A PERSONAL STATEMENT
Welcome to the NYC Evictions Atlas. I created this series of maps as part of my involvement with the
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data visualization and storytelling collective documenting displacement and dispossession in gentrifying landscapes. I originally got involved with AEMP in San Francisco back in 2014, and I am now a part of the New York City chapter.
Many of the maps here were inspired by earlier maps created in San Francisco, and I want to honor the work of the many activists, cartographers, organizers, artists, developers, and data activists whose intellectual labor and skills have gone into imagining and creating these maps before me.
While I developed this Atlas as part of my final project for the Advanced GIS class at the New School, I want to emphasize that all of these maps were made possible by the love and labor of many passionate people. Our society tends to individualize success, looking for leaders and heroes, yet social movements are built out of the often uncompensated and insibilized collective labor of many. In my activist life, I have seen in particular how women are fierce yet humble leaders of movements who rarely seek out praise for their undenying commitments to social change.
Here are a few acknowledgements I want to make for this Atlas:
- The NYC Marshals Evictions dataset was deduplicated and cleaned row-by-row by members of the Housing Data Coalition and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.
- Sam Raby from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project developed the NYC Evictions Map, which I then re-styled and added information to for the Redlining Map, the Race & Evictions Map, and the Pledge Map. Many members of the AEMP community were involved in workshopping the Evictions Map over the last few months, offering invaluable feedback and insights for improving the map.
- JustFixNYC developed the profiles of Worst Evictors in collaboration with the Right to Counsel coalition, which I added as a sidebar to our Evictions Map, to connect the systemic nature of the evictions crisis to specific landlords we hope to hold accountable. JustFix, AEMP, and RTC released a joint website on Monday, May 6, 2019 to put the worst evictors on blast. You can view it here!