Projects

Project 1: Stepping Stones Report

In the first half of the semester, while learning more about R, reproducible data workflows, and ethical data practices, we began contributing to work for the City of Charlottesville to expand and enrich a community “Stepping Stones” report, a collection of 39 metrics to gauge well-being in Charlottesville and Albemarle. Working in teams, we divided up the metrics and built scripts to download updated measures and validate prior data, process and prepare the data, visualize the trends, and better contextualize changes over time. All our code and the resulting data are available on a GitHub repository; this will make future iterations of the report easier to generate and serves as a potential resource to expand to other localities.

Our work-to-date can be reviewed in the following team reports:

  • Team 1 report: Math SOLs, High school degree attainment, School reports of physical violence, Students identified as economically disadvantaged, Children in foster care, Adults experiencing homelessness
  • Team 2 report: Students with limited English, Homeowner burden, School reports of alcohol and drug offenses, Child abuse and neglect assessments/investigations, Mothers with access to prenatal care, Reading SOLs
  • Team 4 report: On-time high school graduation rates, Children living with two parents, School suspensions, Children in need of supervision, Juvenile arrests for crimes against persons, Mothers with no or late access to prenatal care
  • Team 5 report: Children living below poverty, Per capita income, Youth labor force participation and unemployment, Kindergartners identified for reading intervention, School division average daily attendance, Births to mothers with less than a 12th grade education, Sexually transmitted infections in youth (awaiting data transfer)
  • Team 6 report: Divorce rate, Voter registration, Births to mothers with less than a 12th grade education, Rental burden, School reports of weapons possession, Juvenile delinquency judgments, Arrests for underage alcohol offenses

The Equity Center at UVA will be continuing this work to compile the updated metrics into a single report in collaboration with the City’s Department of Human Services.

Project 2: Multiple Equity Center Projects

In the second half of the semester, we worked in teams on more open-ended projects that contribute to ongoing Equity Center efforts.

Police Stops

As part of the Determined series from the summer of 2020, journalist Jordy Yager’s Determined to be Free examined the disparate impact of mass incarceration on the Black community locally. He had several years worth of Charlottesville police data on temporary detentions, collected by local attorney Jeff Fogel through multiple FOIA requests. To support this community story and provide a more accessible look at the data, we generated a dashboard that looked at the data from several angles: the who, where, and why of stop and frisk events.

Since then, Virginia passed the Community Policing Act which prohibits bias-based profiling and requires policing agencies to “collect data pertaining to (i) all investigatory motor vehicle stops, (ii) all stop-and-frisks of a person based on reasonable suspicion, and (iii) all other investigatory detentions that do not result in an arrest or the issuance of a summons to be reported into the Community Policing Reporting Database.”

Beginning in July 2020, all law enforcement agencies were required to collect data “Each time a law-enforcement officer or State Police officer stops a driver of a motor vehicle, stops and frisks a person based on reasonable suspicion, or temporarily detains a person during any other investigatory stop.” The Department of State Police was required to maintain a statewide database of these reports.

We began exploring and analyzing this data:

Attorney Fees in Evictions

As part of a larger collaboration on housing justice, we’ve been working with a team at the RVA Eviction Lab to build data-informed tools for advocacy, including the Virginia Evictors Catalog. The overarching goal of the team is to create collaboratively-designed data tools to support community organizers, service providers, and policy advocates to address housing instability.

This work is informed by a community advisory committee with members from the Legal Aid Justice Center, Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, Richmond Tenants Union, Charlottesville’s Public Housing Association of Residents, Virginia Poverty Law Center, Virginia Community Voice, Piedmont Housing Alliance, Advocates for Richmond Youth, Charlottesville DSA, Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia, and the Charlotteville Human Rights Commission.

A member of the advisory committee asked if we could look into changes in attorney fees in eviction cases. They’ve noticed some law firms representing landlords advising them to insert a clause into leases asserting that tenants agree that, in the event of an eviction case, 25% of the costs being sought will be deemed a reasonable attorney fee. Do we see any increases in attorney fees being awarded in eviction cases overall, or if changes are evident among cases where landlords are represented by specific firms?

Understanding the Local Rental Landscape

Most localities in Virginia do not require landlords renting property to register the property with a rental registry, making it challenging to describe the rental landscape.1 Understanding the number, type, ownership, and quality of rental housing – and its change over time – would aid advocates for affordable housing.

In addition to aiding localities in tracking the number of rental properties, ensuring safe living conditions, and maintaining contact information for maintenance or other issues, a list rental properties and their ownership would aid our ongoing Housing Justice work by, for instance, supporting the aligment of evictions with properties.

In lieu of an authoritative list, we began exploring the use of open property and tax assessment data as a starting point for describing a local rental landscape, beginning with Charlottesville.

  1. Short-term rental registries, on the other hand, which capture homes used for Airbnb style homestays, have become widespread. Some notable exceptions include Fredericskburg and Fairfax.↩︎