When most people think of the 2020 housing crisis, they picture big cities like New York, Los Angeles, or maybe Boise. They imagine crowded courtrooms, overwhelmed legal aid offices, and tenants fighting to stay in apartments they can no longer afford after losing jobs during the pandemic. But some of the most telling stories about housing instability that year came from places most Americans have never heard of. In these small communities, losing even a handful of homes can shake the entire foundation of local life.
I remember the first time I saw the numbers from the Idaho Policy Institute. It was one of those late-night research dives that starts with a simple question and ends three hours later with twenty browser tabs open and a growing sense that something important was being overlooked. The data point that stopped me cold was this: Shoshone County, Idaho, a rural community of roughly 13,500 people tucked into the northern panhandle, had a formal eviction rate of 1.10% in 2020. That might sound like a small number, barely worth a headline. But here is the context that makes it matter: the statewide average for Idaho that same year was just 0.6%. Shoshone County was nearly double the state average in a year when eviction moratoriums, emergency rental assistance, and court closures were supposed to be keeping people in their homes.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand what these numbers actually represent and what they leave out. You also need to understand the particular fragility of rural housing markets, where the loss of eighteen households does not just mean eighteen families looking for new apartments. It means eighteen families potentially leaving the community entirely, eighteen children changing schools, eighteen units of strain on social services that were already stretched thin. This is the story of how a small Idaho county became a case study in why housing policy designed for cities often fails to reach the people who need it most.
What the Numbers Actually Tell Us
Let us start with the basics, because the terminology around eviction can get confusing fast. When the Idaho Policy Institute talks about a formal eviction rate, it refers to a specific metric. A formal eviction is not a warning letter from your landlord. It is not a tense conversation in a kitchen about late rent. It is a court order, signed by a judge, legally compelling a tenant to leave their home. These are the cases that went all the way through the legal system and ended with a family being forcibly removed by the law.
The Idaho Policy Institute, which operates out of Boise State University’s School of Public Service, tracks these numbers by pulling data directly from the Idaho Supreme Court records. They are not estimating. They are not surveying. They are counting actual court cases. In 2020, they found that across all of Idaho, about 1,127 households received formal eviction orders out of roughly 189,292 renting households statewide. That gave the state an average of 0.6%. In Shoshone County specifically, with only about 1,642 renting households total, eighteen of them received those formal orders. Do the math, and you get that 1.10% rate.
Here is why the distinction between formal evictions and eviction filings matters. A filing happens when a landlord starts the legal process. It is serious, but it does not always end with someone losing their home. Sometimes the tenant pays the back rent. Sometimes they work out a payment plan. Sometimes they move out before the hearing, and the case gets dismissed. The Idaho Policy Institute data shows that in Shoshone County in 2020, there were 31 eviction filings but only 18 formal evictions. That means about fifty-eight percent of filed cases ended with a court-ordered removal. The rest were resolved somehow, through negotiation, payment, or voluntary move-out.
But here is the crucial thing to remember. Every single one of those eighteen formal evictions represents a family that went through the entire legal process and still lost their home. In a county as small as Shoshone, that is roughly one in every ninety renting households. To put that in perspective, if you applied that same rate to a major city like Boise, you would be talking about thousands of families. The impact is concentrated, magnified by the community’s small scale.
The Economic Reality of Rural Idaho
To understand why Shoshone County struggled more than the rest of Idaho in 2020, you need to understand what kind of place it is. Shoshone County sits in what locals call the Silver Valley, a region built on mining. For decades, the Bunker Hill Mine and Smelter provided good-paying jobs to thousands of workers. Wallace and Kellogg, the county’s main towns, were prosperous communities with bustling downtowns and stable neighborhoods.
Then the 1980s happened. The mine closed. The smelter shut down. Hundreds of well-paying jobs disappeared practically overnight, and they never really came back. I have talked to older residents who remember those years, who watched friends and neighbors pack up and leave because there was nothing left to keep them there. The ones who stayed had to adapt. They found work in seasonal tourism, in small retail businesses, and in service jobs that paid less and offered less security. Some commuted to larger employment centers, burning gas and time they could barely afford.
By 2020, Shoshone County’s economy was a patchwork of these survival strategies. People worked in ski resorts during winter, in restaurants during the tourist season, and in whatever jobs they could piece together. The problem with this kind of employment is that it leaves no margin for error. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the shutdowns were devastating. Ski resorts closed mid-season. Restaurants went to takeout-only or shut down completely. Small businesses that were already operating on thin margins suddenly had no income at all.
In a bigger city, a laid-off worker might have more options. They might find another job quickly, or at least have access to a larger network of support services. In Shoshone County, the safety net has holes. Fewer nonprofit organizations are operating locally. Legal aid services are harder to access, often requiring travel to larger towns. There are no formal mediation programs to help landlords and tenants negotiate before things reach court. When a tenant falls behind on rent, the path from missed payments to formal eviction is shorter and steeper than in urban areas.
The housing stock itself adds to the problem. Much of the rental housing in Shoshone County is older, built decades ago for mining families and never really updated. Maintenance can be spotty. But because there are so few alternatives, tenants often feel they have no choice but to accept conditions they might challenge in a market with more options. When they do fall behind on rent, landlords, many of whom are also operating on thin margins with limited cash reserves, may not have the flexibility to wait for payment. They file for eviction because they need the income to cover their own mortgages and expenses.
When the Safety Net Has Holes
2020 was supposed to be different. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the federal government implemented unprecedented protections for renters. The CDC issued a nationwide eviction moratorium. Congress allocated billions of dollars for emergency rental assistance. Courts in many areas slowed their operations or moved to remote hearings, creating delays that gave tenants more time to find solutions.
Statewide, these measures worked, at least to some degree. Across Idaho, eviction filings and formal evictions dropped by about 30% compared to 2019. The 2020 formal eviction rate of 0.6% was lower than most pre-pandemic years. If you just looked at the statewide numbers, you might conclude that the system had successfully protected vulnerable renters during an economic crisis.
But averages hide disparities. In Shoshone County, the formal eviction rate was still 1.10%, nearly double that statewide average. The protections that helped renters in Boise and Meridian did not reach Shoshone County as effectively, and there are several reasons why.
First, information travels slowly in rural areas. The CDC moratorium required tenants to know about it and to take specific steps to claim protection, including signing a declaration form and giving it to their landlord. In a county with limited broadband access and no widely circulated local newspaper, many tenants simply did not know these protections existed. They did not know they had rights or options.
Second, applying for emergency rental assistance required resources that struggling families often lack. The applications needed internet access to complete. They required documentation like pay stubs, lease agreements, and proof of hardship. For families dealing with job loss, illness, and the general chaos of the pandemic, gathering this paperwork was a significant barrier. In urban areas, community organizations often helped tenants navigate these applications. In Shoshone County, those organizations were fewer and farther between.
Third, the court system itself played a role. While many courts slowed down in early 2020, they eventually reopened and began processing backlogged cases. In Shoshone County, the relatively small number of cases meant shorter delays. Once filings resumed, cases moved through the system quickly. Without mediation programs or robust legal aid to slow the process and find alternatives, filings turned into formal evictions at a higher rate than in counties with more intervention resources.
I think about this often when people talk about policy solutions. It is easy to assume that if a program exists, the people who need it will find it. But the reality is that access is not automatic. It requires infrastructure, communication, and trust. In rural counties like Shoshone, that infrastructure was not there in 2020, and vulnerable families fell through the gaps.
The Iceberg Beneath the Surface
Here is something that keeps me up at night when I look at housing data: the formal eviction rate is just the tip of the iceberg. It only counts the cases that made it all the way through the court system. It does not count the families who got a three-day notice and moved out before the landlord filed. It does not count tenants who were pressured to leave through informal means, such as having their utilities shut off or being illegally locked out. It does not count the families who doubled up with relatives, crowding into already full homes because they had nowhere else to go.
Housing advocates call this “informal displacement,” and it is largely invisible in official statistics. In rural areas, it may actually be more common than a formal eviction. When I talk to people who work in social services in northern Idaho, they tell me stories that never show up in court records. They talk about families who left in the middle of the night to avoid the shame of a public eviction. They talk about elderly tenants who moved in with adult children because they could not navigate the rental assistance application process. They talk about workers who simply left the county entirely, deciding that Shoshone County had nothing left to offer them.
The eighteen formal evictions in Shoshone County in 2020 represent a floor, not a ceiling. The true number of families who lost stable housing that year was almost certainly higher, possibly much higher. We just do not have good ways to count them. This is why I get frustrated when people dismiss rural housing issues because the numbers look small. The numbers we have are incomplete, and they still tell a story of significant distress.
Why Scale Changes Everything
One of the most common mistakes people make when comparing eviction rates is treating all counties as if they are the same. They look at Shoshone County’s 1.10% and Ada County’s 0.40% and think the difference is just a matter of degree. But scale changes everything about how eviction affects a community.
Ada County, which includes Boise, has tens of thousands of renting households. If they lose a hundred families to formal eviction, those families can often find other housing within the same metro area. There are more apartments, more landlords, more options. The social services infrastructure is larger and more diverse. Schools are larger and better able to accommodate transient students. The impact is spread across a larger population.
In Shoshone County, losing eighteen households is a shock to the system. There are not hundreds of vacant apartments waiting for new tenants. The rental market is tight and getting tighter. When a family is evicted, they may not be able to find another place to live in the county. They may have to leave entirely, taking their children out of local schools, their spending out of local businesses, and their presence out of community organizations. The impact is concentrated and lasting.
I have heard local officials describe it as “death by a thousand cuts, but each cut is deeper.” Every eviction represents not just a housing loss but a potential community loss. In a place that has already lost so much population since the mining days, every family that leaves makes it harder for the remaining community to sustain itself.
What We Should Learn From This
It has been six years since that difficult year, and I think we are still learning the wrong lessons from 2020. We look back at the pandemic and remember the big interventions, the billions in rental assistance, the nationwide moratoriums. We congratulate ourselves on preventing the wave of mass evictions that many feared. And to some degree, that pride is justified. Things could have been much worse.
But when we focus only on statewide averages, we miss the places where things were worse. We miss counties like Shoshone, where the protections did not reach, where the infrastructure was not there, where families fell through the cracks. We miss the reality that rural America experienced the housing crisis differently from urban America, and that our policy responses were often designed with cities in mind.
If we are serious about housing stability for all Americans, not just those in population centers, we need to design policies that work for rural communities too. That means funding legal aid services that can reach remote areas, either through mobile clinics or robust remote services. It means creating mediation programs at the county level, not just in big cities. It means simplifying rental assistance applications so they do not require high-speed internet or hours of paperwork. It means building housing stock in small communities, not just in growing metros.
The Idaho Policy Institute continues to track eviction data year by year, and I hope policymakers are paying attention. The 2020 data from Shoshone County was a warning sign. It showed us that even in a year of unprecedented tenant protections, rural renters remained vulnerable. As we move further away from the pandemic and those temporary protections expire, the underlying conditions that created that vulnerability remain. The question is whether we will do anything about them.
Conclusion
The story of Shoshone County’s 1.10% formal eviction rate in 2020 is not just a statistic. It is a window into the particular fragility of rural housing markets and the uneven reach of our social safety nets. Behind that percentage were eighteen families who lost their homes through court order, and likely many more who lost housing through informal means we will never count. They lived in a community that had already survived economic devastation once, when the mines closed, and was struggling to survive another blow from the pandemic.
When I look at this data, I see a call to pay attention to the places that are easy to overlook. Rural counties like Shoshone do not make the evening news. They do not have the political weight of major cities. But the people who live there matter just as much, and their housing stability is just as important to the fabric of our society. The Idaho Policy Institute gave us the data to see this crisis for ourselves. Now we need the will to address it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was Shoshone County’s formal eviction rate in 2020? Shoshone County had a formal eviction rate of approximately 1.10% in 2020, nearly double Idaho’s statewide average of 0.6%.
What does “formal eviction” mean? A formal eviction is a court-ordered removal of a tenant from a rental property that has gone through the complete legal process and resulted in a judge’s order.
How many households were affected in Shoshone County? Approximately 18 renting households out of about 1,642 total renter households in the county received formal eviction orders in 2020.
Why was Shoshone County’s rate higher than the state average? Rural economic vulnerability, limited access to legal aid and rental assistance, lack of mediation programs, and challenges with information access during the pandemic all contributed.
Does this data include informal evictions? No, the data captures only formal evictions processed through the courts. Informal evictions likely represent additional housing losses not reflected in the statistics.
