Enriching Court Data to Identify Households in Consumer Debt and Eviction Lawsuits

Jeff Reichman • April 02, 2025

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In 2023, there were over 141,000 debt claim and eviction lawsuits filed in Harris County, Texas. These staggering numbers underscore a growing crisis in consumer debt and housing instability, but they only tell part of the story.

Courts typically treat each case as a separate matter, rather than tracking a person or their household members across multiple cases. Subsequent research on eviction and debt cases also follows this structure and takes this case-centered approach, rather than a person-centered or household-centered approach.

This paper details an experiment to assemble a household-centered approach to analysis in Harris County, Texas. We looked at a sample of 773 cases marked as Debt Claim or Eviction in Harris County, Texas, and found that 1-in-3 defendants had a household member with a Debt Claim or Eviction case filed against them. These household members accounted for an additional 443 cases attributable to the household.

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