By Tim Thomas, Moore/Sloane Postdoctoral Fellow
May 16, 2019
On May 9th, Governor Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5600 into law which extends the evictions pay-or-vacate notice in Washington from three days to 14 days. The Washington Evictions Research Project (WAEV) provided groundbreaking empirical evidence for stakeholders and policymakers to use to get this legislation passed through the house and senate.
Our research finds that evictions are prevalent where one in 55 adults had an eviction filing, are a civil rights issue where one in six black adults in Pierce and one in eleven black adults in King County had an eviction filing, and evictions are legally underrepresented where less than nine percent of defendants had legal representation.
We also find that evictions occur most in neighborhoods with high racial diversity and high compositions of residents of color; are located in the southerly suburbs of King County; and concentrated in the urban, historically black segregated, neighborhoods of Tacoma and Everett. Our public-facing study can be read at https://evictions.study.
The WAEV Project is still in its early stages. Regardless, its impact on this legislation provides an important step towards curbing the rise in homelessness by keeping vulnerable tenants housed. This work was only a small part of the grand efforts led by tenants, policymakers, and stakeholders. We intend to extend this work to cover the rest of Washington State and compare our findings with upcoming data from Oregon, Baltimore, and Detroit.
Our diverse team consists of:
Jeewon Ha – Undergraduate in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering
Find a link that describes the bill here: http://sdc.wastateleg.
This research was conducted within the context of the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative and UW Urbanalytics, both led by Bill Howe, with funding from Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the eScience Institute.
Additional funding for this research was provided by Enterprise Community Partners, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Material and staff support was provided by the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.