Data is at the heart of EarthTime, a visualization tool developed by Carnegie Mellon University' CREATE Lab in the Robotics Institute's, and Pittsburgh housing data has been a particular focus for project scientist Anne Wright for the past two years. That focus shifted, however, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic this past spring.
Now, Wright and her colleagues scrape the local court websites every day, gathering information about eviction filings and hearings. As part of an initiative called Eviction Rapid Response, they work with a variety of local organizations and volunteers to act on the data by alerting tenants about their rights and linking them to programs that can help them stay in their homes.
"People are being thrown into the deep end of a pool they didn't know existed," Wright said, noting that many tenants facing financial hard times during the COVID-19 pandemic haven't previously been through the eviction process. Tenants often don't know what they can do to halt or delay the loss of their dwelling.
Illah Nourbakhsh, K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies and director of the CREATE Lab, said the lab has always worked closely with community groups. But the role of its researchers necessarily expanded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"When COVID-19 hit, we focused on the urgent needs of the community," he said. That meant making the lab's unique resources and capabilities — such as data-gathering and logistics — available to local groups to fill gaps in services.
"This is very different from operating in an ivory tower," he noted. "I think what we're doing is unique."
The EarthTime housing project has addressed questions such as racial equity in mortgage approvals, effects of gentrification and how families are displaced across school attendance areas. Some of this data is readily available from public sources, such as the federal Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act, which the researchers then map out. Eviction data, Wright said, has been harder to come by.
