[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?

 

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