04-18, 12:05–12:35 (US/Eastern), Auditorium 3
Where do landlords engage in more eviction actions? What characteristics of renters or landlords increase the practice of serial filing? There is widespread interest in using administrative data -- information collected by government and agencies in the implementation of public programs -- to evaluate systems and promote most just outcomes. Working with the Civil Court Data Initiative of Legal Services Corporation, we use data collected from civil court records in Virginia to analyze the behavior of landlords. Expanding on our Virginia Evictors Catalog, we use data on court evictions to build additional data tools to support the work of legal and housing advocates and model key eviction outcomes to contribute to our understanding of landlord behavior.
Virginia is home to 5 of the top 10 cities with the highest rates of eviction nationwide. Housing instability threatens the security of entire communities and burdens already limited social safety nets. Yet research shows that housing instability is rooted not in individual or community failures, but in policies of exclusion, displacement, disinvestment, and discrimination.
While collected to support programmatic goals, administrative data can also be used to shift the lens to those in power. In this work we first visualize eviction activity across the Commonwealth in an interactive Shiny app to address questions and needs of organizations providing legal, policy, and community advocacy. In addition we estimate landlord actions – eviction filings and serial filings – as a function of community and landlord characteristics. Using a series of mixed-effects models, with data aggregated to zipcodes nested in counties, we estimate the impact of community characteristics and landlord attributes on the likelihood of eviction filings and nuisance filings. Both the app and analysis speak to the larger causes and consequences of housing instability.
No previous knowledge expected
Samantha grew up in Charlottesville and earned her bachelor's degree in social psychology research from UVA. She previously worked as a Solutions Engineer and Partnership Manager at RStudio, with a focus on open-source technology advocacy. She believes that everyone should be able to make informed, data-driven decisions regardless of their means, and is passionate about enabling her community with tools to support more equitable and accessible analytics. She currently serves as a Data Scientist at the Virginia Equity Center.
As the Director of Equitable Analysis, Michele Claibourn leads the UVA Equity Center’s community-engaged data science work in support of a more equitable and just region. Michele works to connect the developing data expertise of UVA students to the community as well through her faculty appointment in the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, where she teaches courses on Imagining Equitable Policy and Public Interest Data: Ethics and Practice, and a courtesy appointment in the School of Data Science, where she helped launch a Community Data Fellows program.