COVID-19 and Displacement of Communities in Los Angeles
The longer-term impacts of the pandemic on displacement in our region will be felt most acutely in neighborhoods where residents have been cost-burdened before the global pandemic and rise in unemployment. According to the recent UCLA study, two million households in California have ‘little to no confidence’ in their ability to pay rent in January 2021. Low-income households, low-wage workers, and housing insecure individuals are highly dependent on city, county and state eviction moratoriums, centralized relief programs and unemployment payments. To better direct resources to areas with the highest concentration of at-risk tenants, there is a need to determine the most vulnerable households for whom eviction leads to homelessness and decreases opportunities to rent again.
Public agencies and research institutions have a myriad of ways to define vulnerable, insecure and sensitive communities. Most of them rely on the digitally mediated geographic knowledge from U.S. Census, U.S. Bureau of Labor, HCID and other established authorities. While acknowledging the importance of centralized and ‘cleaned up’ data, this research project actively invites different perspectives into data analysis that are attuned to the things that fall outside of the conventional datasets.
This analysis overlays aggregate data that describes displacement pressure, like distribution of small rental apartment buildings, change in home values, median income, and unemployment rate per sector. Further, we augment these maps with individual data that acknowledges the multiplicity of voices. For instance, the AI-based sentiment analysis will result in a heterogeneous array of subjective visions of the current eviction crisis on various social media platforms. The data from webpages dedicated to apartment listings will include the geo-location, date and price of housing units as they enter the market before they get aggregated into median values that mask specific realities.
Our anticipated outcome is a collection of datasets that can help identify eviction hotspots that require housing assistance through cartographic and analytical techniques. The developed methodology will be scalable and flexible in responding to continuously changing conditions and the magnitude of the problem. This work will enable policymakers, community organizers, non-profit developers and other urban agencies to make more informed decisions based on a detailed picture of vulnerable neighborhoods in LA County and design geographically targeted relief programs.