Question 1: What technologies are you working with, or have you worked with?

I am an urban planner and geographer, by training, and I come out of a background in Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. For the uninitiated: a GIS is a tool for doing analysis and visualization using spatial data—I like to say GIS allows us to “think with maps.”  These days I’m most interested in the application of spatial data science to problems that are central to movements for justice, broadly defined. In particular, I’m working on housing, a matter of increasingly urgent importance in eastern Massachusetts, nationwide, and across the world: rents are skyrocketing, ownership is consolidating, houses are treated as an investment vehicle rather than as homes, and housing instability is becoming a systemic problem. 

My research group, the Spatial Analysis and Action Research Group, is working on a large project that uses spatial data science, GIScience, interactive map development, natural language processing, and social network analysis to analyze the consolidation of residential property ownership, which harms renters and contributes enormously to inequity in housing. We do almost all of our data analysis and pre-processing in R (drawing heavily on its ‘tidyverse’ ecosystem and ‘sf’ package), data exploration and visualization using the open-source QGIS, application development using Mapbox GL alongside frameworks like Svelte and Astro, and store and serve our data in PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases, often wrapped in Python’s Django framework. (Take a look at our GitHub for more!) We rely heavily on public and semi-public datasets: assessors tables and eviction records maintained by the state, as well as a proprietary database called OpenCorporates which allows us to dive into relationships between companies. You could think of us as mapping the other end of housing vulnerability: instead of simply articulating evictions, skyrocketing rents, etc. as a problem (which they are), we make it our mission to connect these adverse outcomes to forms of property ownership that are creating ever-more insecure relationships between the residents of Massachusetts and their homes.

The last thing I’ll say is that I see theory as a really important tool. There’s a tendency, whether you’re in physics or in planning, to draw a strong distinction between the theorists and the empiricists, the humanists and the builders, whatever. But from my perspective, the most exciting empirical work takes its model of the world and its theory of change very seriously, and learns from (or even contributes to!) intellectual traditions and social movements that emphasize the histories, politics, and economies of our technologies and societies. Especially at a polytechnic like MIT that prides itself on building, innovating, disrupting, etc., it’s important to foreground the “why,” the “how,” and the “whom” questions… questions that will never be answered computationally or at a lab bench.

Question 2: How do you take account of MIT’s obligation to pursue the public interest in the work that you do? 

I started doing a version of this particular project in 2020. I was organizing with a group called Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville, which was, and remains, one of the bigger local mutual aid organizations that sprung up during the COVID-19 pandemic in Greater Boston. We were doing a lot of direct aid and neighbor-to-neighbor cash redistribution during the worst of the pandemic.  People were losing jobs, livelihoods, and homes. The latter, in particular, led the organization to take on tenant support and organizing through its housing justice working group. The housing justice group was interested in figuring out how to robustly identify landlords who might have been behaving illegally. For example: is a landlord threatening an eviction even when the state had a moratorium in place? What other buildings might those landlords own? 

Mapping property ownership is a chronically difficult problem: owners are often embedded in a complex web of LLCs. At the time, we used a brute force machine learning approach to cut through some of the noise in municipal assessor's tables and identify shared ownership by entities that look different on paper. Initially at least, I wasn’t really thinking about this as academic research; it was quite distant from my academic life at that time. It was simply a way to contribute my skills to an urgent problem faced by my neighbors during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It has since become a big part of my work at MIT. Alongside the Healthy Neighborhoods Research Consortium and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, my former RA Asya Aizman (MCP ‘24, current DUSP PhD student), and my current RAs Milan Chuttani (MCP ‘25), and Jiao Zhou (MCP ‘26) and I are completing an enormous expansion of that prior work: an interactive tool that equips tenants anywhere in the state of Massachusetts with information regarding landlord ownership structures and eviction practices. From my perspective, this is practical technology in the public interest—it takes a problem that is hard for activists to deal with sustainably and at a large scale and builds a solution that meets very specific needs, putting academic knowledge in the service of community power.

MIT of course prides itself on its history of bridging theory and application, science and engineering. We have an image of ourselves in which engineering and design thinking lead consistently and universally to better lives… but this is, frankly, not consistent with the historical record. Our understanding of MIT’s contribution to the public interest has to come packaged with a healthy dose of realism: both immense good and immense harm have come out of this institute. And unless academics are using their institutional affiliations to contribute to liberatory social change outside the walls of the university, I don’t quite know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. This is our obligation as I understand it—it’s not easy, it grinds against ideals of disinterest and objectivity, and it requires local partnership, collaboration with communities, valuing non-traditional forms of academic output, and shifting power.

Question 3: What more could you and others do to help MIT team meet its social obligation to pursue public interest technology?

No one person is ever going to be able to remake MIT into an institution that fully shares their vision of the good. Universities, including this one, are basically conservative, in the sense that they are risk-averse. They have to contend internally with visions of the future, the good, and the public interest that are often in conflict. To cash that out: I understand “public interest” in a way that MIT doesn’t, and many of my colleagues do not.

But I do have some ideas.

The first is for MIT to stand by its students, who are the people from whom I take the greatest inspiration, and its faculty, when they stick their necks out. I am consistently moved by the effort students put into both their work and their relationships with each other. They are strident, brilliant, and make urgent and necessary demands of the Institute and the world they’re inheriting. Frankly, I wish faculty would behave more like students. For this to happen, we need to secure academic freedom in our community, which is why I’ve taken on a role as the secretary of our new chapter of the American Association of University Professors. MIT’s role is to stand by its principles and its people when they make messes and take bold stances. Academic freedom is under threat across the board in the United States (not to mention the hard-won victories of the civil rights movement), and it is up to institutions like ours—which is to say, rich institutions that can weather blowback—to lead in bold defiance of this trend.

Secondly, we need new and more inclusive definitions of “productivity.” The Institute basically rewards faculty on the basis of publications and patents, outputs which require work that's both time-consuming and unresponsive to changing conditions. If people are to do more responsive and impactful work, MIT has to change how it assesses and funds its scholars: it’s not just the book that’s been in the works for 5 years, it’s the tool you built in a month with some activists; it’s not just the journal article that’s taken 24 months to get to press, it’s research conducted in the course of your advocacy role. We need new criteria that allow us to better capture multiple forms of leadership in a world that’s changing more rapidly than our academic infrastructure is built to accommodate.

For additional information on tenant screening tools that affect tenant rights and protection, see the Public Interest Technologist interview with Wonyoung So on reforming Landlord Tech.

Eric Robsky Huntley, PhD, GISP is a Lecturer in Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where they maintain affiliations with the Data + Feminism Lab and the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. They are also the director of the MIT Spatial Analysis and Action Research Group and the Visualization, Inquiry, and Analysis Learning Lab and the chair of the Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. They are also founder and principal of OGRAPHIES Research & Design, a mission-driven GIS, mapping, and spatial data science consultancy that designs tools and analyzes problems for clients who are working towards a more just world.