We turn messy eviction court data into structured data to map, analyze, and provide analysis for local practitioners and partners to use in their efforts around eviction and tenant policy along with expanding scholarly research in the area, particularly around racial disparities in eviction.
The Eviction Research Network is a collaborative project across several universities where we collect and analyze eviction data, particularly in states where there is little to no data. To do this, we collect court records and apply NLP to mine information, estimate race and gender of defendants, and produce visuals to show where evictions occur and various racial disparities. This work is in use by federal agencies such as the White House, HUD, Treasury, and state and local governments to understand trends in eviction. The backbone of this work requires data science tools to extract, process, and analyze these data.
