Welcome to the Eviction Lab. We hope you will engage with the data we’ve been able to gather and make public. Here are some considerations to keep in mind as you interpret our numbers. On the Map & Data section of our website, we have included a national database of eviction estimates.

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During The Eviction Lab’s first week online, we were encouraged to see interest in our dataset and website—and the eviction epidemic it reveals—from a number of major national media outlets. The New York Times profiled Richmond, VA (#2 in our Eviction Rankings) to demonstrate the effect of its staggering eviction numbers on residents of one city.

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Today on NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews Matthew Desmond, who helps put the eviction crisis in perspective. Desmond, on the estimate that 2.3 million people faced eviction in 2016: “That’s twice the number of Americans that die in car accidents every day. That’s twice the number of people who get arrested for drug offenses every year.

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NPR’s Marketplace features an interview between host David Brancaccio and Matthew Desmond, detailing the shocking volume of evictions in the US, their deeper causes, and how the hotspots of the eviction crisis are often places you wouldn’t expect. Desmond: “If you read the news, you’d think that the housing crisis is basically in Seattle, and New York City, and San Francisco.

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The New York Times has chosen Richmond, VA (listed at #2 in our Eviction Rankings) as the focus of a front-page story, which also profiles Matthew Desmond and The Eviction Lab’s work in collecting over 83 million eviction records from across the country. The article details the “churning machine” of evictions in Richmond, driven by a court system that is often as inscrutable to tenants as it is unsparingly efficient in rendering judgments.

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