Asya Aizman (Research Assistant to Dr. Eric Robsky Huntley and MCP Candidate at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning) presents “Who Evicts Us? A Landlord Attorney Case Study,” Thursday May 10, 5 - 6 pm, in The Nexus.

Evictions, court-ordered removals of tenants from their homes, are a much studied realm of the reproduction of spatial inequality. Research shows that court evictions disproportionately target minoritized populations, greatly amplifying those populations’ acute housing instability experiences. The research I will present analyzes the role of landlord attorneys in the eviction process. It will begin to answer: who are the people responsible for representing landlords and abetting evictions before and during the pandemic emergency? What kind of patterns can we surface in how they conduct their work? This project, done under the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Eric Robsky Huntley, attempts to close a gap in research, as the effects of landlords’ legal representation has not yet been studied. Finally, I will also touch on our work in progress: Mass Evictions, a database of deduplicated evictors in the state of Massachusetts.

Image credit: Eric Robsky Huntley