ATLANTA — Entering court using a walker, a doctor’s note in his hand, 70-year-old Dana Williams, who suffers from serious heart problems, hypertension, and asthma, pleaded to delay eviction from his two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta.

Although sympathetic, the judge said state law required him to evict Williams and his daughter De’mai Williams, 25, in April because they owed $8,348 in unpaid rent and fees on their $940-a-month apartment.

They moved into a dilapidated Atlanta hotel room with water dripping through the bathroom ceiling, broken furniture, and no refrigerator or microwave. But at $275 a week, it was all they could afford.

The Williams family is among millions of tenants across the country who have been evicted or face imminent eviction.

After a lull during the pandemic, eviction filings by landlords have come roaring back, driven by rising rents and a long-running shortage of affordable housing. Most low-income tenants can no longer count on pandemic resources that had kept them housed, and many find it hard to recover because they haven’t found steady work or their wages haven’t kept pace with rising costs.

Homelessness, as a result, is rising.

“Protections have ended, the federal moratorium is obviously over, and emergency rental assistance money has dried up in most places,” said Daniel Grubbs-Donovan, a research specialist at Princeton University's Eviction Lab.

“Across the country, low-income renters are in an even worse situation than before the pandemic due to things like massive increases in rent during the pandemic, inflation, and other pandemic-era related financial difficulties.”

Eviction filings are more than 50% higher than the pre-pandemic average in some cities, according to the Eviction Lab, which tracks filings in nearly three dozen cities and 10 states. Landlords file around 3.6 million eviction cases a year.

Among the hardest-hit is Houston, where rates were 56% higher in April and 50% higher in May. In Minneapolis/St. Paul, rates rose 106% in March, 55% in April, and 63% in May.

The latest data mirrors trends that started last year, with the Eviction Lab finding nearly 970,000 evictions filed in locations it tracks — a 78.6% increase compared with 2021, when much of the country was following an eviction moratorium. By December, eviction filings were nearly back to pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, rent prices nationwide are up about 5% from a year ago and 30.5% above 2019, according to the real estate company Zillow. There are few places for displaced tenants to go, with the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimating a 7.3 million shortfall of affordable units nationwide.

Many vulnerable tenants would have been evicted long ago if not for a safety net created during the pandemic.

The federal government, as well as many states and localities, issued moratoriums that put evictions on hold; most have now ended. There was also $46.5 billion in federal Emergency Rental Assistance that helped tenants pay rent and funded other protections. Much of that has been spent or allocated, and calls for more resources have failed to gain traction in Congress.

“The disturbing rise of evictions to pre-pandemic levels is an alarming reminder of the need for us to act — at every level of government — to keep folks safely housed,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.).

Still, some pandemic protections are being made permanent, and having an effect on eviction rates. Nationwide, 200 measures have passed since January 2021, including legal representation for tenants, sealing eviction records, and mediation to resolve cases before they reach court, said the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

These measures are credited with keeping eviction filings down in several cities, including Philadelphia and New York — 33% below pre-pandemic levels in May for the former and 41% for the latter.

In Philadelphia, 70% of the 5,000-plus tenants and landlords who took part in the eviction diversion program resolved their cases. The city also set aside $30 million in aid for those with less than $3,000 in arrears and started a right-to-counsel program, doubling representation rates for tenants.