"The average age of a homeless person in America is 9," said Matthew Desmond on NPR, at the Urban Institute, and at the National Building Museum. The author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, 2016), was discussing two projects launched this month: a year-long exhibition at the Washington, D.C., museum and the debut of Eviction Lab, a website created by a team at Princeton University that maps eviction records from across the United States.
Inspired by Desmond's book, the National Building Museum show combines three-dimensional infographics with a series of short films by New York–based Unfurl Productions. It combines the macro and micro: nationwide statistics combined with individual stories.
Curator Sarah Leavitt says she hopes visitors to the exhibition learn that evictions are not "an individual problem" but part of a national crisis. “On a much smaller level, I hope that they are just moved ... I hope that they get a little upset and then are able to see how to turn that around—either activism, which would be great, or at least some deeper understanding of the crisis.”
Conversely, the Eviction Lab website (for which Desmond is the principal investigator) deals primarily in the macro. The website was launched with eviction data from approximately 83 million court records from 2000 through 2016, and overlays that data with U.S. Census data on statistics such as poverty rate, median household income, and racial makeup. The maps range in scale from statewide statistics to as small as census tracts and census block groups.
"I think it can work with in-depth journalism or ethonography or storytelling because you can kind of ask questions," Desmond says. "You can zoom in on Atlanta, for example, and you can say 'Okay, here’s a poor neighborhood, here’s another one, they have very different poverty rates, let’s hit the ground, let’s figure that out, let’s dig into this.' So the data or the more macro approach can actually encourage or motivate certain kinds of more on-the-ground reporting too, I think—we hope."
The website doesn't currently include informal evictions, only ones that have made it to the courts. "We’re still working on filling out holes in the data," Desmond says. "So that’s the first next step. So the next big announcement from the Eviction Lab will be this is what we think is the national eviction rate, the best that we can estimate."
