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How Eviction Lab is

helping journalists cover
a spiraling housing crisis Defector’s Kelsey
McKinney on how
2020 destroyed
As the pandemic has worsened an already critical situation, the concept of
researchers started to live track evictions in 17 cities and “sticking to
sports”
launched a scorecard to compare protections for renters in
WALT HICKEY
each state.

By SARAH SCIRE @SarahScire Sept. 10, 2020, 12:40 p.m. %

No single, authoritative source exists to track evictions in the

United States. It can be confusing, even during the best of times,
to know how many evictions are happening at any given moment. Should the
government use
It is not the best of times. The pandemic and a patchwork of Section 230 to
force the tech
emergency orders have made the numbers and laws around giants into paying
eviction even harder to keep straight. That’s where Eviction Lab, for the news?
part of Princeton University, hopes to help. JOSHUA BENTON

The Eviction Lab maintains a national eviction database and

makes the 83 million eviction records they’ve collected available
for analysis or merging with other data sources. Their maps and
reports are free for publications to customize and embed. As
Covid-19 has worsened the housing crisis, researchers have also
Journalists
started live tracking evictions in 17 cities and explaining what
perceive stories
various moratoriums, guidelines, and orders actually mean for the published in local
nation’s renters. news outlets to be
less newsworthy
The imperative to find ways to communicate with the public and MARK CODDINGTON AND SETH
LEWIS
share resources with journalists comes from the very top.

Eviction Lab’s founder and director, Matt Desmond, is a

contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and his
book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City appeared
on bestseller lists before winning the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for
nonfiction — unusual for a fieldwork-based book written by an
The Pentagon
academic. Desmond, a sociologist by training, captured orders the military
mainstream attention with vivid writing and a richly detailed newspaper Stars
and Stripes to shut
chronicle of how evictions often function as a cause, not just a down by the end
result, of poverty. of the month
LAURA HAZARD OWEN
As Desmond told NPR this July, the housing crisis is not new:

Every year in America, 3.7 million evictions are filed. That’s

about seven evictions filed every minute. That number far
exceeds the number of foreclosure starts at the height of
the foreclosure crisis. So before the pandemic, the Facebook has been
majority of renters below the poverty line were already terrible about
spending half of their income on housing costs or more. removing vaccine
And 1 in 4 of those families were spending over 70% of
misinformation.
Will it do better
their income just on rent and utilities. with election
misinformation?
When you’re spending 70, 80% of your income on rent
LAURA HAZARD OWEN
and the lights, you don’t need to have a big emergency
wash over your life to get evicted. Something very small
can do it.

Or something very large — like a pandemic.

Since Covid-19 took hold in the U.S., millions of Americans have

lost their jobs and many millions more find themselves grappling
with insufficient child care and unexpected health care costs.
Although Eviction Lab won’t make predictions about the exact
number of Americans facing eviction during the spiraling crisis,
Desmond has written it’s in the millions. (Emily Benfer, a law
professor and Eviction Lab collaborator, estimated 28 million in
July and a more recent CNN report put the number around 40
million.)

Josh Campbell
@joshscampbell

One of the most important pieces of journalism all year --

@KyungLahCNN with the stories of those being evicted
and losing their livelihood every day due to the economic
stresses of Covid-19.

America is in crisis. Don't look away.

8:00 AM · Sep 3, 2020

67.4K See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter

Faculty assistant Anne Kat Alexander said Eviction Lab, in

partnership with Benfer, built the Covid Housing Police Scorecard
to help reporters parse eviction moratoriums and compare the
state-level protections in place for renters.

“The scorecard was filling a pretty media-centric need that we’d

seen as various eviction moratoriums were coming out across the
country. We sit and look at eviction policy all day — and have for
years — so we have an extra level of expertise in interpreting
them,” Alexander said.

The scorecard unpacks the policies in each state and ranks them.
(If you’re wondering, Massachusetts tops the list with 4.15 stars.
Eight states, including Texas and Tennessee, share the bottom
spot with exactly zero stars between them.)

Alieza Durana, a policy journalist working at the lab as a

“narrative change liaison” through a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
grant, said she splits her time between walking reporters and
researchers through resources, making connections to sources or
community organizations, and commissioning journalistic work.

“Given that housing insecurity — and particularly the perspective

of someone experiencing housing insecurity — has been so
underreported in media, part of our grant money from the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative goes toward commissioning those works,”
Durana said. The works, so far, include “docu-poetry” and
reported pieces, and there’s a documentary on the history of
eviction on the way.

Eviction Lab acknowledges its database of evictions, though the

most comprehensible available, remains incomplete. The federal
government and most state governments don’t track evictions,
leaving records to be gathered county court by county court. A
number of states, because of inconsistent digitization practices
and varying privacy and public records laws, almost certainly
underreport evictions. And Eviction Lab is only attempting to
count the legal evictions. When a landlord changes the locks,
turns off utilities, harasses a tenant, or uses other illegal methods
to force tenants out, the eviction goes unrecorded.

§ § §

The Eviction lab media guide says there are “countless untold
stories in these data.” Where could you start?

The live tracker is useful for reporters covering one of the 17 cities
that it tracks. There’s also data on evictions initiated during the
pandemic for relatively small amounts of money — leaving
families homeless over a few hundred dollars. Journalists can get
the big picture using the database, which includes eviction
records from 2000 to 2016, or start collecting their own records
for a more updated look.

Durana recommended looking for recurring names on recently

filed evictions. “We know there’s often one landlord or a handful
of landlords driving a lot of the eviction filings in a place,” she
said. “Whether you’re in Milwaukee or Houston or Richmond,
starting with PACER or court records is a good way to zero in on
what that story looks like.”

Durana noted that some populations are disproportionately

affected by evictions due to discrimination in the housing market
and policies. Eviction Lab’s maps can be used to investigate where
evictions have clustered.

“We know that Black communities, communities of color, families

with children, and folks experiencing domestic violence all face
high rates of eviction,” Durana said. “It’s something to keep in
mind as you report these kinds of stories out.”

For additional information, Eviction Lab recommends connecting

with legal aid societies (as New Hampshire Public Radio did for
this piece) and organizations (some are listed on Eviction Lab’s
sister site, Just Shelter) in your community.

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Defector’s Kelsey McKinney on how 2020 destroyed

the concept of “sticking to sports”
“We can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and separate thing
because sports are the gift we get for making our society as just and fair as
possible.”

Should the government use Section 230 to force the

tech giants into paying for the news?
A new paper argues that the “26 words that created the internet” should remain in
force — but only for companies that agree to certain new regulations and
restrictions.

Journalists perceive stories published in local news

outlets to be less newsworthy
Plus: “Cultural competence” through diverse sourcing; limitations in how journalists
represent public opinion; and lessons from studying 7,000 news push notifications.

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