Organization
For years, America had no national picture of eviction.
Cases moved through local courts across thousands of jurisdictions. Records existed, but they were scattered. It was difficult to answer basic questions about how often eviction happened, where it was concentrated, or how one community compared with another.
Matthew Desmond began studying eviction in Milwaukee in 2008. His research traced how losing a home could deepen poverty and destabilize the rest of a person’s life.
At Princeton, Desmond and a team of researchers started assembling the bigger picture.
They gathered more than 80 million court records from across the country, cleaned and organized them, and created the first national database of evictions. In 2018, the Eviction Lab opened that data to the public.
Suddenly, eviction had a map.
People could look up their own communities. Researchers could compare cities and neighborhoods. Journalists could investigate local patterns. Residents and public officials could take the numbers into conversations about housing in their own cities.
The work has continued to grow. The Eviction Lab’s national map includes data from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Its Eviction Tracking System publishes newer filing data every month for dozens of cities and states.
That information gives communities a clearer view of housing stability at the ground level.
An eviction can mean leaving a home, a neighborhood, a school, or the people and routines someone depends on. When those cases accumulate in the same places, they become part of the story of the city itself.
The Eviction Lab gives communities a way to see where people are struggling to remain rooted.
Maps change the scale of the question.
A single eviction case tells the story of one household. Put thousands of those cases on a map and patterns begin to emerge across blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and states.
That makes it possible to ask better questions.
Where are filings concentrated? Which neighborhoods experience them repeatedly? How does one city compare with another? What happens after a new housing policy takes effect?
The Eviction Lab makes its data available for other people to use, giving researchers, journalists, local leaders, and residents a common set of facts to work from.
It turns thousands of individual court records into a picture of who gets to remain in a place.
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