On March 14, the South Carolina NAACP released numbers on eviction rates in every county in South Carolina.
That’s significant for two reasons.
First, since Eviction Lab published it’s last update in 2022, charting eviction rates in U.S. counties through the end of 2018, there hasn’t been a comprehensive statewide look at eviction rates in South Carolina.
Second, it’s significant because publishing data charting evictions in the state since the outset of the Covid pandemic took a federal court case to get done.
The update
Eviction Lab first went live in 2018, with data measuring eviction rates from 2000 to 2016. Broken out from the interactive map were lists of the most eviction-prone large, mid-sized, and rural/small cities in the U.S.
South Carolina had:
· The most eviction-prone large city in the U.S. with North Charleston;
· The most eviction-prone mid-sized city in the U.S. with St. Andrews;
· 47 of the 100 most eviction-prone rural/small cities in the U.S.
This made South Carolina, without even a near competitor, the state with the highest eviction potential in the country.
When Eviction Lab updated those numbers in 2022, to account for eviction rates in 2017 and 2018, not much improved in the state. Counties like Berkeley and Dorchester, for example, saw their rates improve in those two years, but their rates remained among the highest in the U.S.
Those 2018 numbers were the last comprehensive statewide look at eviction filings anyone published, and even though the numbers were solid, they relied on tedious compiling of available court records that could only show a snapshot of what things used to look like a couple years earlier.
The case
While Eviction Lab was updating its data in 2022, South Carolina NAACP and ACLU South Carolina were in court. The agencies had sued for the right to automatically collect newly published court records – a process known as scraping – from the Public Index, the state’s repository of court filings. The agencies wanted to compile and publish current eviction numbers; their argument being that barring them from getting such data violated First Amendment rights and unfairly kept the agencies from giving information that could benefit those facing eviction court.
A federal judge agreed with the agencies, setting in motion the mechanism by which South Carolina NAACP could begin building the first major database to update the state’s eviction numbers with only weeks of lag time, as opposed to years.
The database
The findings of the database show that more than a dozen counties had eviction rates amounting to at least one filing per every 20 renter households. Dillon County fared worst of all 46 counties in the state, with 31 evictions for every 100 renter households – almost one in every three.
Dillion County has also had the highest poverty rate – also 31 percent – of all South Carolina counties, according to the database. Dillon’s poverty rate was followed closely by those of Barnwell and Marlboro counties, which posted poverty rates of 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Their eviction rates, however, were each around 12 percent.
That last fact belies that there is no rural/urban divide in the likelihood of eviction in South Carolina. Richland County, for example, is home to Columbia and is one of the most urban counties in the state. It contributed the most overall filings between 2020 and January, 2024 – 50,086 – and had the fifth-highest eviction rate over that time. The four counties with higher rates than Richland were Dillon, Cherokee, Marion, and Dorchester – all rural counties with high poverty rates.
Meanwhile, York County, home to Rock Hill, and Greenville County had the lowest poverty rates in the state – 9 percent and 11 percent, respectively – but had eviction filing rates just shy of one in five.
The state’s lowest eviction rate was in McCormick County, one of the state’s most rural, at 5 percent.
In total, South Carolina landlords filed 377,019 evictions between March, 2020, and January, 2024.
The help
Glynnis Hagens, a Skadden Fellow at NAACP, says that publishing the database is the first step towards getting a larger conversation going about the realities of South Carolina’s eviction crisis.
She also said that the effort to publish is a group one. South Carolina NAACP has several partnering agencies connected to these data, including ACLU South Carolina, Appleseed Legal Justice Center, Pro Bono Charleston, the South Carolina Housing Justice Network, SC Legal Services, and the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. Each, Hagens says, plays a role in pointing tenants who are facing eviction towards help, whether legal services to combat a potential eviction, rental assistance programs, or temporary shelter.
She added that it is more important than ever to have up-to-date and correct information about eviction numbers in the state, because there is the compound problem of already rampant misinformation about eviction and tenant disputes soaked into every corner of the internet and the emergence of AI web searches like ChatGPT, which compile that misinformation into a neatly packaged “answer” to serious questions some might have about their pending evictions.
“Correcting that information is going to be an uphill battle already,” Hagens says. “So if we can give folks true information and some resources [it will help].”
But she acknowledged how tough the effort to cut through AI-driven misinformation will be.
“I think that we're already fighting a battle that has, sadly, begun,” she says.
