The legal case record tells only part of the story, addressed in the 1st segment of the series:
[L]andlords, they had a lot of ways to evict a family. I spent a time with a landlord that would pay you to move and help you move. That's a pretty good eviction, you know, if you've got to get evicted. I met a landlord that would just take your door off. Just imagine you don't have a front door you're living in, you know, anywhere in the country. We need front doors on our homes. That got me thinking, 'gosh, OK there's all these evictions that are processed through civil court, housing court or eviction court but there are all these evictions that no one sees.' They occur in the shadow of the law, informal evictions we call them. So I did a study in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and it's a big issue. For every formal eviction that goes to the court, at least in Milwaukee, there are two informal evictions that are executed....
...the Federal Reserve found that 44 percent of us couldn't cover a sudden 400 dollar expense without borrowing or selling something. And so if you don't have family or friends you can tap, anything unexpected–health issues, accidents, car trouble, reduced work hours–can trigger calamity cascades....
...HUD classifies families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent as 'rent burdened.' According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, that applies to nearly half of all U.S. renters...
Further down, Gladstone and Desmond discuss the data issue (and problems in collecting it), official vs unofficial evictions, and the disparity between ever-rising rents and flat court proceedings. It doesn't add up.
2.8% eviction rate is not a “crisis”. What percentage would be acceptable?