Caitlin Augustin, DataKind
Caitlin Augustin, Senior Director of Product at DataKind, would use eviction data to continue to create open-source tools to combat housing insecurity.
Each year, nearly 3 million people are evicted in the U.S. But these are just estimates. Without access to high-quality, comprehensive, and standardized eviction data, we don’t actually know where evictions are concentrated, who is most at risk, and when evictions are most likely to occur. We also can’t track changes over time or understand whether policies designed to help tenants stay in their homes are working as intended.
With no national eviction database on evictions, it is difficult to respond to eviction as the housing crisis it is. To understand why eviction data is so essential, we asked 20 housing leaders, “If you had good eviction data, what would you do with it?”
Their short video responses are shared below. This video campaign builds on our 8 recommendations for building national and local eviction databases, co-developed with several partner organizations.
Caitlin Augustin, Senior Director of Product at DataKind, would use eviction data to continue to create open-source tools to combat housing insecurity.
Andrew Aurand, Vice President for Research, National Low Income Housing Coalition, would use better eviction data to learn more about who is being evicted, by whom, and where—to target eviction prevention measures.
Sherri Lawson Clark, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Wake Forest University, would use good eviction data to know who is being evicted and why to further understand the negative impact on families.
Judith Fox, Director of the Economic Justice Clinic and Clinical Law Professor at Notre Dame University, describes how she would use good eviction data to mitigate the high number of evictions in her home state of Indiana.
Malcom Glenn, Director of Public Affairs at Better and New America Fellow, would use good eviction data to create the type of policies that keep people in their homes.
Margaret Hagan, Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab and Lecturer at Stanford Law School, would use better eviction data to figure out what’s working (and what’s not) to protect tenants and improve housing stability.
Rosanne Haggerty, President of Community Solutions, would use better eviction data to push for action to break the ties between eviction, homelessness, and racial disparities.
Peter Hepburn, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University-Newark and Research Fellow at the Eviction Lab, would use better eviction data to provide support and intervention to one of the communities that eviction harms the most: children.
Lauren Lowery, Director, Housing and Community Development at National League of Cities, shares how she would use good eviction data to empower cities to protect residents from the persistent and negative consequences of housing instability.
Brent Metzler, Chief of the Housing Protection Unit in the Office of the New York State Attorney General, would use better eviction data to protect more New Yorkers from facing the indignities of eviction.
Cecilia Muñoz, Senior Advisor at New America, would use good eviction data to pinpoint blocks where evictions are happening to target outreach for community safety.
Yuliya Panfil, Director of New America’s Future of Land and Housing program, would use good eviction data to work with local community leaders to make sure rent assistance resources are there for residents when they’re in crisis.
Sandra Park, Senior Staff Attorney at ACLU, would use good eviction data to strengthen litigation and advocacy as a civil and human rights issue.
DJ Patil would use better eviction data to bridge the data science and activist communities and maximize the impact for healthier communities.
Tony Pickett, CEO of Grounded Solutions, would use good eviction data to help create equitable, inclusive, and opportunity-rich communities where housing affordability is protected for generations to come.
Peter Rabley, Managing Partner of PLACE, would use better eviction data to ensure that all tenants could assert their property rights to remain in place.
Stephen Sills, Director of The Center for Housing and Community Studies at UNC-Greensboro, shares how he would use good eviction data to improve programs designed to help residents in Greensboro, North Carolina, avoid eviction.
Patricia Solis, Executive Director of Knowledge Exchange Resilience at Arizona State University, would use good eviction data to create a digital atlas of housing insecurity to improve aid to tenants and inform elected officials.
Frank Wells, Chief Impact Officer at Bright Community Trust, Inc., shares he would use better eviction data to target scarce resources to families that need them most in Central Florida: women of color, families with limited English proficiency, and seniors.