Abstract for: Modeling strategies for limiting evictions and improving housing security in urban America

The inspiration for this modeling project comes from the book Evicted by Matthew Desmond. Forced moves represent a significant health and economic threat to the families experiencing them, and can also contribute to less healthy communities in general. This project’s goal is to incorporate the important dynamic elements of the problem into a system dynamics framework and to create a model that could be used to test strategies for improving housing stability. This project draws on the literature to create both a quantitative system dynamics model. The primary literature source draws heavily on fieldwork and gathering people's lived experience in the system, while additional sources supplement with data and statistical analysis. SD represents a good fit for this problem because of high level of dynamic complexity and interacting system elements. Currently, there is a preliminary working STELLA model that incorporates a basic rental sector model combined with a population module. Much further work remains to refine the model to help it better reflect system behavior in ways relevant to seeking solutions. One likely avenue for improving the model is incorporating arrayed elements and potentially integrating agent-based modeling elements to represent dis-aggregated factors and individual-level feedback elements. I hope a conference presentation could provide some advice and guidance in these areas particularly.