layer beneath explanation, and the explanatory literature we cite was built on descriptive groundwork of exactly this kind. Before anyone could ask why eviction concentrates, someone had to establish that it concentrates, and where, and how stably. A clean, reproducible account of the geography is a public good in its own right. It tells a tenant organizer which neighborhoods to staff, a legal-aid program where the unmet need for representation is thickest, and a researcher which tracts to study closely. It also checks the explanatory work, since any causal story about Chicago eviction has to be consistent with the map of where filings actually land. We are content for this paper to do the descriptive job carefully and to leave the causal questions to designs that can carry them.

A few specific misreadings are worth heading off, since a map invites them. The concentration we show does not mean that renters in low-rate neighborhoods are safe, only that filings are less frequent there relative to the rental stock. It does not mean that a high filing rate equals a high rate of families put out, since filings and lockouts are different measures and serial filing can lift the former without the latter. It does not mean that the neighborhoods at the top of our ranking are the worst places to live, a judgment the data cannot support and we do not make. And it does not establish that any feature of these neighborhoods, their landlords, their housing stock, their economies, causes the concentration, because separating those possibilities is precisely the causal task we have not undertaken. The map is a description of a pattern. Read as that, it is solid. Read as more, it overruns its evidence.

A last distinction guards against a common confusion. A filing rate is not a rate of physical evictions. A filing is a court record that opens a case, and many filings do not end with a household put out. Readers who want a judgment-level or lockout-level view should turn to a different, smaller universe, the Cook County Sheriff's annual reporting on court-ordered evictions, which counts orders carried out rather than cases filed and which itself analyzes the disproportionate impact of those evictions on minority communities. ^[7] That count answers a different question than ours. We measure filings, the smallest and earliest unit of the process, and we keep our claims to what filings can support.

A decade of filings, read from the ground up

The honest version of this paper's thesis fits in a few plain sentences. Eviction filings in Chicago were not spread evenly across the city between 2010 and 2019. A small set of South and West Side community areas, led by South Shore, carried filing burdens roughly two to three times the city average year after year. ^[1] That geography held while citywide volume fell about 25 percent, the totals receding as the map stayed put. ^[1] We report this as a descriptive reading of one real public dataset, set beside a literature that supplies the context our own numbers cannot.

The pieces assemble into a single spatial story. Across the 77 community areas, the highest mean annual filing rates clustered on the South and West Sides, led by Riverdale at 9.39 and South Shore at 8.73 per 100 rental units against a citywide mean of 3.70. ^[1] The same handful of areas carried filings far above their share of the rental stock, the ten highest-volume areas holding 38.0 percent of all 225,710 decade filings on 25.0 percent of the city's rental units. ^[1] The burden persisted as totals fell, South Shore the only area in the top ten by rate in all ten years and the only one never to dip below 8.04. ^[1] Inside the courtroom, landlords held counsel in 80.6 percent of completed cases and tenants in 11.0 percent, and most filings rested on arrears under 2,500 dollars. ^[1] Where filings land, how the geography persists, what a filing becomes once a case opens, each reading points to the same compact set of neighborhoods.

The literature this map sits beside gives the patterns their weight without our borrowing its causal claims. Desmond's work establishes eviction as a driver of poverty rather than only a consequence of it, concentrated in poor Black urban neighborhoods. ^[2] National court-record analysis across millions of cases finds Black renters absorbing a disproportionate share of filings and judgments, with Black and Latina women filed against most. ^[3] A 2025 Chicago study ties higher tract eviction rates to more nearby firearm violence, linking the concentration of eviction to other neighborhood harms. ^[6] Our contribution is narrower and entirely descriptive, the careful geography of where one city's filings concentrated over one decade and how stubbornly that concentration held. ^[1]

The patterns appear to outlast our window, though we say so only through others' work. Later court-clerk reporting on more than 40,000 Cook County filings since 2022 describes the same South and West Side concentration, with South Shore again leading and majority-white areas far lower. ^[10] That reporting uses different units and covers years our dataset does not reach, so we claim no continuity of our own, only that the shape others find after 2019 resembles the shape we find before it. ^[10]

There is a use for a map like this beyond confirming what the literature already suspected. A descriptive geography, computed transparently from public records, is the kind of thing that can be argued with, extended, and acted on. A reader who doubts the concentration can download the same files and recompute the ranking. A program deciding where to place tenant lawyers, faced with a representation rate near 11 percent citywide and lower still in the highest-burden areas, has a defensible list of neighborhoods to start from. ^[1] A researcher with a causal design can take the stable, named set of high-filing areas as the place to look closely, knowing the pattern is not a single year's noise. The point of staying strictly descriptive is not modesty for its own sake. It is that a clean description is reusable in a way an overreaching causal claim is not. We would rather hand the next person a map they can trust than a story they have to take on faith.

A filing is a single line in a court docket, a tenant's name and a sum owed. It is also a data point we can count and a household we cannot see from the spreadsheet. Read from the ground up, the decade of filings shows a city where the lines piled up in the same neighborhoods year after year, on debts that were often modest, against tenants who almost always stood in court without a lawyer. ^[1] We have tried to report that plainly and to mark its limits with equal care. The reproducible files travel with this paper, including the tract-level data we did not chart, so that others can take the map further than we have. ^[1]