We only missed the target by at least 40%.

Well, it could be interesting or infuriating depending on one's temperament.  From What Happened to the Eviction Tsunami? by Yuliya Panfil and David Spievack.

Since the pandemic began, housing experts (including one of the authors of this article) have been predicting that the pandemic’s economic fallout would produce an eviction “tsunami” that could put as many as 40 million people out of their homes.

The experts are still waiting.

When the pandemic first surged in the U.S., the dire predictions prompted federal, state and city governments to enact emergency policies to temporarily ban evictions. Two national eviction moratoriums lasted nearly uninterrupted for about 17 months, until August 2021, and some states and cities still have eviction and other tenant protections in place today.

They made a forecast of forty million evictions.  Others similarly forecasted a tsunami of evictions of  varying magnitude.  All the public intellectuals were convinced and that conviction made its way into policy.  If I were a Democrat I would be furious as the President ended up having to expend political capital to save an eviction moratorium which was, as it turns out, unnecessary.

When the national moratorium lifted, housing experts, renter advocates and policymakers braced for a surge of evictions. Now, four months later, evictions have increased, but data suggests that a tsunami has yet to materialize. Some still think one is coming, as courts begin working through a backlog of eviction filings, but according to Eviction Lab, the country’s most comprehensive tracker of eviction data, evictions in most places are nearly 40 percent below the historical average. 

Not only did they get the magnitude wrong.  They didn't even get the inflection point.  They were simply and comprehensibly wrong.

Why?  The usual public intellectual excuses.  But it is somewhat worse than that.  They are blind to the framing.

Now, as post-moratorium eviction figures come into focus, the outsized predictions are turning into easy fodder for conservative publications. The absence of an eviction tsunami has been met not with celebration or acknowledgement of the preventative effects of proactive social policy, but with debate over whether a tsunami was ever likely.

Since March 2020, rental evictions have been running dramatically below historic norms.  The gap stabilized in August of 2021, at about 40% of historical average.  The eviction moratorium came into effect on September 4, 2020.  The moratorium lapsed in September 2021 and evictions are, four months after the lifting of the moratorium, still running at 40% of historical average.  

So, unless I am missing something, the moratorium never had any effect.  Evictions were at an historic low when the moratorium passed.  Evictions stayed low during the moratorium.  And they stayed low after the moratorium was raised.  It was inconsequential policy and therefore there is no reason to celebrate the ineffective policy as it had no positive effect.  

They made a consequential forecast and they were dramatically wrong for easily predictable reasons.  Despite the weaknesses of their forecasting models, they were adamant that the models could be trusted.  They couldn't be trusted.  

And now, having dramatically underperformed expectations, what is the solution?  Give them money to build better models.

In the private sector, trust is earned and this proposition would be laughed to the rafters.  Failures seeking money to fail some more.  Which is not to say that evictions are a non-serious subject.  We do need better research.  But that likely starts with better researchers less blinkered.

I am being harsh because we are seeing this time and again through the pandemic.  All the institutions dominated by the laptop class and amplified by the chattering class have heralded extinction event forecasts and have been unremittingly wrong.  Everyone else, out in the real world has had to attempt to carry-on bearing the additional burdens of the errors of the chattering class in their misguided policies.

This is more than about being wrong.  It is about being accountable like everyone else is.