In New York City, where democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won an electrifying victory in the Democratic mayoral primary on a platform of freezing rents, new research reveals just how critical such measures could be for the city’s children. A comprehensive new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) tracking over 350,000 children shows that eviction doesn’t just displace families — it derails young lives, trapping kids in a morass of instability with long-ranging consequences.

Now as Mamdani campaigns for the general election against a real estate industry mobilizing behind his opponents, the report’s findings underscore the broader implications of housing policy, like keeping children in school and out of homeless shelters or cramped multifamily living arrangements. The research comes as cities nationwide grapple with housing crises, making New York’s recent good cause eviction protections and Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze potential models for child welfare policy across America.

According to the NBER report, every year, roughly 2.7 million American households face eviction proceedings — and those households include an estimated 2.9 million children. Despite the massive scale of the problem, researchers have struggled to understand precisely how getting kicked out of their homes affects kids’ lives and futures. Eviction records typically only list adult tenants, making it nearly impossible to track effects on children. And even when researchers have been able to identify affected kids, it’s hard to separate the effects of eviction itself from all the other economic disasters that tend to hit struggling families at the same time: job loss, illness, relationship breakdown.

The NBER report, conducted by economists at Yale, the University of Chicago, and other universities, cracks this problem by linking eviction court records to school enrollment data in Chicago and New York City. The researchers tracked more than 350,000 children from families who went through eviction proceedings between 2000 and 2017 in Chicago and between 2007 and 2017 in New York.

To isolate the specific impact of eviction, the researchers used a clever and novel approach: they compared outcomes for children whose families faced similar eviction cases but got different results depending on which judge they were randomly assigned. Some judges are more likely to order evictions, while others are more likely to dismiss cases; since case assignments are random, this creates a natural experiment.

The scale of childhood exposure to eviction is staggering. Using census data, the researchers found that more than half of all eviction cases involve households with children. In Cook County, which includes Chicago, 53 to 56 percent of eviction cases involved kids, with those households averaging 2.3 children each.

The most immediate impact of eviction is obvious: families get forced out of their homes. But the study reveals the deeper instability that follows. Compared to children whose families also faced eviction court but had their cases dismissed, evicted children were much more likely to continue moving afterward. This effect persisted for years, with evicted kids continuing to move at higher rates than their peers who avoided eviction.

Eviction also dramatically increased homelessness among children. In the year after their case, evicted children were 7 percentage points more likely to enter Chicago’s homeless services system and 3.1 percentage points more likely in New York. These effects grew even larger in the second year.

Many evicted families ended up “doubling up,” moving in with grandparents or other relatives. The study found eviction increased children’s likelihood of living in such arrangements by 17 percentage points, suggesting that extended family networks serve as a crucial safety net when the housing market fails families.

Kids in families that were evicted also faced severe educational disruption. Evicted children were 46 percent more likely to switch schools during their case year, and this instability continued affecting their education long afterward. Chronic absenteeism — missing more than 10 percent of school days — increased by 9 percentage points among evicted children.

For high-school students, the academic damage was particularly stark. Evicted teens saw their credit accumulation drop by 14 percentage points in the year after their case. The researchers found that boys were hit especially hard, experiencing larger increases in absences and bigger drops in academic performance. Boys were also less likely to move in with relatives, leading the researchers to speculate that family networks may not be as available to them as to girls.

The researchers found that eviction reduced high-school graduation rates by 12.5 percentage points. They found no significant impact on elementary- and middle-school test scores, suggesting that eviction’s damage operates less through impairment of cognitive skills and more through disrupted school engagement, breaking the routines that help students stay connected to their education and complete their degrees.