Red dots arrayed across Milwaukee provide a visual of the nearly 40,000 evictions filed in the city between the beginning of 2016 and June 1 of this year.

The newly released interactive map is just one element of a yearlong project to better understand evictions in the city. Maps and graphs posted online at mke-evict.com reveal the scope of the city's evictions and are meant as a resource not solely for policymakers and other officials but also the public. That includes prospective tenants.

"If I hadn't read the book 'Evicted,' I think I would have been shocked at the scale of it," Ald. Nik Kovac said.

Kovac, an original sponsor of the budget amendment that created the project, said it provides further evidence of the eviction crisis in Milwaukee.

Matthew Desmond's book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," chronicled the lives of eight Milwaukee families as they struggled to stay in housing.

The book put a spotlight on Milwaukee, Raphael Ramos, an attorney who leads Legal Action of Wisconsin's Eviction Defense Project, told a committee of the Common Council last week.

"We knew that eviction was a problem, we knew it was a significant problem," he told the Steering and Rules Committee. "But one of the things that we lacked as a community was a way to assess that problem, to see it in more granular detail."

The project visualizes data in a way that's easy to digest, he said, and it shows that evictions are happening more often in areas of color and areas of poverty.

The idea behind the project was to consolidate data in a way that allows patterns of potential retaliatory evictions to more easily come to light.

Kovac and others also noted that while there may be landlords abusing the system, there are also cases in which tenants can't afford the rent. In the latter circumstances, the evictions are legal, though they might not necessarily be wise, he said.

What the eviction website shows

Through the website, it's possible to explore eviction data and case outcomes and find the top evictors; look into eviction trends and outcomes down to an address or parcel; and find evictions that were filed within three months after a building code violation.

Prospective tenants can check out a landlord's eviction filing rate — the number of evictions filed relative to the number of units at a residence in a given year, over a three year period — and decide whether to proceed with a lease.

At the same time, one of the challenges is that people with evictions on their records have limited options in terms of landlords who will rent to them.

Among the challenges of the data analysis is that property ownership is often organized under limited liability companies, or LLCs, a setup that allows owners to keep their identities secret, making it difficult to link property records to a single landlord, said Branden DuPont, the project's lead researcher from the Medical College of Wisconsin. That means a single landlord will show up in the data under several LLCs.

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The data also doesn't show the reason for an eviction, including whether it results from a tenant not paying rent or other something else.

Ramos said non-payment of rent is a leading reason cited for pursuing an eviction, but situations are often a lot more nuanced.

One of the top reasons the Eviction Defense Project sees for not paying rent is that needed repairs in a residence are not being carried out, he said.

"Tenants feel their only recourse is to withhold the entirety of their rent to encourage their landlord to actually complete those repairs," he said.

Withholding the full rent exposes a tenant to eviction under current law. Most tenants don't know that and unintentionally fall into that trap, he said.

He also said a lot of bad housing conditions aren't reported because tenants are afraid of retaliatory evictions.

The data allows Legal Action of Wisconsin to look at the number of evictions but also the dispositions of those cases and how soon an eviction followed a building code violation.

While it's useful for his organization, Ramos said he thinks the biggest effect will be to raise awareness.

"It’s critical that people understand the magnitude of the problem and the longevity of the problem, that it’s not going away on its own," he said. "I think one of the benefits of the tool is that it allows people to look at evictions not just as a general number, but they can see it on a map and they can look at it within their neighborhood."

He hopes that this information pushes people to continue supporting organizations such as Legal Action of Wisconsin that are providing services to address the issue.

He said he also hopes that landlords see the volume of evictions and consider whether it's necessary to file an eviction or if there are other steps that can be taken to resolve the issue first.

In the past, the City Attorney's Office has faced challenges with pulling together data on evictions that came in retaliation for a report of building code violations.

"We know anecdotally that it occurs and it’s a problem, but really trying to figure out who those offenders are on the landlord side of things is difficult," Assistant City Attorney Heather Hough told the committee.

She said the database doesn't provide evidence of a retaliatory eviction scheme but it does give her office a starting point to gather evidence on whether such evictions are happening.

The website also presents an opportunity to educate the community, she said.

Part of the goal is to better detect landlords that are abusing the system and enforce the law, Kovac said. Other policy changes could also result, and limiting the sale of city-owned property to landlords convicted of retaliatory evictions has been raised as a possible avenue to explore.

He also anticipated a lot of changes would have to come from the state level.

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Contact Alison Dirr at 414-224-2383 or adirr@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter @AlisonDirr.