HPRM Do No Harm Pledge
Responsible-use terms for the Housing Precarity Risk Model
The HPRM is a tool for protection, not a market signal. It may not be used for commercial real-estate prospecting or speculation, acquisition targeting, property pricing, tenant screening, rent-increase justification, or to target vulnerable communities. The HPRM is not licensed for these uses.
The Housing Precarity Risk Model (HPRM) identifies neighborhoods where low-income renters face elevated risk of displacement and formal eviction. It is a tool for protection — built on community-grounded methodology and designed to err toward underestimating risk rather than overstating it. The HPRM does not make predictions about specific people, households, or properties; it is not a market signal; and it is not a basis for commercial advantage.
Misuse of these data — particularly use that accelerates the very harms the HPRM measures — undermines both the science and the communities it represents. Every recipient of HPRM tract-level data makes the following commitments before receiving the data.
The commitments
1. I will read the HPRM Methods & Data User Guide before drawing conclusions or producing derivative products. I understand that the HPRM measures associations, not causation; tracks net migration, not the reasons people moved; and reports tract-level estimates, not facts about any specific person, household, or property.
2. I will not use the HPRM for commercial real-estate prospecting or any speculative property activity. This includes using HPRM scores to identify acquisition targets, price properties, screen tenants, justify rent increases, develop investment products, or otherwise treat displacement risk as a market signal. The HPRM is not licensed for these uses.
3. I will not use the HPRM to justify displacement or enforcement action against vulnerable communities. This includes upzoning or redevelopment decisions that displace existing low-income residents, immigration or housing-code enforcement targeting, landlord tenant-screening practices, or policing deployment grounded in HPRM scores.
4. I will not use the HPRM to justify exclusionary zoning or to block housing for working-class and low-income people. Risk identification is not an argument for restricting development. Using the HPRM to freeze land use in ways that worsen long-run affordability inverts the model’s intent.
5. I will not attempt to re-identify renters or households. I will not join HPRM data with parcel-level, address-level, or individually-identifiable records in ways that could expose specific tenants, owners, or vulnerable populations to harm.
6. I will represent the HPRM accurately and within its scope. I will not present HPRM scores as deterministic predictions, strip the model’s caveats and limitations from derivative products, or use the HPRM beyond the geographic and temporal scope it covers (census-tract level, lower 48 states, 2018–2022 ACS 5-year estimates).
7. I will treat HPRM scores as a lower bound and ground-truth with local knowledge. The model is intentionally conservative. I will pair HPRM scores with community input when possible, on-the-ground assessment, and current local data sources before making policy, investment, or programmatic decisions.
8. I will cite the HPRM in any work that uses it.
Thomas, T., Ramiller, A., Moore, H.C., Greenberg, J., & Chapple, K. (2026). Housing Precarity Risk Model (HPRM) 2.0. Eviction Research Network, UC Berkeley. https://evictionresearch.net/hprm/
I will also cite the underlying data sources (ACS, LSC/HUD eviction filings, EPA Smart Location Database, HUD Picture of Subsidized Households) as applicable.
Honor system
This is an honor-system pledge. The Eviction Research Network does not enforce it through contract; it relies on the integrity of data recipients to protect the communities these data describe. If you become aware of misuse, your own or anyone else’s, notify the HPRM team at timthomas@berkeley.edu.
The HPRM is subject to periodic review and may be updated, corrected, or sunset. Check the current vintage on the methods guide before publishing derivative analyses.
Requesting data
Tract-level HPRM data is distributed by request, with this pledge, through the data request form.
Request HPRM 2.0 data (Google Form)
Requests are one per project. The Eviction Research Network follows up by email, typically within several business days. For urgent or general inquiries, email evictions@berkeley.edu.
Using the HPRM in code
The neighborhood R package provides the mapping and analysis functions used to build ERN’s HPRM products. The package does not ship or download HPRM data; every HPRM function reads data you already hold. These same terms apply to any analysis built with it, and nt_hprm_terms() prints them at the console.
Signature copy
Data requests that require a signed copy can print and return the block below to timthomas@berkeley.edu.
I have read the commitments above and agree to them.
Signature: ___________________________________________
Printed name: ______________________________________
Affiliation / organization: _________________________
Email: _____________________________________________
Date: ______________________________________________
Intended use of HPRM data (one or two sentences describing the analysis, audience, and decisions this will inform):
______________________________________________________________
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