Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

January 30, 2014
browser-based, cartography, data-visualization, museum

Created a series of maps as part of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data-visualization and digital storytelling collective working to document the housing crisis in San Francisco, California.

Ellis Animated map of Ellis Act Evictions in San Francisco, 2007-2011.

About

Each individual dot on these maps is a building in which all of the residents were evicted through no fault of their own. The size of the dots corresponds to the number of units in each building, and the map is animated to show the cumulation of these evictions over time.

The data used in these maps comes from the SF Rent Board and the SF Planning Commission. Maps showing housing data are nothing new, and have frequently been created by real estate companies and the assessors office to provide information to home buyers and landlords. These real estate maps are created with the very specific purposes of expediting the process of buyng and selling houses, in other words of displaying the economic rather than the human side of the housing market.

As a collective of activists and techworkers, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is interested in exploring and exposing the power relationships underpinning housing changes in the Bay Area. Some driving questions in this project have been:

  • What would a map of housing data created from the perspective of tenants, rather than home-buyers, look like?
  • In what ways is data perceived as “objective”, while actually reinforcing existing hierarchies of power and points of view?
  • How can a visualization evoke a more human realtionship to the data it represents?

combined Map of all No-Fault Evictions in San Francisco, 2007-2011.

Design & development: Olivia Jack
Concept and data gathering: Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

Created using d3.js, Leaflet, and CartoDB. Code on Github.

Press #

Al Jazeera+ made a video using the map:

see also: