As Millions Lose Housing, Top Funders Back an Acclaimed Author's Data Shop

In 2008, the number of U.S. homes under foreclosure jumped to over 2.3 million, kicking off a recession that laid waste to many middle-class Americans’ finances. The Great Recession will scar our collective sense of economic security for a while longer. But for millions of Americans with low incomes, there’s a very real sense in which that crisis is still underway.

While many low-income families rent their homes and can’t be foreclosed upon, they can be evicted. And according to sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of the 2016 book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” around 2.3 million evictions were filed in 2016. In other words, the poor are confronting an eviction crisis of just about the same magnitude as the foreclosure crisis, one that grinds on year after year despite a recovered economy.

As we’ve reported, anti-poverty funders finally seem to be paying more attention to root causes and “upstream determinants,” the ecosystem factors that make poverty almost impossible to tackle on an issue-by-issue basis. Lack of access to a decent education or a safe neighborhood, for instance, makes it that much harder for low-income families to stabilize. The same is true of housing insecurity. But while it’s relatively common—if difficult—for grantmakers to fund affordable housing construction and related projects, eviction hasn’t received much attention.

The Eviction Lab is Desmond’s attempt to change that. It’s a data shop based at Princeton University with a mission to gather, publish and map eviction data across the country. The project has attracted some powerful backers: the Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Ford Foundation and the JPB Foundation. Their support, and the Eviction Lab’s work itself, can tell us a lot about how anti-poverty philanthropy is developing.

From Bestseller to Big Data

Desmond began his deep dive into evictions in America at the height of the recession, and “Evicted” draws on research and reporting he conducted around that time. It tells the story of eight low-income families struggling to stay housed in an environment where the causes and effects of poverty blur into a self-perpetuating hell of bad options and impossible choices.

The book set off a stir, making bestseller lists and winning Desmond a 2017 Pulitzer for general nonfiction. Its grim thesis—that eviction functions as a cause of poverty, not just its consequence—is yet another argument that being poor can be a kind of socioeconomic black hole, a downward spiral from which there’s no easy escape. Crucially, Desmond’s book doesn’t leave out the concept of exploitation and the profits to be had on the backs of the evicted. “Poverty in America has become a lucrative business, with appalling results,” wrote anti-poverty activist Barbara Ehrenreich in a 2016 review of Desmond’s opus.

“Evicted” painted a bleak picture of eviction exacerbating poverty for individual families, and it left people wanting to know more. “Going around the country talking to folks, people asked me questions about the overall scope of the problem or what the scale of the eviction crisis was like in their communities,” Desmond told me. “My answer to all of these questions was: I don’t know.” The federal government doesn’t collect data on evictions. “It’s kind of like us not knowing how many car accidents happened in a given year,” he said.

That dearth of data convinced Desmond that the best way to build on the book’s success was to create the nation’s first eviction database. He turned to the Gates Foundation for funding. At the time, Gates was some way off from announcing its first major foray into U.S. anti-poverty giving—it unveiled its $158 million Economic Opportunity and Mobility program last year. But that program was already under development when Desmond connected with Ryan Rippel, now director of Gates’ economic opportunity portfolio.

According to Desmond, the partnership with Gates was instrumental in getting the Eviction Lab off the ground. “I wrote [Rippel] a proposal and he said, ‘You’re not thinking big enough,’” Desmond said. Those early discussions helped him get to a point where he felt confident asking: Can we collect every single eviction record out there, and can we design a web platform that’s really interactive? To date, Gates has made two grants to support the Eviction Lab: a three-year commitment of $1.3 million in 2016 and another three-year grant of $2.5 million in 2019.

Gates’ partnership with a nationally recognized anti-poverty author was a sign of funding to come. “Through the foundation’s work in education, it became apparent that education was not the only intervention that was needed to improve opportunity,” Rippel said. “As a result, the foundation determined that there could be new ways to leverage partners and complement our continued investments in U.S. education and global health and development.”

Gates was the first mover, but the book’s notoriety drew other big-name funders to Desmond’s cause. He credits the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with “providing a gift that allowed us to get off the ground really quickly.” CZI has emerged as an important housing funder in the Bay Area and elsewhere in California, willing to wade into tough policy fights and backing community voices, including nonprofits that fight evictions like Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto. The JPB Foundation has also come on board, supporting the Eviction Lab in connection with a wider anti-poverty portfolio focused on economic justice.

For the Ford Foundation, narrative and storytelling potential made the Eviction Lab a worthwhile investment. “The millions of families and individuals enduring the stacked deck of eviction have largely felt invisible, and their plights underreported. But we now have a powerful narrative that is rooted in lived experience,” said Amy Kenyon, senior program officer on Ford’s Cities and States team.

As we’ve reported, Ford’s community development bona fides give it a good base and network to draw upon as it funds less-concrete attempts to shift narratives. And while big data initiatives have attracted their share of Ford dollars, Kenyon emphasized that “data by itself does not change hearts and minds.” Substantive change requires conveying the human impact of inequality, she said.

Pulling Back the Veil

The Eviction Lab formally got off the ground in April of 2018. So far, the centerpiece of its work is a customizable map that lets users pair eviction data with a variety of census datasets including population, poverty rate, median income, rent burden and racial/ethnic demographics. The lab also provides rankings, limited so far to a list of the U.S. cities with the highest eviction rates.

Those eviction rankings prompted what may be the most direct policy shift traceable to Desmond’s work to date. It all began when the New York Times ran a piece on the Eviction Lab’s analysis of municipal eviction rates. The state of Virginia came out looking pretty bad, with no fewer than five cities on Desmond’s top 10 for eviction. Renters in Richmond had it particularly hard in 2016 with an eviction rate of 11.44 percent (only bested by North Charleston, South Carolina, at 16.5 percent that year).

The New York Times story brought national attention to Virginia’s eviction crisis, and local news outlets quickly picked up on the thread. That surge of attention led to heightened scrutiny of state laws and local policies, and the city of Richmond soon implemented Virginia’s first eviction diversion program. Eviction diversion is designed to help struggling tenants steer clear of the “Scarlet E” by setting up payment plans and providing financial literacy education to make sure landlords get their due, with pro bono lawyers acting as go-betweens. With backing from Ford, Virginia has now set up its own eviction data lab at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Desmond is enthusiastic about how quickly the Eviction Lab garnered results on the ground. “It’s amazing to go from launch to tangible, real policy change in such a short time,” he said. He’s hopeful that the lab’s work will help grassroots organizers and local politicians formulate responses to the eviction crisis. He mentioned New York City, Philadelphia and Newark, all of which either passed or are in the process of passing new legislation to protect tenants.

Although better data is certainly a handy instrument in the policy toolbox, Desmond sees the Eviction Lab as a support to organizers and policymakers, not as a leading voice in the housing debate. “We’re in a moment where there’s an incredible amount of energy around addressing the affordable housing crisis,” he said. “Our hope was that if we built this tool, made it really user-friendly and interactive, and then got out of the way, we could have a bigger impact on narrative and policy than if we took a more vocal approach.”

Gathering Data, Changing Narratives

Something similar can be said of prominent anti-poverty givers, most of whom are still reluctant to get down and dirty in the policy arena. Data is a popular funding vector among living billionaires interested in tackling poverty. The Eviction Lab certainly fits that bill with support from Gates, CZI and JPB. So does Opportunity Insights, the research institute at Harvard founded by economist Raj Chetty to examine economic opportunity on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Gates, Bloomberg and CZI are a few of its biggest donors. The Ballmer Group and Arnold Ventures are also important funders in this space.

Many of the same funders—along with legacy institutions like Ford and MacArthur—have backed data collection to spur change on a similarly decentralized front: criminal justice reform. That story is still playing out, but it’s clear that for both justice reform and poverty, funders see data-driven narrative change as a crucial piece of the puzzle.

"What has made the work of Matt Desmond so powerful is that he brings to bear not just the alarming data and a crystal-clear analysis of the negative impacts of eviction to our society, but there’s also an essential storytelling component that elicits empathy and greater understanding of the human toll of the housing crisis,” Ford’s Kenyon said. In addition to backing the Eviction Lab and Virginia’s own spinoff lab, Ford has gotten behind media projects to shine a light on eviction, such as the WNYC podcast, “The Scarlet E.”

Recently, Gates also upped the ante on narrative change with Voices for Economic Opportunity, the foundation’s first Grand Challenge with a U.S. focus. The aim is to gather novel ideas to address “myths and misconceptions” about poverty in this country. According to Rippel, supporting local narrative change on housing was a key purpose of the Gates’ second grant to Desmond.

Desmond and team now want to fill in gaps in their data. They encourage communities to let them know where the data falls short. Building on data the lab has collected, Desmond also wants to ask “super-basic questions about the eviction crisis that we couldn’t get to before” like how much money people are getting evicted for in different communities and which laws work to address the crisis. He also wants to dig into “nontrivial” eviction rates in rural and suburban communities. In addition to funding data, narrative change and investigative journalism, he suggested philanthropy could chip in by giving more to grassroots tenants’ rights organizations and studying how to “transform eviction court into an actual institution of justice.”

“This is the spearpoint of the housing crisis, where the human record of the housing crisis is on full display,” Desmond said. “The deep solution is more affordable housing, but there are all these other creative ways to get at the problem.”

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