EDRN Partner Spotlight: Just Neighbors and United Way

Thousands of families in Fort Wayne, Indiana, face eviction each year. While the case managers and court staff who interact with these tenants know some details about their situations, inaccessible data clouds the big picture on evictions across the community. Service providers, housing advocates, and local government are missing key information on who is getting evicted, where, and why.

To address this need for more eviction data, local nonprofits Just Neighbors Interfaith Homeless Network and United Way of Allen County joined the Eviction Data Response Network (EDRN), hosted by the Future of Land and Housing program (FLH) at New America. Alongside teams from eight other communities across the United States, Just Neighbors and United Way are collaborating with FLH to access, analyze, and communicate about Fort Wayne’s eviction data, with the goal of informing policies and programs that can keep people stably housed.

In mid-February, FLH joined Just Neighbors and United Way in Fort Wayne to co-host an eviction data workshop with twenty-five civic leaders, service providers, and public employees across the housing and homelessness space. Our shared goal: To identify data needs, and determine a set of manageable next steps that contribute towards shared data analysis and a stronger eviction prevention ecosystem.

Multiple meeting participants remarked that this group of stakeholders had never before been in the same room together—a testament to our local partners’ relationships and ability to activate so many members of their community. Convening representatives from the nonprofit, government, and legal sectors meant that we could hear from people whose work touches eviction at various points, and who have differing eviction data needs.

While each locality has slightly different rules, procedures, and terminology, the data trail for an eviction typically starts when a landlord files an eviction claim in court. As the case winds its ways through the legal system, it amasses data points that usually include a case number, filing date, rental address, and names of the plaintiff (landlord) and defendant (tenant). Once a case is decided, the dataset grows to include its judgment. Data is usually recorded by court clerks, and is increasingly—but not always—entered into electronic court docket systems. State or local laws may require that the individual case data is publicly available, and this information is sometimes aggregated for administrative or research purposes.

To open the workshop, Alisha Gil, Eviction Intervention Program Manager at Just Neighbors, provided a detailed overview of how the eviction process works in Fort Wayne, from the moment a landlord files an eviction case in Allen County Superior Court to the final hearing. The presentation set the stage for the rest of the meeting, as each step in this legal process leaves a bit of data that has the potential to be leveraged in helping housing stakeholders drive down evictions.

So what kinds of eviction data did participants think could help improve housing stability in Fort Wayne?

• Tenant demographics, including race, age, gender, and household composition, could help target prevention programs to at-risk populations.
• Renters’ financial circumstances, including the average amount of back rent owed, could calibrate rental assistance dollars.
• Statistics around legal representation could help make the case for more legal support and encourage tenants to seek out a lawyer.
• Data on landlords that file the most evictions could help with landlord engagement and target eviction prevention to troubled properties.
• The root cause of a missed rent payment—did a tenant experience a medical emergency, lose their job, or have to fix their car last month?—could help provide other forms of assistance to help keep tenants housed.
• Statistics on the proportion of eviction cases that are dismissed could encourage landlords to work with tenants on repayment plans rather than going to court.

In aggregate, participants thought this data could help them make the case for additional eviction prevention funding and resourcing.

Participants identified several key actions to better access and use eviction data. These include exploring whether the local court can share more widely the case data it already collects, and also service providers sharing administrative data they currently collect, as allowed by data privacy and sharing protocols. Participants also wondered about the feasibility of collecting qualitative data from tenants and landlords, a time-intensive exercise that would nonetheless allow researchers to dig deeper into the reasons bringing Fort Wayne residents to eviction court. Participants proposed to complement these strategies by using whatever eviction data they could get to advocate for more tenant resources. And finally, participants agreed that continuing to coordinate as a group, and with other existing eviction prevention efforts, will be an essential part of the work going forward.

Participants left the event energized and armed with new connections, both within their field and in other sectors. It’s our sense that, once participants are able to unlock more eviction data, they’ll put it to use immediately to boost housing stability. Overall, this convening was an important milestone in Fort Wayne’s journey towards using eviction data analysis to help prevent evictions. It will likely serve as a blueprint for stakeholder engagement sessions with FLH’s other EDRN partners across the country as we collectively work towards improved eviction data access and analysis.