Tim Thomas
Tim Thomas is an Assistant Professional Researcher and the founding director of the Eviction Research Network housed in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. A sociologist, demographer, and data scientist, he studies residential displacement, neighborhood change, and housing precarity, asking who has the power to make a household move, by rent increase or by court order, who gets moved, where they go, and what it takes for people to stay in place or to leave on their own terms. His research shows that who is pushed out is decided less by individual choices than by housing markets, courts, tenant screening, the criminal legal system, and segregated neighborhoods, institutions that sort households by race, gender, and class and reproduce inequality.
The Eviction Research Network collects eviction court records across the United States, extracts case details from scanned filings with an open-source natural language processing tool it built, and publishes maps, state profiles, and trend data designed to be linked to health, homelessness, and other administrative records. He also led the Housing Precarity Risk Model, a Bayesian machine-learning measure of displacement and eviction risk for every census tract. His findings have informed tenant protections in Washington State and Baltimore City, the CDC's extension of the federal eviction moratorium, and advisory work with the Executive Office of the President, HUD, and the U.S. Treasury during the pandemic. In 2025 he served as Chief Research and Data Officer of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. He earned his PhD in Sociology, with a certificate in Demography, from the University of Washington.
Chen, Xin, Cheng Ren, and Timothy A. Thomas. 2025. “Evaluating Tenant-Landlord Tensions Using Generative AI on Online Tenant Forums.” Journal of Computational Social Science 8: 50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-025-00378-8
Zapata, A., L. G. Wood, A. M. Galvin, W. Chan, T. A. Thomas, J. Tsai, H. K. Way, E. J. Mueller, and D. C. Hernandez. 2025. “Domains of Housing Instability and Intimate Partner Violence Risk Among U.S. Tenants.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 22(8): 1212. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22081212
Thomas, Tim, Alex Ramiller, Cheng Ren, and Ott Toomet. 2024. “Toward a National Eviction Data Collection Strategy Using Natural Language Processing.” Cityscape 26(1): 241–259.
Wilson, Tamara S., Paul C. Selmants, Ryan M. Boynton, James H. Thorne, Nathan D. Van Schmidt, and Timothy A. Thomas. 2024. “Will There Be Water? Climate Change, Housing Needs, and Future Water Demand in California.” Journal of Environmental Management 369: 122256.
Gao, Xing, Timothy A. Thomas, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Amani M. Allen, Jonathan M. Snowden, Suzan L. Carmichael, and Mahasin S. Mujahid. 2023. “Neighborhood Gentrification, Displacement, and Severe Maternal Morbidity in California.” Social Science & Medicine 334: 116196.
Hepburn, Peter, Renee Louis, Joe Fish, Emily Lemmerman, Anne Kat Alexander, Timothy A. Thomas, Robert Koehler, Emily Benfer, and Matthew Desmond. 2021. “US Eviction Filing Patterns in 2020.” Socius 7: 23780231211009983.
Lanfear, Charles C., Lindsey R. Beach, and Timothy A. Thomas. 2018. “Formal Social Control in Changing Neighborhoods: Racial Implications of Neighborhood Context on Reactive Policing.” City & Community 17(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12346
Williams, Nathalie E., Timothy A. Thomas, Matthew Dunbar, Nathan Eagle, and Adrian Dobra. 2015. “Measures of Human Mobility Using Mobile Phone Records Enhanced with GIS Data.” PLoS ONE 10(7): e0133630.