GOOD CAUSE DOES NOT (NECESSARILY) EQUAL HOUSING STABILITY: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF HOLDOVER EVICTIONS BY LANDLORD TYPE

Authors

• Victoria M. Esposito
• Cynthia Bott

Abstract

In light of the ongoing housing crisis, several municipalities and states have passed or are considering measures to stem evictions and keep as many people as possible housed. One of the most prominent of these is the requirement that private landlords have good cause to evict their tenants. However, there is little scholarship analyzing how and whether good cause has worked in the settings where it has existed longest: public housing and publicly funded non-profit housing.

Good cause eviction protections are intended to protect tenants from holdover evictions—i.e., evictions due to the end or termination of a lease rather than failure to pay rent. By contrast, scholarship about evictions from publicly funded housing has generally focused on nonpayment evictions, due process problems, and patterns of discrimination. There has been little if any scholarship specifically considering holdover evictions from these settings.

In this Article, we follow in the tradition of empirical research into evictions, particularly in the access to justice setting, by analyzing data about holdover evictions from publicly funded non-profit agency housing in the city of Albany, New York. We compare these figures to holdover evictions carried out by for-profit corporate landlords and situate these data in the larger context of an ongoing housing crisis.

As we will discuss, all publicly funded non-profit agency housing in our dataset is subject to good cause eviction restrictions of various kinds, whereas private landlords were not subject to good cause restrictions at the time our data were collected. We therefore expected that publicly funded agencies would file proportionately fewer holdover evictions—evictions for reasons other than nonpayment of rent—than private corporate landlords. However, these data show that holdovers make up approximately the same proportion of evictions filed by publicly funded agencies as they do of evictions filed by for-profit corporations. This leads us to a number of questions for further research about good cause eviction in general and about holdover evictions from agency housing in particular; we also offer some preliminary legal and social policy suggestions.

Recommended Citation

Victoria M. Esposito and Cynthia Bott, GOOD CAUSE DOES NOT (NECESSARILY) EQUAL HOUSING STABILITY: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF HOLDOVER EVICTIONS BY LANDLORD TYPE, 48 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 19 (2026), https://digitalcommons.wne.edu/lawreview/vol48/iss1/3