Millions of renters face eviction filings each year, even as the emergency protections that temporarily suppressed cases during the pandemic have disappeared. The national numbers put Atlanta’s housing shortage into a sharper frame: the problem is not simply whether cities can build enough homes, but whether renters can remain in the ones they already have.

America’s eviction crisis has largely returned to where it was before the pandemic.

The Eviction Lab at Princeton University says landlords file roughly 3.6 million eviction cases in a typical year, and its national research estimates that 7.6 million individual renters are threatened with eviction annually. Those figures are not evidence that every filing results in a family losing its home, but they show how frequently housing instability enters the court system.