Eviction Lab

Eviction Lab
Name	Eviction Lab
Formation	2016
Founders	Matthew Desmond
Type	Research project
Headquarters	Princeton, New Jersey
Parent organization	Princeton University

Eviction Lab Eviction Lab is a research project based at Princeton University that compiles, analyzes, and visualizes data on residential eviction in the United States. Founded to provide a national evidence base on housing instability, the project has produced datasets, interactive maps, and reports used by scholars, policymakers, and advocates. Its work intersects with studies of poverty, urban policy, housing law, and social welfare across American cities, counties, and states.

Overview

Eviction Lab aggregates court records, administrative files, and survey data to produce national and local measures of eviction filings and outcomes. The project is housed within an academic setting and collaborates with universities, legal organizations, and philanthropic funders to expand coverage and improve methods. Its public-facing tools include an interactive national map, customizable datasets, and reproducible code intended to support research by journalists, nonprofit organizations, legislators, and municipal agencies. The Lab’s outputs are cited in scholarship, litigation, and policy proposals addressing housing instability, homelessness, and tenant protections.

History and Development

Launched in 2016, the effort grew from academic research on housing precarity and mass eviction in American cities. The founder recruited multidisciplinary teams from sociology, data science, and law to systematize disparate court records into a harmonized dataset. Early phases prioritized major metropolitan areas before scaling to statewide coverage with support from institutional partners. Over time, the project expanded to include historical time series, neighborhood-level indicators, and documentation of methodological decisions to enhance transparency. Collaborators have included legal aid organizations, municipal housing departments, and national research institutes in iterative data collection efforts.

Research Methodology and Data

The Lab constructs its datasets by scraping digital court dockets, digitizing paper records, standardizing case-level variables, and linking records to geographic boundaries such as census tracts and counties. Methodological choices address problems like duplicate records, sealed cases, and heterogeneous filing codes across jurisdictions. Data harmonization draws on classification frameworks from civil procedure and housing court practice, while geocoding employs parcel and address-matching resources to assign location. The team applies statistical methods for rate estimation, small-area smoothing, and trend decomposition to produce comparable eviction rates across time and place. Documentation of codebooks and cleaning algorithms aims to enable replication by researchers, journalists, and nonprofit partners.

Major Findings and Publications

Analyses produced by the project and affiliated researchers have documented the scale, geographic concentration, and demographic correlates of eviction in the United States. Studies show elevated eviction filing rates in specific metropolitan regions and disproportionate effects on renters with low incomes, single parents, and communities of color. Publications include peer-reviewed articles, working papers, and policy briefs that quantify annual filing volumes, eviction prevalence by neighborhood, and the relationship between eviction and subsequent homelessness, employment disruption, and health outcomes. The Lab’s visualizations and data tables have been used in national media coverage and academic syntheses on housing precarity, urban inequality, and social determinants of health.

Policy Impact and Advocacy

The project’s empirical outputs have informed legislative debates, municipal ordinances, and advocacy campaigns focused on tenant protections, rental assistance, and court procedure reform. Policymakers and advocates have cited its maps and datasets in proposing right-to-counsel initiatives, emergency rental aid programs, and eviction moratoria during public-health crises. Partnerships with legal-service organizations and civic groups have leveraged case-level data to prioritize outreach, monitor compliance with state laws, and design targeted prevention programs. The Lab’s evidence base has been referenced in testimony before municipal councils and state legislatures, and by foundations funding housing-stability interventions.

Criticism and Controversies

Researchers and practitioners have raised critiques about data completeness, measurement error, and interpretive limits of court-file-based metrics. Concerns include undercounting informal evictions, variability in filing practices across jurisdictions, and difficulty capturing outcomes such as informal move-outs, negotiated settlements, or unfiled landlord actions. Methodological debates involve the trade-offs between spatial resolution and data accuracy, as well as potential misinterpretation of filing counts as synonymous with physical displacement. Some legal scholars and housing advocates caution against policy decisions that rely exclusively on filing data without complementary qualitative investigation and administrative records. The project has responded by publishing methodological notes, caveats, and code to allow users to assess robustness and limitations.

Category:Research organizations Category:Princeton University Category:Housing in the United States