While reporting on the looming eviction crisis, City Bureau’s housing team used data to find folks who were facing eviction.
By Justin Agrelo
City Bureau reporting fellow Woojae Julia Song interviews residents in line at the Illinois Secretary of State Facility about their housing information needs. (Photo: Justin Agrelo/City Bureau)
Early this month, City Bureau published The Housing Cliff, a look inside Chicago’s ongoing housing crisis from the perspective of the people experiencing it. For this story, we spoke with more than 30 tenants who were either hit with an eviction filing or were otherwise displaced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Housing Cliff is the culmination of an intense, weeks-long engagement project that began last summer.
Here’s how we pulled it off.
Using records requests and data to reach vulnerable communities
Reporting during the pandemic presented City Bureau’s housing team with a unique challenge: How do we find and center people experiencing housing insecurity at a time when people are keeping their distance? We couldn’t rely on in-person man on the street interviews or attending neighborhood town halls, so instead we approached the issue in several ways.
First, I submitted a records request to Chief Judge Timothy Evans of the Cook County Circuit Court asking for all eviction filings in 2020. We then identified 445 Chicago residents who were hit with an eviction filing after the state shut down in mid-March. The data listed people’s full names, addresses, and landlords who had filed against them. Then City Bureau reporting fellows Natalie Frasier, Malik Jackson, Woojae Julia Song and I mailed each renter a handwritten letter informing them of the filing, how we got their contact information and asking if they’d share their story with us. We modeled our letter after one ProPublica used in a similar engagement project. It took us about two weeks to hand stuff each envelope and mail them to each resident.
Here’s a copy of our engagement letter.
To supplement the letter, we created a social media campaign using a Google form that also asked renters to share their stories with us. In both the letter and the social media campaign, we made sure that our intentions were clear—that our aim was to shed light on what the media was calling the “eviction avalanche” from the perspective of the people experiencing it. We made sure people knew we were journalists working on a story and not government employees or housing experts. And we provided a clear way that they could get back in touch with us, if they wanted to at all.
Preparing envelopes with the engagement letters. (Photo: Justin Agrelo/City Bureau)
As a team, we discussed what it meant to be asking people facing a traumatic experience like eviction to share their stories with us during an especially difficult time. We decided that it wasn’t enough to simply gather folks’ stories without offering something in return. Woojae Julia Song compiled a list of housing resources we could share with each person who called us back regardless of their participation in the story. The list consisted of local resources like free legal aid clinics, tenant rights groups, support for domestic violence survivors, and where to find emergency housing.
The interviews
Many of the people we spoke with did not know they had been filed against. I spent much of those early phone conversations explaining how I found people’s information, the negative impacts an eviction filing can have on their ability to find future housing, and where they could find help. From those early calls, I started to see similarities in the conversations I was having. Most people wanted to share what they had experienced throughout the pandemic and how they ended up in the position they were in.
While learning how folks slipped through the cracks of local and federal support was important, we also needed to know what people’s lives were like before the pandemic in order for us to truly bear witness to this moment.
What were their hopes for this year? Were they settled and content? What were their ties to the place they were now being uprooted from? How did the pandemic create new challenges for them? How did it compound already existing ones? What did they want their neighbors and those in power to know about how the pandemic had impacted them?
City Bureau’s housing team sent 445 letters to renters facing eviction during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Justin Agrelo/City Bureau)
We learned that the pandemic upended people’s lives very quickly. That people didn’t have to lose their jobs to be impacted. Having your hours cut at work could be devastating for families living paycheck to paycheck. Some of the folks we spoke with didn’t really know where to turn to for help or that resources even existed. Eviction is an experience that’s often shrouded with shame and kept private behind closed doors. We also learned that landlords were using threats and coercion to force people from their homes despite the eviction moratorium. This is known as self-evicting and it’s one of the most common ways that renters have been pushed out of their homes this year, according to local housing advocates. And those threats were especially severe for the women we spoke with, who ultimately experienced violence at the hands of partners and landlords.
In the end, the housing team spoke with 32 Chicago residents who were threatened with housing insecurity during the pandemic and subsequent economic fallout. We kept close records of who called whom, what issues they were facing in their apartment, and why they believed they were filed against.
Most people were facing negligent conditions at home—from the minor (occasional pests) to the more severe (black mold). The majority of people we spoke with identified as either Black or Latinx, 20 of them were women and all of them had experienced some sort of financial or personal hardship that was directly related to the pandemic.
Impacts of this project
I’m always questioning my usefulness in the lives of the people who allow me their time and their stories. How does speaking to people about this incredibly traumatizing year actually benefit them? How do I measure impact in a city in dire need of structural change?
I often think back to a conversation I had with a community organizer in South Shore last year who told me that oftentimes the best way to be helpful for folks experiencing some form of social inequality is to help meet an immediate need of theirs. This can be something as simple as feeding people at an event. I believe this project was an example of that. We gave people a heads up that they had been filed against and connected them with organizations that could help them better navigate the eviction process. Graciela, one of the renters in the story, was able to have her eviction case thrown out after we connected her to The Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing who then provided her free legal representation.
It’s hard to tell what the full impact of The Housing Cliff will be or even how to measure it. In an ideal world, policymakers will step up and stem the tides of the eviction wave. And that could be our measuring stick. But then I think back to conversations I had with a renter that I’ll call Paula and remember that impact isn’t always tangible.
Paula is an older, disabled Latinx woman living in Back of the Yards with her grandkids. Her landlord filed to evict the family after Paula used her rent money to replace the apartment’s broken boiler that her landlord wouldn’t fix. During our first conversation, Paula was understandably emotional and frustrated. Her landlord had been tampering with their new boiler and harassing her to move for months. I shared some of the resources we had compiled with her and told her I’d call her back to see how things were going.
When I called her back about two weeks later, she was noticeably more upbeat. She thanked me for the initial call and said “it took a little pressure off me telling you what they were doing to me.” That she felt lighter. Paula’s story, for me, was a reminder of how important it can be to tell your story without being judged or blamed. How powerful it is to offer folks a space to be heard without asking for something in return.
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