Situating Datasets: Making Public Eviction Data Actionable for Housing Justice

Title of the Paper

Situating Data Sets: Making Public Data Actionable for Housing Justice

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Data Science and Community Studies (Data Ethics, Activism, Housing Justice)
• Keywords: Open Data, Data Feminism, Critical Visualization, Housing Justice, Eviction Data, Counter-Mapping

Research Background and Problem Statement

• Problem Identification: While public data is increasingly accessible, significant challenges remain in its usability and actionability, particularly for community organizations such as anti-eviction tenant rights groups. Open data is often presented as "raw data dumping," with formats and delivery methods mismatched to community needs.
• Significance: Evictions severely impact low-income and minority communities, leading to health risks, homelessness, and exacerbating housing market inequalities. Leveraging eviction data to empower community organizations in combating this systemic issue is of critical importance.
• Motivation and Related Work:
  • Data feminism theories analyze the power dynamics of data, offering guidance for more inclusive and contextual designs.
  • Critical data studies and community collaborative design provide a theoretical foundation for exploring the relationship between data and social justice.

Proposed Solution

• Proposed Approach: Through long-term collaboration with a local tenant rights organization in Atlanta, the authors investigate how public eviction data can be aligned with community needs. They propose three design principles: becoming domain novices, pursuing data actionability, and evaluating designs based on social relationships rather than technical efficiency.
• Innovations: Introducing data feminism and standpoint theory to shift the design stance from "technical expert" to "community partner"; proposing a framework for transforming data from accessibility to actionability; designing two data visualization tools to support specific community actions.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Data Cleaning and Organization: Developing a "Data Handbook" to contextualize eviction data and enhance its readability.
  2. Community Collaboration: Conducting participatory design workshops and gathering feedback on data visualization prototypes.
  3. Technical Implementation: Developing interactive data visualization tools (Eviction Address Tracker and Starwood Map) to assist community organizations in identifying action priorities.

Research Outcomes

• Key Outcomes:
  1. Developed a dashboard to display eviction addresses, partially meeting community needs but falling short of driving strategic organizational change.
  2. Created the "Starwood Map," which integrates multiple datasets to identify properties owned by the private equity firm Starwood, enabling resource concentration strategies.
• Comparative Advantages: The Starwood Map demonstrated greater community actionability compared to the earlier Eviction Address Tracker, directly facilitating a strategic shift in tenant organization efforts (from reactive assistance to proactive resistance).
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • The Address Tracker improved data accessibility but failed to support actionable outcomes.
  • The Starwood Map catalyzed specific actions and became a driver for changing community organization strategies.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • The timeliness and completeness of datasets constrained the tools' usability over time.
  • Introduced the concept of "designing for tool graveyards," suggesting future research should evaluate how technological tools sustain social relationships rather than merely focusing on technical functionality.

Output Format

• Further Recommendations: In collaborating with communities, researchers need not only technical expertise but also a deep understanding of domain knowledge. They should prioritize the long-term maintenance of social relationships and strive to transform data into actionable resources.