Dear friend,

Welcome to the “FEAT Takeover” of Frontier, the monthly newsletter from the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America. This month, we are dedicating our update to an exciting milestone in our eviction and foreclosure data work with the release of FEAT and a virtual release event on March 2, 2022 (what’s FEAT, you ask? Read on…).

In September 2020, our Displaced in America report spotlighted just how precarious housing security is for millions of families across the U.S.—something as commonplace as a flat tire could be the difference in whether a family can afford to keep a roof over their head or not. The report also highlighted just how little we know about these devastating occurrences, with one-third of U.S. counties reporting no annual eviction or foreclosure figures.

While access to this data is a major barrier for many cities and counties, so too is the capacity to analyze this data, even when it’s available. And without this analysis, local leaders can’t make informed decisions about how to target outreach and allocate rental assistance, or which housing policies and programs are most effective at keeping people housed.

Today, we are taking a step towards closing the housing loss data gap with the release of the Foreclosure and Eviction Analysis Tool (FEAT), an open source tool that helps cities and counties with access to local data better track and prevent housing loss over time. 

FEAT can help create maps of eviction and foreclosures, similar to this map of Harris County, TX.

Developed in partnership with DataKind, and a cohort of over a dozen U.S. cities and counties, FEAT allows local leaders to upload local eviction and foreclosure data, which it then standardizes and geocodes, and transforms into outputs that show where housing loss is most acute, when during the year housing loss is occurring, and who is most impacted.

FEAT is housed in a Github repository, and accompanied by a set of resources, including:

• A comprehensive, step-by-step user guide that walks through using the tool from data collection to interpretation of its outputs;
• A set of FAQs; and 
• A blog series sharing insights from cities and counties, and exploring why tools like FEAT are needed. 

🔊 And on March 2nd at 12pm ET, please join FLH and DataKind for a live demo of FEAT and a panel discussion featuring some of the cities who helped develop this tool and are using it to create more informed housing policies, research, and advocacy. Register here! 

As always, we welcome any ideas, questions, feedback, and collaboration on this work. To ensure you receive the most up-to-date information on FEAT and our other work on eviction and foreclosure data, please visit our project webpage and follow us on Twitter, @FLHatNewAmerica. 

- Yuliya Panfil, Future of Land and Housing Program Director

About New America

New America is dedicated to renewing the promise of America, bringing us closer to our nation’s highest ideals. We’re a different kind of think tank: one dedicated to public problem solving. Our team of visionary researchers, changemakers, technologists, and storytellers study and seize the opportunities presented by dramatic social and technological change. We search for powerful ideas, wherever they are, and collaborate with civic innovators around the world to develop evidence-based solutions.

The Future of Land and Housing Program at New America aims to help solve today’s land and housing rights challenges, both in the United States and internationally. Through our research and writing, convening, and collaboration with civic innovators worldwide, we strive to connect new constituencies, shed light on underreported issues, and implement creative approaches in the property rights space.

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