Rents Are Down in Austin. So Why Are Evictions Still Climbing?

The story going around about Austin these days is one of YIMBY vindication.

The city has exploded in population over the last few decades, growing from fewer than 500,000 people in 1990 to nearly a million in 2022, briefly breaking into the list of the 10 biggest cities in the U.S. The metro area population has doubled as well, to more than 2 million people. During a boom in tech jobs in the 2010s, the average cost of rent almost doubled. The city then went on a building spree, spurred on by some local regulatory changes and investments in affordable housing construction, and rents dropped.

According to a recent Pew study, Austin’s median rent fell from an average of $1,546 a month at the end of 2021 to $1,296 at the beginning of 2026. The median rent in large apartment buildings, which account for nearly half the new units in the city between 2015 and 2024, fell by 7 percent in 2024.

For pro-housing advocates, who have long argued that reducing regulations and adding lots of new housing will result in lower rental costs, the Austin experience has been a proof of concept. But another recent statistic illustrates the breadth of the city’s rental market, with many tenants still struggling to afford housing costs despite falling median rents. According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, Austin landlords filed 30 percent more eviction notices last year than the post-pandemic average. That was the biggest spike in the rate of filings of any of the 38 cities in the group’s Eviction Tracking System. And it occurred in a year when landlords around the country filed fewer evictions overall than the year before.

There’s no clean explanation for why eviction filings spiked last year in a city where rents have dropped below the national median. But given the vulnerability of tenants with the lowest incomes, it isn’t exactly a surprise, says Aabiya Baqai, the research and policy director for Building and Strengthening Tenant Action (BASTA), a tenant organizing group affiliated with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.

“It’s one of those low-tolerance things,” Baqai says. “One thing happens — a lot of people will have one issue in their family, a death, and they all of a sudden can’t pay their rent on time.”

BASTA is working on its own analysis of Austin’s eviction filings from last year, but its report on the previous year’s filings already showed a clear upward trend. During the COVID-19 pandemic, evictions were paused around the country under federal, state and local emergency measures. The federal government also invested in an Emergency Rental Assistance program in 2021 that helped vulnerable tenants stay in their homes. Eviction filings have steadily climbed back to pre-pandemic rates in the years since, and in Austin they’ve surpassed the previous peak in 2019.

The BASTA report also shows that evictions were clustered in certain apartment buildings, some with eviction rates as high as 38 percent. That’s in keeping with national trends. Tax-exempt properties, which provide reduced-rate housing for people who make less than the area median income, often supported by Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, also had higher eviction rates than the area average. And eviction rates were higher toward the outskirts of Travis County, farther from Austin itself.

Despite the spike, Austin’s overall eviction rate is not high compared with other cities in the Eviction Lab’s Eviction Tracking System. Austin area landlords filed 14,558 evictions over the last year, up from about 13,000 in 2024. By comparison, Atlanta, the city with the highest eviction rate at 25 percent, had more than 143,000 eviction filings over the last year.

Places with lower eviction rates tend to have more tenant-friendly regulations in place, says Grace Hartley, a researcher at the Eviction Lab. An eviction diversion program in Philadelphia, which requires landlords to negotiate with tenants before moving ahead with an eviction, has been hailed as a model for the country. But there’s no single policy that’s associated with low eviction rates. And the overall cost of living is not a good indicator of eviction rates either, Hartley says.

“Rent is not the only story,” Hartley says. “We do have numbers on some of the most expensive places to live, and the [eviction] rate is pretty low in New York, even though rent is super expensive.”

In Austin, the building boom has helped ease rents, especially for older “Class C” apartment buildings that are not luxury new construction. But even the tax-exempt affordable housing that gets built in the city, often targeted at 50 or 60 percent of area median income, isn’t always attainable for people with the lowest incomes. Baqai says BASTA is working to change the culture of evictions, pushing landlords to negotiate with tenants who are behind on rent and noting that most judgment amounts in eviction cases are fairly small. A Texas law adopted last year makes it easier for landlords to file evictions in some cases.

Meanwhile, pro-housing groups are pushing the city to update its zoning code and reduce barriers to housing construction even further. The drop in median rent has been gratifying, says Parker Welch, board secretary for the Austin-based urbanist advocacy group AURA. For the first time ever, Welch says his own rent didn’t go up at all last year. There are other encouraging signs for housing stability, like a drop in the number of people who became homeless last year versus prior years, Welch says.

Still the spike in evictions is “concerning,” he says. And the drop in rents could be a temporary function of the construction cycle, which is why Welch says the city needs to keep working to promote more housing construction — for example, by making it easier to subdivide lots for multifamily development.

“I am worried about rents coming back up, because there’s been a drop in construction, though not as steep as the rest of the country,” Welch says. “The interest rate environment, tariffs, the awful things that are happening to migrant workers who are often in the construction sector — these are all headwinds that we can’t control here. … There’s no guarantee that the rent won’t start rising again.”