Our speaker this month, Dr. Erin McElroy, will share more about collective research that they have been a part of over the last several years to study landlord technologies, or the surveillance and speculation platforms, databases, and systems that landlords and property managers use to automate landlordism.

Many of these technologies, from biometric building access cameras to tenant screening algorithms, reproduce contexts of racial surveillance, housing precarity, and carcerality, essentially automating gentrification. In addition to offering a contextualization of this landscape, McElroy will share more about Landlord Tech Watch efforts to product tools and popular educational materials on the harms associated with landlord technologies in coalition with the Anti-Eviction Lab, [people.power.media], the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and the OceanHill-Brownsville Alliance.

Dr. McElroy is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington where they run the Anti-Eviction Lab, and  is a cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. In addition to co-editing the Radical Housing Journal, McElroy additionally runs Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing techniques.

Talk will both be livestreamed here and later archived here on the EFF-Austin YouTube channels. Questions for the speaker from virtual attendees may be submitted via the Youtube livestream chat, our Twitter account, @EFFaustin, or our Mastodon account, @effaustin@mastodon.social.