How to Use This Guide
Who Is This Guide For?
This guide is designed to support those seeking to use court eviction data (referred to throughout as “data users” or simply “users”) in leveraging court eviction data to better understand eviction trends and impacts in their area. This includes but is not limited to court staff, social service agencies, city or county housing or human service departments, elected officials and their staff, legal aid organizations, researchers, and journalists.
While court data can be accessed through various methods, this guide covers data typically accessed directly from courts through data-sharing agreements, docket review, or bulk extract from courts.
What Is the Purpose of This Guide?
Court eviction data serves multiple purposes. Courts utilize this data to more effectively adjudicate cases. Civil legal aid providers and community-based organizations use it to directly intervene and provide legal aid and other resources. Policymakers and researchers use it to track and better understand evictions over time.
This guide offers a framework for understanding the kinds of questions that can be addressed using court eviction data. It outlines the types of data needed to address each question and identifies key challenges related to access and analysis that experts in the field commonly face. Given the variation in the data, and in eviction legal processes and terminology, the framework provided in this guide must be tailored to fit the specific data and eviction context and cannot be universally applied to all court eviction datasets.
How Might I Use This Guide?
This guide seeks to:
- Demystify terminology and make court eviction data and analysis more accessible and transparent;
- Enable data users to make multi-state and multi-year comparisons to better assess the impact of eviction lawsuits on courts and communities;
- Further data-informed decision-making and understanding of eviction court processes;
- Mitigate misunderstandings of evictions and their impact; and
- Empower social services and other community-based service providers to better assist and distribute aid to communities impacted by evictions.
Learn more about improving eviction data with research and analysis from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program.