The eviction wave that never came: a regional analysis from Austria

During the first wave of COVID-19, numerous states introduced short-term tenant protection policies. The lifting of these short-term interventions raised fears of an incoming eviction wave. These materialised in some countries but were prevented in others, highlighting the role of longer-term housing policy. In the Austrian case, initial short-term protections were followed by a support programme for households in distress. Against this background, this paper asks: (1) which regional factors drive eviction rates across Austrian court districts, in order to predict (2) how many evictions were deferred during the pandemic due to short-term interventions, thereby indicating how large the expected rebound should be; and (3) whether the follow-up assistance programme, called ‘Housing Umbrella’, is associated with wider gaps between expected and realised evictions after these protections expired. Using a Bayesian Poisson model with Stochastic Search Variable Selection, we identify unemployment, rental share, divorce rates and population density as the most important regional predictors of evictions. Deriving expected eviction counts and comparing them against empirical data, we find a growing gap between expected and realised evictions, indicating both the success of short-term protections and the potential for a wave of evictions after the moratorium expired in 2022. However, realised evictions remained 30% lower than expected and even below pre-pandemic levels. Regressing these regional ‘eviction gaps’ on the support programme’s activities yields the expected negative, i.e., widening, effect. However, very wide credibility intervals render the findings statistically insignificant.