Assessing Balance of Eviction Ethnicity in Massachusetts

eviction;ethnicity;bootstrap

Palin, Joseph

University:Havard University

Department:Mathematics and Computation

关键词: eviction;    ethnicity;    bootstrap;   

Others  :  https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37365081/PALIN-DOCUMENT-2019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard

【 摘 要 】

This project analyzes Massachusetts housing court records, testing if there is ethnic bias in who is evicted.The project starts with semi-manually scraping court recordsfromtheMassachusettscourtwebsite. Becausethewebsitedisallowsfully automaticscrapingofrecords,toolsweredevelopedtofacilitateandexpeditethe downloading of data without violating the terms and conditions for the page.Withsourcewebpagesdownloaded,therecordswereprocessedtoextract eviction features: plaintiffs, defendants, location of eviction, and which housing court.Largely through format shifting, nearly a gigabyte of records was parsed and pared down to about 20MB stored in a usable data frame.Incomplete or unparsable records were removed.Once the raw data was processed, addresses were geocoded and turned into census tracts to add probabilities of ethnicity for each record, based on location.Additionally, last names were matched against census database records to extract the corresponding probabilities of ethnicity based on surname.These pieces of data were then combined to create a refined estimate of ethnicity for each data point.The estimated ethnicities were compared with the underlying demographics todetermineiftherewasameaningfuldifferenceinevictionsbetweenhowmany peopleofeachethnicitywereevicted,andwhatshouldbeexpectedbasedonthe underlyingpopulation. Dependingonhowthemodelwastested,thereweretwo different results.Either Caucasians are over-evicted relative to their population, or Hispanics and African Americans are over-evicted relative to their populations.