How eviction lawyers could help fight preterm births

Interesting report from STAT News

In 2017, New York City began rolling out a program that guaranteed lawyers to low-income tenants in certain ZIP codes. Evictions were reduced by half, and a study published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics found the program was also associated with a 0.96% reduction in preterm births and infants born at low weights. That may sound minor but it’s statistically significant and translates to 600 fewer adverse birth outcomes each year.

Researchers used city vital records to analyze more than 260,000 Medicaid-insured births in the city between 2016 and 2020. More than 43,000 of those occurred in ZIP codes where eviction lawyers were available over the program’s staggered implementation. Over four years, adverse birth outcomes continued to increase in the neighborhoods where tenants weren’t offered lawyers, while rates leveled off in areas where they were.

“It’s the same populations that are getting evicted that are at highest risk of poor birth outcomes to begin with,” researcher Gracie Himmelstein told me in 2021 after authoring a study on the association between eviction and poor birth outcomes. Neither study proves causation, but the evidence suggests a right-to-counsel program could have real public health benefits, the recent study authors write. Some form of tenant right-to-counsel now exists in 17 cities, two counties and five states.