NYC Evictions Atlas

New York, NY

By Manon Vergerio
evictions, housing justice, dispossession, tenant organizing

The NYC Evictions Atlas visualizes the systemic nature and historical roots of the city’s eviction crisis.

Main Image Photo Credit: Rob Robinson

Welcome to the NYC Evictions Atlas. I created this series of maps as part of my involvement with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a data visualization and storytelling collective documenting displacement and dispossession in gentrifying landscapes. This atlas explores and visualizes evictions in New York City as a systemic crisis with deep historical roots.

Many of the maps here were inspired by earlier maps created by AEMP in San Francisco, and I want to honor the work of the many activists, cartographers, organizers, artists, developers, and data activists whose intellectual labor and skills have gone into imagining and creating these maps before me. While I developed this Atlas as part of my final project for the Advanced GIS class at the New School, I want to emphasize that all of these maps were made possible by the love and labor of many people and developed as part of a collaborative process. Our society tends to individualize success, looking for leaders and heroes, yet social movements are built out of the often uncompensated and invisibilized collective labor of many.

A few acknowledgments I would like to make: members of the Housing Data Coalition and AEMP for spending many volunteer hours cleaning data row-by-row; Sam Raby from AEMP for creating the citywide NYC Evictions map and doing a tremendous amount of work over the last months, JustFixNYC for analyzing ownership data to identify serial evictors; and Right to Counsel organizers and tenants for their on-the-ground and embodied knowledge of the eviction crisis. You can view the public result of our collaboration here.

Credit: Map developed by Sam Raby from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. The Serial Evictors were identified by data analysis from JustFixNYC and on-the-ground knowledge from tenants organizers at the Right to Counsel coalition.

There were 18,007 residential evictions carried out by Marshals in New York City in 2018. Let that number sit for a minute. If you have ever sat in court with a loved one fighting an eviction or heard from an elder who is being displaced from their long-time neighborhood, you know that every single one of those 18,007 evictions had a devastating impact on someone’s life. Despite the sheer enormity of this number, tenants are often blamed for their own evictions, for falling behind on rent or for being “bad tenants” who don’t fit into the system. Yet, when you witness the scale of the eviction crisis in NYC, you know something is up. This is not an individual problem, but the very way the housing system is set up to work.

This data does not even tell the whole story: this is only the number of evictions that were physically carried out by Marshals. When served with an eviction notice, many tenants move out of their apartments before their landlord hires a Marshal to forcefully evict them. Often, landlords file bogus eviction cases over and over again as an intimidation tactics to displace tenants and replace them with higher-paying residents. Despite pressure from advocates, the City has yet to release up-to-date data about eviction filings, which would reveal how evictions are used as a harassment tactic. Thankfully, thanks to the Right to Counsel legislation which provides free legal representation to tenants facing eviction cases, more and more tenants are able to fight back in housing court and win their eviction cases.

Evictions inscribe themselves in a long cycle of racialized disinvestment-reinvestment. In the 1930s, the federal government instituted a national policy of mortgage lending based on racial hierarchies. Maps of every major American city were drawn up to determine how “safe” each neighborhood was to receive loans from the Homeowner Loans Corporation (HOLC) based on a rating. Any neighborhood that had more than 5% Black residents was immediately “redlining,” deemed to risky for mortgage lending. Based on these racist assumptions, POC neighborhoods across the US were systematically disinvested, while white families were offered loans to flee urban centers and settle in affluent suburbs to pursue the American dream of homeownership.

“White flight” was facilitated by the federal urban renewal program in the postwar context, which tore down neighborhoods deemed “blighted” or depressed to make way for highways that made commuting from suburbs to urban job centers much easier. Thousands of families, primarily in communities of color, were uprooted by urban renewal under the guidance of Robert Moses in NYC, destroying the urban fabric and social networks of these neighborhoods. After redlining barred entire neighborhoods out of the mortgage system and urban renewal tore them apart, many neighborhoods faced hardships.

Throughout the 1970s, the City of New York instituted a policy of “planned shrinkage,” where neighborhoods deemed worthless saw their public services shut down. The “Decade of Fire” in the Bronx is the most infamous example of how the City facilitated the near-decimation of an entire borough.

To visualize how the afterlives of racialized urban planning impact New Yorkers today, visit the Race & Evictions map of this Atlas.

RACE & EVICTIONS

After decades of racialized disinvestment through redlining and urban renewal and hard-won battles by community organizations, communities of color across New York City are now at the frontier of gentrification. Far from being a coincidence, this neighborhoods present what critical geographer calls a “Rent Gap” - a profitable discrepancy between current property values and potential future values based on city policy. Real estate developers have their eyes on the prize. Through city policies such as rezonings, these neighborhoods are being revalued overnight, paving the way for predatory speculative development and a new wave of displacement. It is within this context of “racial capitalism,” embodied by longstanding racialized urban planning policies that benefit the private sector while dispossessing the poor, that we must understand gentrification and displacement today.

Evictions are not inevitable! There is a growing movement in the city to stop evictions through collective organizing and stronger legal protections for tenants. On an individual basis, you can also take small actions to break the cycle of evictions-as-dispossession. This map invites you to look-up an address to see its recent eviction history. Take a stand today! Join us an pledge to not rent or buy a unit that is available as the result of an eviction.