Multiple Eviction

What is it about?

This article is an empirical examination of eviction in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin. We mapped eviction filings from 2000 to 2017 and created an index to assess types of neighborhood change. The findings show that eviction tends to be associated with neighborhoods of "continuously extremely high risk" with little demographic change. In addition, we also standardized the names of people listed in eviction filings and show that people with multiple eviction filings tend to be even more concentrated in these neighborhoods. Tracing their movement from one filing to next reveals that people with multiple evictions tend to move within and among these "continuously extremely high risk" neighborhoods.

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Why is it important?

The findings are important for several reasons. First, they demonstrate that eviction-based displacement may not necessarily produce outward movement away from neighborhoods. The spatial and temporal quality of the results consequently allow us to imagine a displacement process that may be due less to precariousness alone than to a structured and highly racialized form of exclusion at the urban scale that manifests itself as a patchwork of islands of extreme risk and eviction. This in turn implies that neighborhoods of concentrated and repeated eviction may be better interpreted as special geographies produced at the urban scale through various forms of exclusion—e.g. poverty, structured scarcity, racism, gentrification—such that the conditions for eviction-based displacement through property-owner mobilization of the state become reasonable and advantageous within certain neighborhoods.