Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing costs, and eviction is transforming their lives. Yet little is known about the prevalence, causes, and consequences of housing insecurity.
The Eviction Lab is a team of researchers, students, and website architects who believe that a stable, affordable home is central to human flourishing and economic mobility. Accordingly, understanding the sudden, traumatic loss of home through eviction is foundational to understanding poverty in America.
Drawing on tens of millions of records, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University has published the first ever dataset of evictions in America, going back to 2000. We hope you’ll join us in using the tools of this website to discover new facts about how eviction is shaping your community, raising awareness and working toward new solutions.
Matthew Desmond started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, living and working alongside poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with original statistical analyses, Desmond discovered that eviction was incredibly prevalent in low-income communities and functioned as a cause, not just a condition, of poverty. This work was summarized in his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016).
When speaking to people and policymakers across the country about Evicted, Desmond realized the need to collect national data on eviction to address fundamental questions about residential instability, forced moves, and poverty in America. With the support of the Gates, JPB, and Ford Foundations, as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Desmond founded the Eviction Lab in 2017 with the conviction that stable, affordable housing can be an effective platform to promote economic mobility, health, and community vitality.
Through this website, the Eviction Lab has made nationwide eviction data publicly available and accessible. We hope this data is used by policymakers, community organizers, journalists, educators, non-profit organizations, students, and citizens interested in understanding more about housing, eviction, and poverty in their own backyards. You can look at evictions over time, map evictions in the United States, compare the eviction rates of different neighborhoods, cities, or states, and generate custom reports about America’s eviction epidemic.
Researchers can use the data to help us document the prevalence, causes, and consequences of eviction and to evaluate laws and policies designed to promote residential security and reduce poverty. Together, we hope our findings will inform programs to prevent eviction and family homelessness, raise awareness of the centrality of housing insecurity in the lives of low-income families, and deepen our understanding of the fundamental drivers of poverty in America.
