Urban Displacement Project Releases Housing Precarity Risk Model

The Urban Displacement Project at the University of California at Berkeley has released its Housing Precarity Risk Model (HPRM) Dashboard, which maps neighborhood-level risk of eviction and low-income displacement in the 53 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Each census tract in these metro areas is given a HPRM score from 0 to 9, with higher scores indicating that residents are at greater risk of displacement. Black-headed and Latino-headed households disproportionately live in neighborhoods with high risks of eviction.

The interactive map allows users to see the number of renters in high-precarity neighborhoods, as well as more information about the underlying variables that contribute to a neighborhood’s HPRM score, including pre-pandemic eviction risk, pre-pandemic displacement risk, 2020 unemployment, and 2019-2020 change in unemployment. Since demographic trends affect these variables, the dashboard features a map showing racial segregation and a tool for users to overlay the map with census tracts that have a high student population (above 30%). Users can also look at the neighborhood-level COVID-19 infection rates of 3 metro areas, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle, to visualize how housing precarity overlaps with COVID-19 spread.

The tool shows that one in three households live in neighborhoods with moderate to high levels of vulnerability to evictions, 44% of renters live in neighborhoods with high level of housing precarity, and that evictions, economic shocks, and displacements disproportionately impact Black-headed and Latino-headed households. In fact, 73% of Black households live in neighborhoods with high risk of eviction.

Access the dashboard here: https://bit.ly/35YY8js