Eviction rates reveal a lot about the stress a community is under financially, but they only help if the numbers are accurate. Anyone trying to locate the Idaho Policy Institute formal eviction rate 2020 Shoshone County statistic should be given a clear answer as to what is actually sourced and what is simply regurgitated across the web with no clear citation. Here’s what the research says, and where it gets confusing.
Who the Idaho Policy Institute Is
Boise State University’s School of Public Service houses The Idaho Policy Institute (IPI). It’s a bipartisan think tank that collaborates with state agencies, nonprofits and community groups on data projects throughout the state. Tracking evictions was among its regular features beginning in 2019, when the state of Idaho did not have a dependable statewide sense of how frequently formal evictions were taking place.
IPI obtains the full eviction case records from the Idaho Supreme Court each year, for all 44 counties in Idaho. That’s a meaningful detail: this isn’t survey data, or an estimate calculated from a sample. It is derived directly from court filings, making it one of the more reliable sources on the topic.
Filing vs. Formal Eviction: Why the Difference Matters
Much of the confusion many people have around eviction stats comes from treating “filing” and “eviction” as synonymous. They are not.
An eviction filing is as soon as a landlord initiates legal proceedings against a tenant. A legal eviction only occurs if a judge orders the tenant to move out. Lots of filings never get that far: tenants bring rent current, negotiate a payment plan or simply move out voluntarily before they ever make it to court.
IPI reports the two figures separately, and doing so presents a clearer look than just looking at raw filing counts. The formal eviction rate is the number of renting households that were legally forced to move out by court order, rather than just faced with the prospect.
What the Verified 2020 Statewide Numbers Show
IPI has released its second annual eviction report for the 2020 calendar year, and the state-level results are well-documented and publicly available from the university.
Idaho had a daily average of nearly 3.1 evictions for the year. Of Texas’ 189,292 renting homes, 1,893 (roughly 1 percent) had an eviction filing. Of these, 1,127 homes – which is just 0.6 percent of all renters in the state – were actually evicted. To the extent that 59.5% of all households with a filing eventually gets a formal eviction order.
Both filings and formal evictions are down some 30 percent statewide from 2019. That decline reflected what was occurring nationally: court closures early in the pandemic, a federal eviction moratorium, expanded unemployment benefits, and emergency rental assistance programs all contributed to the slowing down of the process, even if they didn’t alleviate the underlying financial strain that renters were under.
The Pandemic Left a Clear Fingerprint on the Timeline
The monthly IPI breakdown indicates filings reached a low point in April 2020, when Idaho courts closed due to the pandemic. Once courts resumed in May, filings and formal evictions spiked, indicating a backlog of cases that had been stalled and not resolved.
Where Shoshone County Fits In
Shoshone County is in the northern panhandle of Idaho, in the Silver Valley, an area that was historically rooted in mining. It is a small, rural county, and the rental market is nowhere near as large as the Ada or Canyon County rental markets, which make up a large portion of the total eviction activity in the state (because that’s where most of Idaho’s renters live).
Rural counties tend to operate differently than urban counties. While the number of filings is typically much lower, simply because there are fewer rental units to begin with, rural renters often face issues that don’t always translate neatly into court data: lack of legal resources, fewer local rental assistance programs, and older housing stock that can make landlord-tenant disputes more difficult.
Housing instability researchers generally warn that formal eviction rates, while helpful, are likely an undercount of the true picture in rural areas. A tenant leaving silently after an informal conversation with a landlord is never recorded in court, but it is still a displacement.
About That Specific Shoshone County Figure
If you’ve researched this topic before, you may have come across a particular online assertion: that the rate of formal evictions in Shoshone County in 2020 was 1.10 percent, with 18 formal evictions out of approximately 1,642 renting households, or nearly double the state average.
That statistic is appearing in a handful of general interest web sites and it is virtually word for word from one site to the next. None of them link to an actual IPI report or screenshot of a dashboard or dataset that would allow a reader to independently verify it. Until “that number” is sourced to a primary source, it’s best to characterize it as unverified rather than reiterating it as a matter of fact.
IPI does have an interactive county-level eviction dashboard powered by Tableau and hosted through Boise State s official site, where you can search formal eviction information for all 44 counties in Idaho, Shoshone included. That dashboard, not a secondhand blog post, is the place to find a confirmed county number.
Why This Kind of Verification Actually Matters
It’s an easy trap: a reputable research organization releases solid statewide data, and then a number appears online, attributed to the organization but with no one checking whether the number actually came from their work. From there, the number gets copied from site to site, taking on a borrowed authority it doesn’t deserve.
For journalists, landlords, tenants, and local housing advocates, the distinction isn’t merely academic. The future of rental assistance programs, tenant outreach efforts, or local policies shouldn’t be determined by a statistic that no one can verify.
What Renters in Rural Idaho Can Actually Do
Regardless of what the actual Shoshone County number turns out to be, a few practical numbers are still good no matter the county.
- Talk to your landlord early if you’re behind on rent; filings are far more likely once communication breaks down.
- Look into emergency rental assistance before a court filing happens, not after; it’s typically more effective as a preventive step.
- Reach out to a legal aid organization serving Idaho renters, even in rural areas where in-person help can be harder to find.
- Keep a written record of payments, agreements, and any communication with your landlord.
Bottom Line
The Idaho Policy Institute’s statewide 2020 eviction research is solid, based on Idaho Supreme Court records, and shows a clear pandemic related drop in both filings and actual evictions compared to the previous year. Rural counties such as Shoshone almost certainly saw their own version of this housing pressure, but the one number you can find for the county online right now is not rooted in any sources that can be verified. For an accurate number, people should refer to IPI’s own county dashboard instead of relying on a number that has been passed around with no citation.
