[Civic] Data Engineering

Building a system to track Milwaukee evictions.

Branden DuPont

Eviction as a Social Determinant of Health

• Displacement
• Children

  • Education – Increased absences due to instability or school changes due to relocation

  • Direct correlation between ER visits for children and housing instability

• Adults

  • Education

  • Employment

    • Difficulty getting new job without permanent address

    • Risk of losing current job due to housing instability, relocation, transportation, etc.

• Health

  • Housing conditions (worsened by cycle of eviction) like lack of heat, mold, infestations, etc. lead to health issues

  • Mental Health (perceptions of procedural fairness)

• Family

  • Families can be separated or forced into unsafe housing conditions due to housing instability

  • Neighborhoods see increased crime in areas with high turnover and lack of community

Eviction Database Background

• Eviction database developed as a joint partnership
• Stemmed from the need to identify basic eviction data
• "Less than 1% of tenants in eviction filings, 112 out of 13,457, were represented by counsel in 2016" - Raphael Ramos

Policymakers, Researchers, & Community Members Need Eviction Data

• Difficult to understand drivers of eviction and design prevention strategies
• No ability to monitor and identify trends
• Community unable to view a properties eviction record
• Conducting additional research prohibitive

 Datashare @ MCW = Local IDS

What Was Built

• Automated database that maintains Milwaukee eviction records
• Pipeline that assigns evictions to an address and taxkey
• Series of visualizations on aggregate eviction metrics
• Parcel level map of eviction filings
• Linked eviction records with building code violations issued within 90 days as well as open at the time of filing

Consider a Basic Question on Eviction

• "He'll evict you in a minute" - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Youssef "Joe" Berrada's Use of Eviction
• High eviction filing rate or does Berrada just own a large number of properties?

Data Needed To Construct an Eviction Filing Rate

• Court records on eviction - small claims case
• Address the eviction took place
• Taxkey information for that address
• The number of units at that property
• The primary land use of the property (multi-family or single-two family)

ETL: a hard ^#&@ing problem

Dave Guarino, ETL for America

• "Many of the problems government confronts with technology are fundamentally about data integration"
• Or, there is a reason no one was tracking evictions before

Getting Eviction Data

Got Eviction Data:

Deeply Nested JSON

• Data needs to be parsed into 8 tables
• Re-pull entire case for any slight change
• Retention rules: data needs to be stored and deduplicated

Get Eviction Location

• Drew from an established set of guidelines set forth by Matt Desmond's Eviction Lab Methods Report
• Defendant in cases earliest address is used to represent an eviction location

  • Series of steps to match the defendant address to exact address listed by City of Milwaukee to get Taxkey

  • 94.8% match rate compared to 93% match for Eviction Lab

Match an Eviction Record to an Address

• Defendant address formatted exactly as in city address
• Extensive series of steps to clean addresses

What Is A Taxkey or Parcel?

Taxkey is a unique ten-digit number assigned to each parcel.

Eviction Filing Rate

Me explaining why standardizing your variables is important: Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti

Foundational Work Comes First

Source:Monica Rogati’s  “The AI Hierarchy of Needs”

"Nowadays, I understand counting carefully and intelligently is what analytics is largely about, and this type of foundational work is especially important when we live in a world filled with constant buzzwords and hypes." - Robert Chang

Evictions and Code Violations: Retaliation and Warranty of Habitability

• Use distance in time and open at filing as proxy
• Ordinances/Adopted State Statutes are unclassified
  • makes categorization difficult
• Exclude violations that seem unlikely to be retaliatory. (external violations)
• Identify violations that affect Warranty of Habitability

Counting Carefully and Intelligently

• Inefficient to categorize ~912 ordinance/statutes
• Separated ordinance/statutes to get subchapter categories
  • e.g. 275-82.1 - related to bed bugs
  • Seperated "275-82" to get the sub chapter Extermination
  • Categorized 95% of ordinances/statutes with 62 sub chapters.

Specific Categories

(affecting habitability of home)

• Bed Bugs - ordinances/text in order
• Pests - ordinances/text
• Heat issues vs. Restore Heat
  • 275-61 -repair or replace defective heating system. restore heating system to a safe and operable condition capable of adequately heating all habitable rooms, bathrooms and toilet rooms to a temperature of at least 67 degrees Fahrenheit continuously during periods of occupancy
• General sub-chapters - interior structure, plumbing, sanitary conditions.

Distance in Time and Open Violations At Eviction Filing

• Currently: assigned 30,60,90 days after code violation
  • unreliable in large multi-families
• Properties with unresolved code violation at the time of eviction filing
  • checks whether a parcel had any open violation when an eviction is filed
• More than one eviction, order, or violation within 90 days or at time of eviction filing
• Open violations are defined violations whose last statues are not final:

Thoughts on Scope

Outcomes

• Featured in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Next City, & The Sunlight Foundation
• Viz Interactions > 80,000
• Shared publicly > 850
• Provide stakeholders with a key source of data to inform housing policy and understand drivers of eviction (local researcher, city agencies, etc.)
• Understand relationship between habitability of rental housing and evictions
•  Establish Right to Counsel: reduce evictions and increase housing stability

Questions?