The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Atlanta Regional Commission, and Georgia Tech SCaRP and CSPAV labs have built a data tool to track what is happening with eviction filings — the Atlanta Region Eviction Tracker.
The data is from court records in the 5 local counties. The bank, university, and commission formed a regional coalition, the Southeastern Eviction Data Collective (SEEDC). Each of the different groups had different strengths and abilities (including abilities to request data, fund and maintain tools, ongoing relationships, and convening power). The coalition was able to access the data, visualize it, and maintain it with their different strengths.
They built a scraper and tracker to get the public court case records. The team also did user engagement with tenant advocacy, legal aid, and city housing officials. Advocates tended to want more address-level data, whereas government officials preferred a summarized data set.
This helped them get a balance between specific data & protection of tenant privacy. It’s aggregated at census tract-level, and there is a data request form for people who want more local, building-level data.
The data tracker went from a student project to a professional, hosted tool.
They showed the change in filing rate over time. This helps see how different government programs and assistance efforts may affect filing rates.
It also shows local hot spots so that you can see where there are main problems with evictions.
