Branden DuPont, a 2021 Rubinger Fellow and data analyst in Milwaukee, created a property ownership mapping tool that has the potential to change the way cities handle evictions: “Who Owns What” makes it possible for local stakeholders to identify where evictions are happening, who owns those properties, and which landlords are the city’s most prolific evictors. DuPont sat down with us to explain how it works and why it’s so critical.
Information is power, but only if it comes in a form that makes sense to people, that’s accessible and coherent. Branden DuPont’s mission, in a nutshell, is to turn scattered and often obscure data points into that kind of information. His work connects the dots. It reveals the workings of complex social systems—and empowers people to change those systems for the better.
A data analyst at the Institute for Health and Equity of the Medical College of Wisconsin, DuPont has focused on housing and criminal justice systems. His recent efforts have included building an online dashboard to track key performance indicators of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, uncovering racial disparities in arrest and conviction rates for marijuana possession in Wisconsin, and showing (in a widely cited study) that reducing the use of cash bail in Chicago saved defendants and their families millions of dollars without making communities less safe. Thanks to a tool DuPont created linking Milwaukee evictions data with property records, local stakeholders can now identify where evictions are happening, when they’re also associated with code violations, and which landlords are the city’s most prolific evictors.
Branden DuPont, Rubinger Fellow, Milwaukee, WI
DuPont’s Rubinger Fellowship project, inspired by the work of nonprofit JustFix.nyc, is to create a new housing-information tool for Milwaukeeans, one that adds a critical dimension. Using mailing addresses, the names of property agents, and other data points, the portal will connect properties associated with the same ownership—a workaround to landlords’ practice of hiding behind anonymous limited liability corporations, or LLCs. Users will be able to pull up code violations, tax status, and evictions connected to a building, but also find out whether the building’s owner—the person collecting rents—is a small landlord or owns hundreds of units across the city under a long list of blandly named LLCs.
DuPont intends this “Who Owns What” tool not as an end in itself but as a means to enable tenants, housing advocates, and local municipal and legal-aid attorneys to spot patterns and trends, target enforcement against bad actors, and work toward housing justice both for individuals and across the system.
After you graduated from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2013, it seemed like you were headed for a career in law or politics. What made you take this turn toward using data analysis to illuminate social problems?
When I was a sophomore in college, I had this very specific dream that I wanted to get into campaign finance law. In 2013 I did an internship at the public defender’s office in Milwaukee and got a chance to work on alternatives to revocation [when a court rescinds release terms and returns someone to prison]. I got to see a system that I felt was very unfair; it didn’t really work for anybody. When you’re out on probation or parole you have a series of conditions that you have to follow. They’re insane; just trying to live my day-to-day life, I would probably violate a couple. And you would have people going back to incarceration for years of their life for low-level offenses that didn’t match that level of severity.
That was my first introduction into this very clear systemic problem. Individual advocacy or work isn’t going to make an essential impact on this issue. With any social problem, it takes a lot of people—people with lived experience, people with expertise. But I found one thing that was lacking was an understanding about the problem as a system. And oftentimes you can express that in data. All the systemic and the administrative problems that were happening, you could say, “oh, how often are packets late?” and “how often are people just being held?” There was a need for these data skills.
Tell us a little bit about your evictions mapping tool and its impetus.
It’s about two years old now. The project started when a colleague who works at Legal Action Wisconsin, Raphael Ramos, had just basic questions about eviction data, and no one was regularly pulling it. So he’s asking, “How many people had representation? And how many cases were filed in the County of Milwaukee? And of those cases how many end up in default judgment, where a tenant doesn’t come to court and the judge immediately rules for the landlord?” I had some access through work that I did at the local criminal justice level, and I just started pulling the data—because there is a clear need for basic information about the system.
This is something I still maintain through the medical college, and I try to run numbers as needed for people. Right to counsel for those facing eviction was just passed in Milwaukee at the county level and there will be funds coming from the federal government. So this information is important in that process but also just to be able to discuss the size and scope of the eviction problem and look at neighborhoods that are most in need; it’s really helpful for fundraising, grant submission and grant collection.
And your Rubinger project is going to marshal various kinds of data to connect properties under the same ownership. You’re calling it “Who Owns What.” Why do we need to know that?
One thing that is really important is who is the top evictor in my city, in terms of absolute numbers and rates of eviction. But it’s also important just to know who owns all these rental properties. If you don’t know who your big actors are, who is driving evictions, it makes it really difficult to do something like distribute rental assistance, for example. It makes tenant organizing difficult when you think it’s just you or maybe a couple other properties dealing with a particular landlord as opposed to like 300 properties. Legal aid attorneys won’t know how to do targeted representation around eviction and city attorneys can’t target the top evictors.
And the reason you can’t just look up the owner of a given parcel is because of this issue with LLCs. For a lot of reasons—shielding identity, deferring risk—landlords oftentimes have like 50, 60 LLCs behind these properties, on the extreme end. In Wisconsin the only requirement is to list a registered agent for a property. So all an LLC has to do is say “this is my registered agent,” which could be they just hired a manager. And it makes figuring out who actually owns these properties really difficult.
And that makes any kind of accountability or enforcement difficult, right?
There was a really good series put out by the Sentinel Journal and they talked about how landlords with these LLCs would actually not pay taxes, let the properties go into foreclosure, and then buy them back in foreclosure sales under a different LLC. And the city was handicapped in answering the basic question, are these properties linked together? They’d do it by hand. They’d sit down and say, “Ok, is this business address linked to this LLC or is it linked to that one? And I think this attorney always represents this landlord.” Oftentimes that is so much work that they just stop there. They’re essentially trying to construct a network. And that’s something that a computer can do.
So this obscurity is obviously deliberate on the part of landlords. Beyond schemes like the one you just mentioned, what do they not want people to know?
The number two evictor in Milwaukee is almost never mentioned in local media, even though he’s filed so many evictions. And one of the reasons is he has all these different LLCs and their names are like “Anumbera Properties” and “Abuncha Properties” or “Atunna Properties.”
When you link them all together you see that this guy has filed about 3,000 evictions from 2016 to 2019. Now you can ask, does this landlord evict a lot, or do they just own a bunch of properties so the number of evictions is correspondingly high? If you look at the housing authority, for instance, they’re filing a decent amount of evictions but compared to how many units they own the rate drops to like 3 percent. This “A” properties guy, who is today relatively unknown, his pre-pandemic eviction rate was like 93 percent. So what does that mean. That means for every ten units he owns, he files nine evictions—every single year, for five years.
The trouble is, that’s perfectly legal, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s technically legal. Just because something is technically legal absolutely does not make it right. Nine evictions for every ten properties you own? That’s clearly an example of somebody weaponizing housing court in a way that’s really devastating to people’s lives. That specific example is likely a phenomenon that’s recently been discovered in a lot of places where the landlord is using housing court to collect rent. If you think about it from the perspective of someone who’s rent burdened, say they’re spending 60 to 70 percent of their income on rent. So my car breaks down. Do I pay to fix my car to get to work, and then I don’t have money to pay my landlord? Or do I pay my landlord and walk or try to use the bus? So the landlord goes, I know you have the money: do you want to pay me or do you want to be evicted by the sheriff?
So how can your project make a difference?
I’m a big fan of [Supreme Court justice Louis] Brandeis—“sunlight is the best disinfectant.” I had in mind with this project to make this data open and public and useful, so a city attorney, instead of taking a month to try to link together these properties in an Excel sheet with two paralegals, can just export the data.
But the next step I’m hoping to do is to dig into this as a policy issue. I really don’t think it should be this hard and complicated to link together this information. Just like there’s been some push to make eviction data collection a national effort, I do think that release of beneficial ownership behind LLCs should also be a form of transparency that’s pushed out by the federal government.
How has the LISC fellowship furthered your work?
Milwaukee had one of the country’s top rates for actually distributing rental aid during the pandemic. That’s in part because a lot of really effective people immediately reached out to our largest landlord and got him to essentially stop filing evictions during the CDC moratorium by directly putting in a case for him to help process rental assistance applications.
I was able to show that with data. Before we’d be able to say, yeah, I think we’re having an impact. Now we can actually look at the numbers and compare it to a three-year baseline with this same landlord; his evictions dropped by like 99.9 percent. That’s immediately beneficial for people to tell the story and make the case for increasing tenant rights. Without LISC and this project, that’s not stuff that I could have ever surfaced.