Using Local Data to Drive Housing Loss Decision-Making

U.S. policymakers deemed loss of housing during COVID-19 a matter of life and death. The patchwork of local, state, and federal eviction and foreclosure moratoriums instituted after COVID rates started spiking last spring illustrates policymakers’ swift linking of housing and health. While not everyone has been equally protected by these moratoriums, the urgency exhibited in attempting to keep people housed during the pandemic reveals just how harmful evictions and foreclosures can be, and the outsized role they have come to play in the U.S. housing system.

Of course, this was all true well before the pandemic. Evictions have long been a cause and a consequence of poverty, disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx communities, and Black and Latinx women in particular. And while foreclosures may be currently receiving less attention, the economic devastation and racial disparities resulting from foreclosures, especially from the Great Recession, are no less stark.

Now that the harmful nature of evictions and foreclosures has been laid bare in every city and county across the country, how do we sustain pandemic-era policies that mitigate harm in the short-term and re-orient our housing system to prioritize housing as a human right over the long-term?

This is the first post in a series that will detail progress and insights from a project led by New America and DataKind to create a new tool that cities and counties can use to generate insights on eviction and foreclosure in their communities.

Cities and counties are at different starting points in understanding housing loss within their own communities. And much of where they start depends on whether the right eviction and foreclosure data is available and who can access it. While a national eviction data infrastructure, with uniform data standards, is needed to fully understand the scope of the problem, cities and counties cannot wait until one is in place, especially since the most lasting solutions in keeping people housed are those that are responsive to local laws, court processes, and neighborhood characteristics.

To prevent misuse of evictions and foreclosures, cities and counties must understand what is happening in their neighborhoods and who is impacted. This might seem rudimentary, but prior inquiries reveal that much of the data needed to address these questions is difficult to obtain, of poor quality, or simply non-existent.

Just as access to housing loss data varies, so too does local analysis of data. New America’s Future of Land and Housing program and DataKind are taking what we’ve learned from our previous housing loss research and creating a publicly-available tool for local leaders to generate insights and analyze their own eviction and foreclosure data. As currently envisioned, local leaders will be able to use the tool to assess where housing loss is most acute, when during the year it’s occurring, and who is most at risk.

Over the course of the next six months, we will develop this tool that housing leaders in cities and counties across the U.S. can use to transform existing data into useful insights to inform resource allocation, policy, advocacy and legislation. We are partnering with 14 cities and counties—‘partner sites’—to inform and test the tool to ensure it meets a range of data needs. You can read more about the partner sites here.

Follow along on this blog series, titled "Data to Drive Housing Loss Decision-Making" for updates on tool development and insights from the experience of partner sites as they navigate data collection, analysis, and use in mitigating housing loss locally.

Data and analysis are only as good as the infrastructure put in place to support their use to drive decision-making.

The goal of this series is for other cities and counties to learn from the everyday work of the partner sites as they seek to better understand the causes and consequences of housing loss in their communities. Over the next six months, we will shed light on questions, such as:

• What inputs (data and otherwise) currently inform decision-making about evictions and foreclosures at the city or county level?
• What questions are housing leaders able to answer with the knowledge they currently have? What do they still want to know?
• Do cities and counties have the data and the technical capacity to answer these questions, and if not, what plans are they putting in place to move in that direction?
• Once insights are generated, how are those being used to drive decision-making at the local level?

Data and analysis are only as good as the infrastructure put in place to support their use to drive decision-making. Without understanding the intricacies of cities and counties day-to-day work—from the different ways that cities and counties access data and set up partnerships to sustain the collection of data to how they use insights in decision-making, including the roadblocks and facilitators—we are missing out on valuable pieces of the puzzle.

Local housing systems, and the many competing inputs, are incredibly complex. If the goal is to put in place lasting infrastructure, then cities and counties need as much knowledge as possible—not just numbers and trends, but as much relevant context, case studies and carefully-delineated thought processes as possible—to shed light on how to mitigate short-term harm and move towards long-term solutions.

To stay up-to-date on this project, subscribe to our monthly newsletter here, or email Sabiha Zainulbhai at zainulbhai@newamerica.org to share insights, ask questions or learn more.