Section 1. What is the Foreclosure and Eviction Analysis Tool (FEAT)?

The Foreclosure and Eviction Tool (FEAT) is a web application, developed by New America’s Future of Land and Housing program in partnership with DataKind and over a dozen cities and counties across the United States.

FEAT is for local leaders looking to generate data-driven insights about evictions and foreclosures in their community, whether it’s for policymaking, research, or advocacy purposes.

FEAT processes and analyzes address housing loss data, appends demographic and socioeconomic information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and produces summaries of housing loss over time. These insights are intended to help local housing leaders track and better understand evictions and foreclosures in their communities.

FEAT can process three types of data (individually or in combination to produce a collective housing loss analysis):

• Eviction filings;
• Eviction judgments; and
• Mortgage foreclosures.

You, the user, are responsible for sourcing and uploading eviction or mortgage foreclosure data into FEAT, in the format specified in Section 2, and for ensuring that the data uploaded is as accurate as possible and representative of the geographic region and time period intended. Data must be at the level of an individual eviction or foreclosure (i.e., not aggregated) and must include at least one geographic identifier (e.g., street address of the property or census tract) and one date for each record.

Users can also access FEAT analysis on eviction filing data from Eviction Lab’s Eviction Tracking System—a database of eviction filing data across approximately 10 states and 30 cities.

FEAT can be found at www.featapp.org. Users need to register by creating a login and password to use FEAT.

FEAT is intended for anyone looking to generate data-driven insights about evictions and foreclosures in their community whether it’s for policy, research, or advocacy. In particular, FEAT will be useful for local leaders across the U.S., including those in city and county housing departments, legal aid organizations, researchers, journalists, and community-based advocates.

FEAT presents housing loss analysis in two ways: 1) a ZIP file of all FEAT analysis and underlying data for download; and 2) a dashboard visualizing select FEAT results. FEAT produces geocoded datasets, one for each type of housing loss provided, as well as a dataset that aggregates evictions and foreclosures at the census tract level. FEAT also appends five-year 2017–2021 American Community Survey data to housing loss data, also at the census tract level, and conducts correlation analysis to show which demographic and housing variables have strong associations with housing loss. Lastly, FEAT produces a heat map of housing loss data, as well as the necessary files for creating maps in GIS or QGIS.

User content (uploaded files containing eviction or foreclosure data) are processed by FEAT to create outputs (both HTML and downloadable ZIP files). Once processed, the user content is destroyed by an automated process within 24 hours of upload and is no longer stored by FEAT. For more information, please visit our Terms of Service.

FEAT is a data transformation tool that produces housing loss analyses based on uploaded data. The reliability of the analyses is only as good as the housing loss data that a user uploads into FEAT. It is important that users take into account any data limitations when interpreting FEAT results and exercise caution when using and sharing this analysis.

Detailed information about the data and methods FEAT uses is available in this user guide. You can use the Feedback button within FEAT to submit a technical glitch, bug, or data questions. You can also email Sabiha Zainulbhai at zainulbhai@newamerica.org with any additional questions .