(Spring 2021) This project was a final capstone project required to receive a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree from the University of Michigan, and was created for Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan Presidential Initiative focused on preventing and alleviating poverty. Project members included Aaron Krusniak, Nani Wolf, Ziqian Yin, Ziyi Guo, Damian Arnaiz, Nadia Karizat, Lindsey Dowswell, Edwin Peart, and Christian Hunter. The capstone’s faculty advisor was Harley Etienne.
Eviction has serious consequences on an individual’s health and material well-being, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, eviction has also had serious implications for public health— with some studies estimating that national moratoria on evictions and public utility disconnections between March and November 2020 could have reduced COVID-19 deaths by over 40%. Detroit had a high eviction rate relative to cities of similar size even before the pandemic, and its residents face additional economic and other factors that increase eviction and COVID-19 risk. To further study these overlapping crises and provide timely data that can help the City of Detroit and various housing advocacy organizations mitigate their effects, this project created an online data dashboard tracking eviction and COVID-19. This dashboard will continue to be updated with the latest data for the duration of the pandemic.
The public data dashboard, accompanied by a full report and analysis produced by the capstone, is expected to be published by Poverty Solutions in early summer 2021. Please check back for more updates; in the meantime, a beta version of the dashboard can be viewed here.
aaron krusniak 