Hampton, Virginia: Using FEAT to Establish Regular Data Sharing Across City Departments

Partnered with: Housing leaders in the City of Hampton, Virginia on the development of FEAT.

When Eviction Lab first released eviction rankings in 2016, city leaders were dismayed to find that Hampton and surrounding cities had some of the highest eviction rates in the country. In figuring out ways to tackle rampant housing insecurity, housing leaders soon realized they lacked the data to truly understand how eviction processes were playing out in their own city. The FEAT partnership provided Hampton with the impetus to get to the bottom of who in the city had access to eviction data, and what types of data were available.

“One of the great outputs of this partnership is that we [now] have a process for sharing and analyzing our eviction data.” – Lauren White, City of Hampton

After some digging, the team discovered that the City’s Sheriff’s department received data regularly from the county court. Beyond using this data to serve court-ordered evictions to tenants, this data sat on a computer in the Sheriff’s department. Given the need for local eviction data in the testing of FEAT, the community development department and the sheriff’s department put in place a process to interchange data on a quarterly basis. With this data in hand, housing leaders will use FEAT to identify areas severely affected by evictions to target outreach and services, and open lines of communication with landlords and tenants in these neighborhoods.