West Coast Eviction Data

      Walking around the neighborhoods in the City of Portland, we see sprawling tents all around revealing the increasing problem of homelessness. Incomes for Americans of modest means have flatlined while housing costs have soared making housing less and less affordable leading to eviction and then homelessness. While it is a hard-to-fix national problem, it is more severe in the West Coast States where the cost of housing price and living cost has spiked in the past decade. To look more into the problem, we looked into the Eviction data and other factors like poverty-rate, median-gross-rent, median-property-value that might affect the bigger problem of homelessness and housing insecurity in the West Coast States.

      Evictions occur when tenants are legally forced to move from a housing property, often due to inability to pay rent. In many populated west coast cities there is a serious concern that increasing real estate prices and lack of affordable housing are causing more evictions, contributing to the issue of homelessness. Every time a formal eviction occurs, a legal case must first be filed by the property owner to obtain a court order forcing the tenants to leave. Eviction Lab, a research project at Princeton University, compiles data on evictions by searching the vast court records of different states using automated procedures. In each case, they are able to see the outcome (whether the landlord was successful in evicting the tenants) and thus count the number of successful evictions occuring for each state.

      Alongside these eviction rates, the Eviction Lab compiles other relevant data such as average rent costs, annual incomes, and poverty rates. The dataset in our package contains these variables alongside eviction rates for Washington, Oregon, and California from 2000-2016. As an example of how this data can be utilized, we generated the following graphs. These show us that although rent burden increased from 2000 to 2016 in each of these states, eviction rates in that timeframe declined.