WOC Initiative Project Highlight- Mapping Eviction
BY BRITTNEY MILES
There is amazing work-in-progress emerging in The Cincinnati Project’s 2018 initiative to highlight the experiences and voices of women of color, funded by the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. One highlight is the work of Elaina Johns-Wolfe and the students in her Urban Society sociology course. They are partnering with Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME)and Legal Aid of Southwest Ohio to illuminate the experiences of eviction in our community. Together, using a community-partnered research model from The Cincinnati Project, they are working to understand who is evicted, how they are evicted, by whom they are evicted, and the communities from which they are evicted. Previous research shows that the socioeconomic problems of eviction disproportionately impact women of color. This project will contribute to a more holistic picture of the experiences of housing instability and dispossession.
With the aid of eviction records and American Community Survey data, the goal of this project is to map the geography of eviction filings that occurred between 2014 and 2017 in Hamilton County. Finding itself at the intersection of statistical analyses and lived experiences, this project centers the experiences of a population displaced and often forgotten. Indeed, much of the research on housing instability focuses on the experiences of homeowners rather than of renters. Beyond the benefits of this research, this project goes one step further by supporting the local efforts of two organizations HOME and Legal Aid of Southwest Ohio to better understand housing in Hamilton County.
In addition to the grant support from the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, this project is made possible through a partnership between The Cincinnati Project and Texas A&M University’s GeoServices. We would also like to acknowledge the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts for their assistance in obtaining data on eviction filings in Hamilton County.