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.
Principal Investigator
Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
Program Coordinator/Research Staff
Anne Kat Alexander is a researcher and project manager at the Eviction Lab and an incoming evening JD student at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Her recent work focuses on eviction policy during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has appeared in Indiana Health Law Review and the Washington Post. She earned her B.A. at Brandeis University in 2018.
Visiting Research Collaborator
Emily A. Benfer is a visiting professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University. She first collaborated with the Eviction Lab in March 2020 to create the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard. As a research collaborator with the Lab, she conducts legal mapping and policy surveillance of U.S. eviction and housing policy, including eviction moratoria at the federal, state, and local level. Her clinic practice and research focus on the intersection of social determinants of health, racial inequity, and poverty with an emphasis on housing and eviction policies. Emily has widely published, testified before Congress and appeared in numerous media outlets on these topics. Emily is the Chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Eviction, Housing Stability, and Equity and a member of the Legal Services Corporation U.S. Eviction Law Study Advisory Board. Professor Benfer served as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and a Peace Corps volunteer. She was named a Legal Freedom Fighter by Rocket Matter and one of Chicago’s Top 40 Lawyers Under 40 by the National Law Journal. She has received numerous commendations for her commitment to health equity, housing stability, and social justice, including an American Bar Association Presidential Commendation and the American Public Health Association David P. Rall Award for Advocacy.
Administrative Assistant
Bria Dixon is an Administrative Assistant at the Eviction Lab. She has a bachelor’s degree in Natural Resources with a concentration in Environmental Science. A Jersey native, her recent focus is climate change and natural disasters in relation to sustainable development and the right to affordable housing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her spare time, Bria loves to indulge in yoga, blogging, and traveling.
Research Specialist
Joe received his bachelor’s degree in Economics and Applied Math from Macalester College. A San Francisco native, his senior thesis used a survival analysis framework to explore the effect of zip code level tech growth on San Francisco eviction rates. As a researcher, he hopes to establish causal relationships between the effects of wealth consolidation and income inequality on eviction rates. Outside of research, Joe enjoys basketball, board games, and eating.
Audience and Community Engagement Editor
Juan Pablo Garnham is a Chilean journalist interested in cities, public policy, and immigrant communities. In his previous work as the Urban Affairs reporter for The Texas Tribune, Juan Pablo reported on the main challenges of Texas' largest metro areas — Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso and Dallas-Fort Worth, where he is based. Juan Pablo has also worked as senior producer for the podcast In The Thick, editor of CityLab Latino, and City Hall reporter for El Diario in New York. In Chile, he wrote for some of the country’s most important magazines and newspapers. Juan Pablo brings his expertise as a bilingual and multimedia journalist to his position as the Audience and Community Engagement Editor for the Eviction Lab.
Project Director
Carl Gershenson is broadly interested in how markets and politics structure inequality in the United States. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, where his dissertation explored the political and cultural origins of the American business corporation. As a graduate student, Carl published on a variety of topics, including corporate democracy and securities law, neighborhood level politics and the distribution of city services, and eviction and urban labor markets (with Matthew Desmond). After graduation, Carl joined the Sociology Department at Washington University in St. Louis as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, where he collaborated with Professor Tim Bartley on a project exploring how xenophobia and attitudes toward markets structure public opinion regarding immigration and offshoring.
At the Eviction Lab, Carl will continue to study how American political economy creates the conditions for the contemporary housing crisis. He is also deeply interested in issues around climate and energy, and he will work these interests into his research at Eviction Lab. When life gives him the chance, Carl likes to read history and fiction and explore Philadelphia.
For more on Carl’s research, go to https://scholar.harvard.edu/cgersh/home
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Nick holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin, MPH from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in sociological methods, including Bayesian hierarchal modeling and data viz, racial segregation and urban life, education, and health policy. His work has appeared in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet, among others.
Research Specialist
Jacob is a Research Specialist at the Eviction Lab, where he contributes to research on eviction filing patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. He previously worked as a Research Associate with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. While there, he contributed to research on a range of topics related to regional economics and monetary policy. Jacob earned his B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis.
Research Fellow
Peter is an assistant professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark. Peter first joined the Eviction Lab in 2018 as a postdoc after completing his PhD in Sociology and Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. At the Lab, he has done work on serial eviction filings, racial and gender disparities in eviction rates, eviction in suburban spaces, gentrification and eviction, and money judgments in eviction cases. He also developed and leads the Eviction Tracking System. Outside of the Lab, Peter’s research examines the ways that employment practices and public policies affect children and low-income families. He has also studied the effects of mass imprisonment on kin networks, exposure to subfelony criminal justice in New York City, and trajectories of employment and disability among American workers. Peter runs one marathon a year and no, he has not qualified for Boston (thank you for asking). You can read more about him at pshepburn.github.io.
Research Specialist
Olivia graduated from Middlebury College where she majored in Economics and minored in Mathematics. As an undergraduate, she worked as a research assistant examining how economic hardships experienced by Russians during the post-communist transition in Russia affected their attitudes toward market reforms and different policies. For her undergraduate thesis, she used a longitudinal survey data from Russia to examine the impacts of self-perceived economic welfare on life satisfaction, and its implications on income inequality. As a researcher, she is interested in delving deeper into the problems of poverty and inequality. A South Korean raised in Hong Kong, Olivia loves traveling, exploring new places to eat, drawing, and taking long walks.
Administrative Assistant
Katie received an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2016. Her research interests included religion and the literary history of consent eighteenth and nineteenth century America. She taught courses titled “Death and Dying in Early America” and “Women Possessed: Religion, Gender, and Sexuality,” as well as first year writing classes. Her interests related to the Eviction Lab include gender based housing discrimination, and how to improve housing stability for people affected by addiction and mental health issues. In her free time, Katie enjoys stand up and improv comedy, podcasts, and birdwatching.
Research Specialist
Emily Lemmerman is a research specialist with the Eviction Lab. In 2019, she graduated with a degree in Sociology, concentrating in Data Science from Stanford. As an undergrad, she was a research assistant at the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, analyzing the impacts of federal and local pre-trial processes and risk assessment algorithms. Her undergraduate thesis focused on modern-day debtor’s prisons - detention as a punishment for unpaid criminal justice fines and fees - in El Paso, Texas. After some time in the private sector, and on the Bernie Sanders campaign, Emily is excited to return to sociology research. At the Eviction Lab, she is most interested in work that examines how legal aid interventions influence outcomes for tenants facing eviction, and in further exploring relationships between markets, debt, inequality and housing.
Research Specialist
Jasmine holds a Master of Public Policy from the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and a B.A. from Berry College in Political Science, with a minor in Women’s Studies. Prior to joining the Eviction Lab, Jasmine worked as a program associate with the Bonner Foundation and as a Public Policy and Advocacy Intern at Habitat for Humanity.
Research Assistant
Ndidi is a junior at Princeton University concentrating in the Woodrow Wilson School and pursuing certificates in the Global Health Program and African American Studies. On campus, she serves as Co-Vice President of Insure Jersey, and volunteers with the HomeFront Health Initiative and Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR). In her free time, she enjoys singing with the Trego ensemble. As someone who is interested in the social determinants of health, she looks forward to potentially investigating the relationship between housing and health outcomes.
Graduate Research Assistant
Henry is a first-year doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. He graduated from Harvard College in 2017 with a degree in Sociology and a minor in Statistics. For his undergraduate thesis, he studied how American cities have become unaffordable for many renters and the consequences that has had for social life in rent-burdened communities. Henry currently studies the causes of rising rent prices, the relationships between landlords and tenants, and how evictions affect community life. In his free time, Henry likes to cook, listen to podcasts, and recite scenes from sitcoms to patient friends.
Research Affiliate
James is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he obtained a B.A. in Public Policy with a focus on Applied Statistics and Labor Policy. He has worked for several public interest research and advocacy groups, such as the ACLU and the Economic Growth Institute, where he developed a deep interest in the intersection of statistical analysis and policy. Currently serving as a Research Affiliate with the Eviction Lab, James seeks to better understand the impact of eviction on residents of public housing, as well as how local policymakers can best craft housing assistance solutions that will benefit their communities. In his free time, he is an avid dancer and enjoys volunteering in the local arts community.
Graduate Research Assistant
Gracie is a doctoral candidate in Demography and Social Policy at Princeton University, and a medical student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She graduated with an AB from Princeton in 2012 in Public Policy and International Affairs. Gracie studies health disparities, and how social inequality is reflected in, and perpetuated by, the health care system. Her recent work has looked at how the effects of abstinence-only education funding on teen reproductive health outcomes varies by state political ideology, and how ACA-facilitated Medicaid expansion altered social determinants of health such as food insecurity. In her free time Gracie likes to ski, take pictures of everything she cooks, and ask strangers if she can pet their dogs.
Research Assistant
Sarah is a third-year undergraduate in the Sociology department pursuing a certificate in Asian American Studies. Her prior internship experiences involve teaching English in Kenya, mobilizing pretrial defendants to vote in Texas, and working as a housing policy intern at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Outside of the Lab, Sarah is a U-Councilor on USG, Chair of Law and Public Affairs, and a Petey Greene volunteer.
Graduate Research Assistant
Lillian is a first-year doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. She graduated in 2017 from New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she studied Economics and Global Business. Prior to her graduate studies, Lillian was a research specialist at the Eviction Lab, where she helped collect, clean, and analyze eviction records. She has also conducted interviews with landlords and tenants from South Carolina, Alabama, and Ohio to study the phenomenon of serial eviction filings. Broadly, she is interested in understanding the drivers of neighborhood change, economic inequality, and residential segregation. In her free time, she enjoys painting and reading, as well as learning to skateboard.
Graduate Research Assistant
Matt is a doctoral student in Population Studies and Social Policy at Princeton University. He graduated with his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. Before beginning his studies at Princeton, Matt worked as a research assistant and programmer at Mathematica Policy Research, where he developed an interest in housing policy and segregation. Matt currently studies how racial, ethnic, and economic integration can reduce prejudice and improve social trust within communities. At the Eviction Lab, he hopes to study how integration and fair housing policies affect residential displacement patterns. Matt plays guitar, drums, and a bit of piano and in a past life, was a drummer in an alternative rock band.
Research Assistant
Scott Overbey is a junior in the Economics Department at Princeton University pursuing certificates in Statistics/Machine Learning, Political Economy, and Urban Studies. His research interests generally cover poverty, housing, and public finance in the United States and what government, specifically at a local level, can do to address social ills. As a proud Cincinnati native, he hopes to use this research to impact local policy making in his hometown. Outside of the Lab, Scott is an Assistant Residential College Advisor in Butler College, Captain of the Model United Nations Team, and a Junior Fellow for the Pace Center’s Service Focus Program.
Graduate Research Assistant
Devin Q. Rutan is a first-year Ph.D. student in Princeton’s Sociology Department and is affiliated with the Office of Population Research. He is interested in the re-production of spatial inequality and the persistence of residential segregation. In 2016, he received a Bachelor of Philosophy in Urban Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently exploring the relationships between rising rents and evictions.
Research Assistant
Naomi is a third-year undergraduate in the Sociology department, pursuing a certificate in the Center for Human Values. Prior to beginning at Princeton, she lived in Dakar, Senegal in a year of cultural immersion, fostering an interest in the relationship between development interventions and how they interact with the complexities of people’s lived experiences. Her current research interests include international development, poverty interventions, and mental health disparities, global and domestic. In the lab, she is thrilled to explore the relationship between eviction and educational outcomes. Outside of research, Naomi spends time singing ‘60s and ‘70s folk music and running through the woods of Princeton.
Graduate Research Assistant
Gillian Slee is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. She graduated from Harvard College in 2016 with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. In 2017, Gillian earned her M.Phil. degree in Criminology at the University of Cambridge where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. Her research focuses on urban poverty, criminal justice, housing, policy, and ethnography. Gillian is a recipient of Princeton’s Centennial and Marion J. Levy fellowships. At the Eviction Lab, she is currently exploring the neighborhood-level consequences of eviction on voting.
Research Assistant
Larry is a second-year undergraduate at Princeton University majoring in Operations Research and Financial Engineering, and pursuing certificates in Computer Science and Statistics and Machine Learning. He is a member of the National Society of Black Engineers and Princeton’s Black Men’s Association. In his free time, he enjoys listening to music and chilling with friends. He is interested in learning how statistics and machine learning can help affect impact real-life situations such as housing.
Narrative Change Liaison, 2020-21
Writer, NerdWallet
Narrative Change Liaison, 2020-21
Research Specialist, 2017-2020
Stanford University, PhD Student (Economics of Education)
Research Specialist, 2017-2020
Lavar Edmonds is a research specialist with the Eviction Lab. Guided by experiences as a high school math teacher, his research broadly centers around inequality, particularly in education. In college, he worked as the data analyst for the school’s Student Transition Program, studying academic outcomes for first-generation and traditionally underrepresented minority students at the university. While at Penn, Lavar worked as a research assistant at the School District of Philadelphia and conducted a semester-long research project examining the causes of teacher exit in Tulsa Public Schools. His current research explores the impact of teachers from Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) on student achievement. As part of the Eviction Lab team, he is especially interested in studying the intersection of housing policy – namely, causes and consequences of housing instability – with education policy. Beyond policy research, Lavar is a classically-trained violinist, and enjoys music performance and rousing, relatively slow-paced games of tennis. Originally from Norfolk, Virginia, Lavar studied economics and mathematics at the University of Mary Washington and education policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2017-2019
Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Los Angeles
Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2017-2019
Ashley joined the Eviction Lab as a postdoctoral research associate after completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation research examined the formation and consequences of spatial clustering of children with non-medical exemptions to school vaccine requirements in California. More broadly, her research interests focus on how social networks and local communities provide the social context for individual decisions and events that aggregate to form macro-level patterns across space and time. She is particularly interested in how quantitative and computational methodology can be used with administrative and online data to gain new insights into social behavior and community-level outcomes. When not cleaning data (which she rather enjoys), she goes hiking, puts together puzzles, and has been working her way through Amazon’s list of 100 books to read in a lifetime.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2019-2021
Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2019-2021
Aparna completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation research studies the relationship between land conservation policies and economic development. A large part of her current research is devoted to studying the extent to which early land conservation policies in the USA affect later economic and environmental conditions in the Great Plains. More broadly, her research interests include how urban and rural land policies affect inequality. Her research combines methods and theories from environmental economics, economic history, and development economics with modern empirical strategies.
You can read more about her at aparnahowlader.com.
Research Specialist, 2019-2021
PhD student at Stanford University, Dept. of Sociology
Research Specialist, 2019-2021
Renee received her B.A. from Princeton University where she concentrated in Sociology and received a certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning. Her undergraduate research endeavors ranged from examining nonprofit Twitter behavior, analyzing attitudes towards inequality across forty years of survey data, as well as studying the experiences of student dining hall workers on campus. Her broader intellectual interests include the intersection of qualitative and quantitative methods in the social sciences. Originally from Singapore, Renee loves film, travel, stand-up comedy and R programming.
Research Lab Coordinator, 2019-2021
CUNY Graduate Center, PhD Student (Political Science)
Research Lab Coordinator, 2019-2021
Helena received her HBSc from the University of Toronto in 2017, and graduated from Columbia University’s MA in Global Thought program in 2019. She has worked at the nexus of health, politics and social inequality in academic and public service capacities, and is broadly interested in researching social welfare policy, urban inequality, citizenship and social stratification. Her extra-academic life consists of roaming around New York, drinking bodega iced coffee and sketching.
Research Specialist, 2017-2019
University of Washington, MPA ‘21
Research Specialist, 2017-2019
Adam is a research specialist with the Eviction Lab. He received his bachelor’s degree in Sociology with a concentration in analysis and research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Princeton, he supported social science research projects at the Center for Financial Security and the Environmental Resources Center. He also has a background in political organizing and community non-profits. At the eviction lab, Adam’s research interests include exploring the intersection between affordable housing policy, community health, and cooperative economic institutions.
We thank the following Citizen Researchers for helping us build America’s first national database of evictions by providing original data to the Eviction Lab. If you would like to share eviction data with us, please email research@evictionlab.org.
Associate Director, Data Science & Technology
Urban Institute
Assisted with: Washington, DC
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles
Assisted with: Los Angeles and California
Staff Attorney, Housing Unit
Community Legal Aid
Assisted with: Massachusetts
Moore/Sloan Data Science Postdoc, Department of Sociology
University of Washington
Assisted with: Washington State
Assisted with: Kansas and Missouri
Housing Policy Analysts
Community Service Society
Assisted with: New York City
Contract Performance Officer
Philadelphia Legal Assistance
Assisted with: Pennsylvania
Attorney at Law
Legal Aid of the Bluegrass
Assisted With: Kentucky
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