Heat Seek helps tenants win $22,000 and long awaited repairs

Tenants at 930 Prospect Place have been fighting for repairs and adequate heat for nearly a decade. Their landlord, Seth Miller, consistently appears on New York City’s Worst Landlord Watchlist. Residents have formed a strong tenant association in the building in order to coordinate demands for repairs, and during the early days of the pandemic they implemented a rent strike to force Miller to follow through on promised repairs. Because lack of heat is such a persistent issue, many of the tenants received Heat Seek sensors and began documenting the temperature in their apartments during this time.

In August, the first tenants were due in housing court to negotiate repairs, end their rent strike and repay any back rent owed. In addition to heat, tenants were fighting to resolve persistent hot water outages; dangerous mold; rats, roaches, and bedbugs; and a broken lock on the building's front door that compromised building security. The tenants asked for a rent abatement of 40% to compensate for years of neglect, as well as a commitment to make all necessary repairs in the building.

In the lead up to the trial, Miller’s attorneys refused to negotiate a resolution directly with the tenants. Instead, they offered a paltry 20% rent abatement. However, on the day of the trial, a tenant overheard a phone call between the landlord and his attorney during which the attorney lamented “They’re prepared, they brought a ton of data, and they have 14 people here supporting them. You’re not going to win this”. Miller finally agreed to settle.

With the support of their tenant association, tenant organizers at Brooklyn Eviction Defense, and their Heat Seek data, the tenants were able to secure a 37% rent abatement, much larger than a typical rent abatement in housing court. Because of how long they’d been on strike, the abatement translated to over twenty-two thousand dollars back in their pockets. Furthermore, they obtained a commitment from the landlord to make all the repairs they asked for, and negotiated an access date for repairs to begin.

After so much neglect, the tenants are not optimistic that Seth Miller will follow through on his commitment to make repairs in the building. However, they are continuing to document the temperature in their building with Heat Seek, and are prepared to take him back to court on contempt if necessary.

Tenants shouldn’t have to fight this hard to get basic repairs in their buildings. Adequate heat is a right for all New Yorkers, and no one should have to suffer through a winter without heat. Heat Seek is immensely proud to stand with tenants as they stand up to bad landlords and demand their right to safe, healthy housing.

Heat Seek Testimony on Preparing for Heat Season

Heat Seek Testimony on Preparing for Heat Season

Committee on Housing and Buildings

October 30, 2023

Noelle Francois

Executive Director

Heat Seek NYC

I want to begin my testimony by thanking Council Member Pierina Sanchez and the Committee on Housing and Buildings for holding this hearing.

My name is Noelle Francois and I am the Executive Director of Heat Seek, the only nonprofit in the city working specifically with tenants experiencing insufficient heat in their apartments in the wintertime. We use smart temperature sensors to accurately and reliably document the indoor temperature during the winter months and enable tenants to prove exactly how often the temperature in their apartments is too low and in violation of the law.

Citywide, heat complaints remain relatively stable year over year, at over 200,000 annually. However, only a small fraction of those complaints translate into heat violations issued by HPD. While some complaints are certainly resolved by the landlord prior to an HPD inspection, or represent instances where a tenant feels cold but the temperature isn’t below the threshold, Heat Seek data demonstrates that many, many legitimate heat complaints are not translating into violations. After specializing in this work for almost a decade, our data makes clear that an exclusively complaint driven system for maintaining the city’s housing stock is ineffective and insufficient.

Heat Seek has served as a neutral third party to provide tenants a resource to adequately document serious and persistent heat issues in their apartments. Last heat season, Heat Seek sensors in just 150 apartments documented over 59,000 hours in which the temperature was below the legal limit. Forty percent received no violations at all. Heat Seek has documented cases in 20 buildings where our sensors collected more than 100 hours of illegally cold temperatures, the tenants called in heat complaints to 311 numerous times, and yet they never received a single heat violation from HPD. That is a quarter of the buildings Heat Seek operated in last heat season.

Heat Seek has proven that there is a better way to investigate heat complaints using technology, especially in instances of a chronic failure to provide heat in accordance with the law. Real time data transmission would make HPD more effective and efficient, allowing them to send inspectors at times when they are actually able to observe and record a violation. Utilizing this technology would conserve agency resources, as either HPD’s workload would be reduced because no violations are found and inspectors can communicate that to the tenant so they understand the temperature is not illegally low, or HPD issues violations and the landlord is compelled to make repairs/remedy the issue, thus also reducing HPD’s workload because the tenant is not continuously calling with a new complaint in an effort to get a violation placed. There is no reason for HPD to continue guessing what the temperature is when widely available technology exists to tell us the answer at any hour of the day. We strongly urge HPD to adopt this technology with the enthusiasm it deserves, and empower HPD inspectors to install sensors themselves to address chronic complaints.

Serious heat violations rarely exist in a vacuum. As our data analysis of the Heat Sensors program demonstrates, buildings in the program benefit from the increased scrutiny of HPD that comes with program enrollment. Because of the bi-weekly inspections, buildings in the program report higher rates of violation for a variety of breaches of the warranty of habitability in the first year of the program, beyond just heat. It is clear that complaint based inspections are a burden on tenants and often fail to surface serious issues to HPD; however, when HPD takes a more proactive approach and visits bad actor buildings consistently, issues are identified and addressed.

The inability of our city government to adequately tackle the city’s heating crisis feeds directly into the city’s inability to preserve affordable housing, fueling and exacerbating the housing crisis. Housing instability and poor maintenance are two sides of the same coin, which disproportionately impact communities of color.

Wholesale failure to maintain the city’s affordable housing stock is not an option, but it is the path that HPD is choosing with its current approach to addressing the most pervasive habitability issue for tenants. We must take a more aggressive approach to adequately maintaining the affordable housing we currently have, because rents are continuing to rise at alarming rates and more affordable housing is not being built at a rate sufficient to meet the need. One of the best ways to address our homelessness crisis is to minimize displacement by keeping people who have housing in their homes. But we cannot do that if those homes are allowed to fall into disrepair to the point that they are unlivable and tenants are forced to relocate.

We live in the 21st century, in the age of technology, and we cannot continue to operate as though these tools are not readily available to us. The city’s refusal to adopt mainstream technology is not only a failure to its mission to promote quality and affordability in the city’s housing, but also a failure to society at large, in a pivotal moment where so many are deeply in need and expect far more from their government.

Important Announcement From Heat Seek

Dear Heat Seek Advocates, Partners, and Friends:

We started Heat Seek 9 years ago with a very simple mission: heat in your home is a human right and a source of dignity.

Heat Seek empowers tenants to collect their own temperature data to prove insufficient heat and illegal housing conditions. Tenants across the five boroughs have used their temperature data to support rent strikes, demand repairs, and defend against evictions. The insights from Heat Seek data have powered research and policy that have changed the way the city investigates and resolves heating violations. We are enormously proud of the work that tenants and advocates like yourselves have accomplished.

The world looks very different today than it did when we started Heat Seek. We are in a post-covid eviction crisis of unprecedented proportions, and attention, funding, and resources are necessarily focused on eviction prevention. While Heat Seek has always been a small and resourceful team, we do not believe we can achieve the kind of impact we desire as a standalone operation any longer.

After 9 years in operation, Heat Seek is putting its program on hiatus to explore a path towards sustainability. Pausing the program will give us time to seek opportunities for deep partnership, acquisition by a larger nonprofit, creative joint fundraising, a train the trainer model - everything is on the table during this period of exploration.

In the short term, this means:

  • Heat Seek will not be providing any new sensors this season and will be unable to assist with troubleshooting sensors that are currently installed.

  • However, the Heat Seek app will remain live and all historical temperature data will continue to be available for download.

  • Sensors that are connected to an established wifi connection should continue to function normally, however cellular sensors will no longer be operational as the SIM cards have expired.

  • If you have an upcoming court date and plan to use Heat Seek data, please get in touch. We will do our best to support any work that is a continuation of last year’s program.

This fall, we are asking you to partner with us on a new project – exploring a sustainable path forward for this work. Heat Seek has always worked in partnership with community organizations and legal service providers, housing justice advocates, and funders - it is integral to how we achieve impact. We are asking you, our community, to help us explore where the next phase of the mission lies, and how we can continue to serve NYC tenants.

If you would like to be part of our brainstorming and idea generating, please reach out. We would love to hear your ideas about paths forward for Heat Seek. We will also be assembling a brain trust this fall to help us explore the viability of a possible acquisition of Heat Seek by a larger organization, as well as the creation of a self service curriculum for organizers and attorneys. If you would like to participate, reach out and we’ll make sure you get an invite.

We are so grateful to have developed Heat Seek alongside each and every one of you. We are committed to finding a sustainable home for the tool and services that Heat Seek has been providing to NYC tenants and their advocates, and hope you’ll join us in that endeavor.

Our ambitious goal this heat season

Heat Seek is already hard at work to help keep families safe and warm in their homes this holiday season. Although it is only November, we have already installed more sensors this heat season than all of last year. We’re not stopping here — we have an ambitious goal to support up to 200 families with sensors this winter, triple the number of sensors we installed last last year.

The need is great. Rents and inflation are skyrocketing and pandemic assistance has largely ended. City agencies, including the Housing Department, are understaffed and are being asked to cut costs even further to respond to uncertain financial times. Tenants need more support than ever before, and Heat Seek is rising to meet the occasion by expanding our reach this heat season.

Tenant stories

As a housing justice organization, we strive to center tenants and their needs. Our impact report highlights their stories - we’ve included Sharon’s below. 

Sharon is a senior citizen living on a fixed income in a rent-stabilized apartment in the Kingsbridge Heights neighborhood in the Bronx. Her building is owned by the Edelstein family, notorious slumlords with a history of displacing tenants from rent stabilized units across their portfolio of almost 30 buildings. Sharon had been withholding rent due to the landlord’s failure to make repairs, and in the fall 2021 was facing eviction for nonpayment.

Among other issues, Sharon experienced erratic heating outages that made it very difficult to live in the apartment. Over the past 3 years, 137 heat complaints had been made to 311 by residents of the building, making it the #1 complaint for the building. Sharon experienced heating outages that would mysteriously resolve for a day or two after she called 311, and then resume after HPD had come to inspect the apartment.

Knowing they were likely to be in litigation over the nonpayment case, Sharon and her attorney reached out to Heat Seek in November 2021 to see if they could obtain a Heat Seek sensor. Although Sharon had had little luck with 311, she wanted strong evidence of the heating issue in her apartment.

Heat Seek helped her install a sensor, and throughout the winter it captured approximately 100 hours of violations in her apartment. Her nonpayment case also began working its way through court after the pandemic eviction moratorium ended, and a trial was scheduled for June 2022. Heat Seek prepared to provide testimony about her temperature data in court.

On the appointed date, and after hours of negotiation between attorneys, both parties agreed to settle the case and avoid a trial. Sharon received a rent abatement of over $2600 and her nonpayment case is now closed. Sharon’s attorney confirmed that Heat Seek data played a critical role in the positive outcome, noting that the judge referred to paperwork showing the lack of heat when encouraging both parties to negotiate a settlement. The settlement allows Sharon to remain in her apartment, and her landlord is on notice that future heating outages will not be tolerated.

You can find the full report, including another case study, here.

Heat complaints across the city

For the second installment of our Annual Impact Report excerpts, we’re sharing data. These stats speak for themselves, and amplify the need for our work.

Why our work matters

These are unprecedented times for renters in NYC. Covid-related eviction protections have expired, rents are soaring, and the availability of apartments with rent below $1500 is at a 30-year low. It is more important than ever that tenants are able to remain safely in their homes. - Heat Seek Annual Impact Report, Letter from the Executive Director

As this heat season begins, we’re reflecting on the past year, what we accomplished, and what we learned to best position ourselves to aid tenants in need this upcoming winter. We’ve just launched our Annual Impact Report, and will be sharing excerpts of it throughout the month of November. Today, we’re sharing the Report’s “Letter from the Executive Director,” which provides an overview of our work. If you’d like to read the full report, you can find it here.

We Surpassed Our Goal, Thank You!

We are overwhelmingly grateful for your Giving Tuesday contributions in support of New York families this heat season. The tally is in - the combined online and mail in donations total $6,025.15, surpassing our Giving Tuesday goal of $2,500.00. 

With your contributions, we will be able to get temperature sensors into the homes of more New Yorkers, and work towards making their homes more safe and habitable this winter. As a small nonprofit, your donations make a huge difference in our ability to deliver on our mission, and for that we are truly humbled and appreciative. 

If you missed Giving Tuesday but would still like to contribute, there are several ways to still make an impact!

  • Year end donations can be made through our website or by check. Although our physical office is still closed due to Covid-19, you may reach out to noelle@heatseek.org with subject MAILING ADDRESS to request our temporary mailing address.

  • Our merchandise shop is now live! Orders placed by December 13 will ship before December 31, making this a great option for last minute holiday shopping. Our apparel (including shirts, tanks, and hoodies), tote bags, mugs, and facemasks mean you’ll easily find a gift for everyone on your list, and maybe even something for yourself! 

  • Our inaugural annual benefit will take place in January 2022 - stay tuned for more details! 

As always, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, @heatseeknyc for our latest updates. Again, thank you to all of our generous donors for making Giving Tuesday 2021 a success!

Sincerely,

Noelle Francois

Heat Seek Executive Director

Reflecting on 2020, and Looking Ahead to the 2021 Heat Season

Heat Seek had its biggest heat season yet in 2020-2021, installing sensors in 70 apartments throughout New York City. This was possible due to our numerous partners working tirelessly on behalf of low income New Yorkers. We extend our deep thanks and gratitude to: 

  • The Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer

  • Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation

  • Met Council on Housing 

  • Legal Services NYC

  • NYC Tenant Support Unit

  • Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB)

  • The New York Community Trust

  • Sparkjoy Foundation

COVID-19 disproportionately impacts low income communities and communities of color, meaning that our services were more critical than ever before. We worked steadfastly last winter to help tenants hold their landlord accountable and force them to provide heat as required by the law. Due to the state of emergency and related physical distancing restrictions in place, we innovated our installation process, developing a system for remote sensor installs and creating detailed instructions to support tenants in installing their own sensors, with great success. 

We launched a pilot program with the City of New York to support sensor installation in two new neighborhoods — Inwood and Washington Heights, which captured a whopping 4,355 hours of violations. A single sensor in a Washington Heights apartment captured 943 hours in which the temperature was below the legal limit between February and May 2021, a period of just 3.5 months. The coldest temperature recorded by the sensor was 53 degrees, fifteen degrees colder than the minimum daytime temperature required by law. Heat Seek’s sensors helped the tenants in this building receive new radiators, new windows, and a promise of future insulation work. While  the advocacy work is not over, Heat Seek looks forward to continuing to support tenants, tenant organizers, and legal advocates as they demand the essential services that landlords are required to provide. 

This is just one example of Heat Seek’s impact. As we look ahead to the upcoming heat season, we’re excited to build upon what we learned in 2020, and expand the reach of our program. We’ve hit the ground running this fall - in October, we convened a group of legal services practitioners and legal advocates to discuss how Heat Seek can support the tenants they are working with. We’ll be hosting a similar forum for tenant organizers in early December. Heat Seek also has a fantastic new board of directors, which is focused on positioning the organization for growth over the next three years. 

There is much work to be done in the next several months, and we look forward to diving in. Stay tuned for additional program updates - there are exciting things afoot here, and we can’t wait to share them with you!


Noelle Francois

Executive Director

Five days of gratitude - Day 5

This week, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, we're spending time reflecting on a few of the things we're most grateful for at Heat Seek.

Today we're incredibly grateful for the developers, data scientists, advocates, and activists who make up the housing data community in NYC. This collective of folks who care deeply about housing equity meets once a month after work to propose ideas, talk through issues with the data, and share the individual projects we're all working on.

There's so much we can learn when we look at trends in housing data. From the loss of rent stabilized units over time, to the number of housing maintenance complaints and violations in a building, to the deeds and sales records of properties (and the banks that issue loans to them), we can learn a great deal about what's happening in NYC real estate by looking at the data. As we continue to learn, we can better hold accountable the predatory landlords and bad actors who are skirting the laws and displacing low income tenants across our city.

The Worst Landlord's Watchlist, published each year by the Public Advocate, is an important start, but there's so much more we can do. By bringing together domain experts -- the tenant organizers, housing lawyers, and affordable housing advocates who work directly with tenants -- and data wizards (that's a technical term, right?), we're able to add a data driven element to the conversation, in order to bolster the qualitative stories that tenants share.

We're so grateful for this group of individuals. We're grateful to work with you, to learn from you, and to contribute to the conversation.

Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Five days of gratitude - Day 4

This week, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, we're spending time reflecting on a few of the things we're most grateful for at Heat Seek.

Bill soldering.jpg

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today we're grateful to everyone who has ever contributed their time to Heat Seek - and we mean everyone. From our board of directors, to our trusted advisors, to anyone who has ever volunteered (even for a day) for Heat Seek, we appreciate all of you more than you know. 

We don't have a huge staff at Heat Seek, nor do we have a big budget. We could never do all the things it takes to keep Heat Seek up and running on our own. But we work with the most committed, most generous people in all of New York City. They write code and build features in our web app, make maps to help us visualize our work, help us strategize and plan for upcoming heat seasons and, when we need them to, they even come together to help us solder sensors -->

To the entire Heat Seek community, thank you!

Five days of gratitude - Day 3

This week, in preparation for Thanksgiving, we're spending time reflecting on a few of the things we're most grateful for at Heat Seek.

Today we're especially grateful for Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood, a tech incubator + fellowship program aimed at helping entrepreneurs build technology to fight poverty in New York City. Its also the labs arm of the Robin Hood Foundation, an incredible anti-poverty foundation in NYC. We first got involved with Blue Ridge when we participated in their inaugural Catalyst incubator in 2015. 

When we found out we'd been accepted, it had been almost a year since we won the 2014 BigApps competition. We'd spent the year continuing to work on Heat Seek in an all-volunteer capacity, while also working toward incorporating as a nonprofit and applying for our federal 501(c)(3) tax exempt status. We'd done so much as volunteers that year. Traveling to far flung neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn at night and on the weekends, calling lawyers, organizers, and tenants in between grad school classes and on lunch breaks at work. We even met as a team every Sunday for an entire year to build out the hardware, plan installs, and troubleshoot bugs in the app. By the end of it we were exhausted, but we'd proved (to ourselves at least) that our sensors worked in the field, that our data was accurate, and that there was a demonstrated need for our work.

Now we had to prove it to the rest of the world - or at least New York City.

Besides the funding that came with Catalyst, which let my co-founder William and I work on Heat Seek full-time (a HUGE milestone), the team at Blue Ridge Labs helped us develop our initial plan for achieving impact. We'd learned very early on the merely having a sensor wasn't enough to get someone's heat restored, and that the bread and butter of our work had to be helping people use their data to compel change. Now we had to figure out how to do that, which meant learning a lot about NYC's arcane rent laws, the byzantine housing court process, and the network of housing lawyers and organizers who help New Yorkers navigate the bureaucracy in order to save their homes. The team at Blue Ridge Labs helped us shift our thinking from building a product to running a program, and they're responsible for a large part of the impact we've achieved. 

And of course they helped us with all the things a good incubator should help its portfolio companies with -- access to tech support, trainings on business development, intros to funders, a brain trust of the smartest people you could ever hope to work with...

But these aren't the only reasons we're grateful for Blue Ridge Labs.

What's so special about Blue Ridge is how they've cultivated a community of folks who are all passionate about improving the lives of low-income New Yorkers, and believe that technology has a role to play in accelerating change. They are the only co-working space for tech startups in NYC (that I know of) where everyone is focused on impact, not profit. At Heat Seek, we're inspired every day by the passion and commitment of the teams that come through Blue Ridge.

It can sometimes be hard to explain to people why we're a nonprofit, why we go through all the trouble of applying for grants and working with community organizations when we have a product we could just sell. Some days we wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just sell the sensors and let the free market take care of the rest. But we know that inadequate heat disproportionately impacts low-income New Yorkers, and if we sold the sensors, they'd be unlikely to benefit. When our resolve gets shaky, we draw on the support of the Blue Ridge community and remember that we're not the only ones who believe technology should be a force for good in the world. We remember that at the end of the day, it's our mission that matters.

When we graduated from our most recent incubator and didn't have a place to work, Blue Ridge Labs welcomed us back with open arms and open desks.

And, when someone who we thought had our best interest in mind and whose opinion mattered very much to us, told us she believed we were failing in our mission because the city hadn't purchased our technology yet and we should just shut Heat Seek down, they were the first to tell us not to listen, that systemic change takes time, especially in a real estate environment as highly political as New York City's, and that even though we weren't "ready to scale," our work certainly mattered to the 40 families we helped get heat last winter.

It's hard to explain exactly why the team at Blue Ridge means so much to us, but I'll leave you with this. At our office Thanksgiving on Monday, we went around the table listing the things we were most thankful for. Halfway through we had to institute a new rule: it had to be something other than Blue Ridge. 

BRL Thanksgiving 2017.jpg

Five days of gratitude - Day 2

This week, in preparation for Thanksgiving, we're spending time reflecting on a few of the things we're most grateful for at Heat Seek.

Today we're grateful for the people and organizations whose funding keeps us going. We're highlighting two foundations whose support has meant the world to us recently.

First, Google. In addition to being our tech overlords, they also have a pretty great foundation, Google.org. And it was a grant from that foundation that made it possible for us to build our new sensors. What makes this so special is that not a lot of human services foundations fund technology R&D (at least that I know of -- I would LOVE to be wrong on this). So when we needed a new sensor design in order to continue running our program, we were so grateful to receive a grant from Google.org. Here's a taste of why their grant means so much to us:

Our new sensors are:

  • Redundant. Internet goes out? No problem - we'll write all the data to an SD card on the device. Once the internet comes back, we'll seamlessly send all your data to your account.
  • Reliable. They're based on the Adafruit Feather, a commercial grade, tested board with tons of documentation online. If you don't know Adafruit, check them out! The company is female founded and based in NYC.
  • So much easier to install. No more 'will it or wont it connect'. No more hacky USB modem. A real IoT device designed for consistency and reliability. Plug it in, attach it to the wall, and you're good to go.

Our old sensors were:

  • Fragile. They were always going offline for unknown reasons, meaning we'd have to send someone to fix or replace them. This took up so much staff time. 
  • Custom. Which sounds cool, until they stop working and no one knows how to fix them, and there's no documentation online to help you figure it out.
  • Complicated to install. The two devices (the hub and cell) had to connect to each other and to the internet, meaning there were multiple points of failure. Devices in different apartments had to connect to each other for the whole system to work.

 

Don't get us wrong, our old sensors got the job done. And they were absolutely critical in helping us demonstrate the potential of technology to document insufficient heat. But these new sensors are going to take our work to a whole new level, and we can't wait to get them all installed this season.

Next is The New York Community Trust. This foundation is especially dear to us because they were the first foundation to write us a grant after we graduated from our incubator in August.

Toward the end of the summer, it wasn't actually clear that we were going to be able to sustain another winter season. We had amazing new sensors and three years of strong partnerships with the housing justice community in NYC under our belts, but not a lot of funding to keep the lights on. People like to talk a big game about innovation, but when it comes down to it, its a lot of trial and error, learning from the community, and testing new things that have never been done before. It can be hard to fundraise for that. And while innovation is exciting and new and has the potential to move the ball forward on really sticky, hard to solve problems, it can be riskier than a tried and true solution. Knowing that we had a vote of confidence from the Trust let us to redouble our own commitment to the work.

At Heat Seek, we are committed to ensuring that all New Yorkers, regardless of income, have the tools they need to obtain the safe, healthy housing they are entitled to. And we're so grateful that NYCT shares our vision.

 

Five days of gratitude

Its been an incredible, and incredibly challenging, year at Heat Seek. We graduated from our incubator program, rolled out an entirely new sensor design, and helped dozens of families get their heat turned on. At the same time, with a budget shortfall looming, in August Anthony made the difficult decision to seek employment elsewhere. Grants came in, but others fell through. It has truly been a year of ups and downs. And yet, we have so much to be grateful for.

This week, in preparation for Thanksgiving, we'll be spending time reflecting on a few of the things we're most grateful for at Heat Seek.

Our hope is to give you a glimpse behind the curtain, to share just a few of the people, organizations, and companies that have helped make Heat Seek the organization it is today, and who continue to support us to ensure that all New Yorkers go to bed safe, healthy, and warm each night. We could not do this work without them.

First up, we are so grateful for the incredible generosity of attorneys like Stephanie Rudolph at the Urban Justice Center and Sunny Noh at The Legal Aid Society. When we were first getting started, these pro bono housing lawyers spent countless hours with us, walking us through the process of submitting a heat complaint, allowing us to shadow them in housing court, and introducing us to their clients. Their willingness to share their knowledge and expertise, as well as feedback on our product, has been absolutely indispensable in getting Heat Seek to where it is today; we would have been lost without their early insights and support.

With so many tech startups focused on maximizing profit, it's a real privilege to build tools that actually help folks solve an acute, dangerous problem in their lives. We are so honored to work with, and learn from, talented committed public servants like Stephanie and Sunny.

Check out Stephanie in the video below:

Time to Level Up our tech

“The new technology will “simplify installation and bring together our sensors and on-device datalogging to SD card to ensure we never miss a measurement, and a swappable networking component, which lets us use the same basic platform when connecting via Wifi, Cell, or LoRaWAN networks.” ”
— - Eric Skiff, Founder, Tanooki Labs

Did you know that Heat Seek's first round of sensors were entirely designed and built by volunteers? Back when we won BigApps in 2014, we had one working prototype and it looked like this ↓ !

Lucky for us, we have some of the best volunteers in the world. They're incredibly talented hardware engineers, software developers, and designers, and they helped us build the custom Heat Seek sensors we've been using ever since. 

But after three winters in the field, a significant number of our sensors are broken or worn out. It's time for Heat Seek to level up, with a new sensor design that's more reliable, more precise, and less expensive to install.


We're moving away from our original mesh network design - radio signals don't travel well through dense concrete and metal rebar, making our whole system fragile - and instead planning for each sensor to have its own onboard internet connection.

To increase versatility and reduce cost, our new sensors will be able to connect to WiFi, cellular internet, or even LoRaWAN, depending on the situation. This means we can maximize connectivity options and do installs in the coldest apartments in a building, regardless of the building's layout.

The new sensor will have a more precise thermometer (+/- .5° C) and a humidity sensor to calculate the heat index, for future summer use.

These new sensors will be more reliable, significantly easier to install, quicker to manufacture, and ultimately provide our clients with better data. 

This is a large part of why we need your support now. It's not often that a nonprofit designs a hardware product, an expensive, time-consuming process that requires highly-skilled labor. If we could purchase an off-the-shelf sensor that meets our clients' needs, we certainly would. But so far, there isn't a cheaper alternative to the custom temperature sensors we're building.

In order for our new sensors to be ready for fall, we need to start the manufacturing process now. Will you help us keep more neighbors warm?

Working prototype of the new sensor design. "The new sensors place an emphasis on simplicity and reliability, so things like a failed radio transmission or network connection will never get in the way of writing an accurate temperature log to t…

Working prototype of the new sensor design. "The new sensors place an emphasis on simplicity and reliability, so things like a failed radio transmission or network connection will never get in the way of writing an accurate temperature log to the SD card." -Ryan Boland, chief product designer of our new sensor

If you believe in Heat Seek's mission, we need your support today to raise $50,000. This allows us to:

  • Double the number of cold New Yorkers Heat Seek serves
  • Improve Heat Seek’s sensor design to be cheaper and more reliable
  • Advocate for new regulations to force the worst landlords to install sensors in their buildings 
  • Wrap up this winter's court cases that are using Heat Seek’s sensor data, ensuring that those tenants aren’t back in court next year

Years of Organizing = a Warm Winter!

Loraine wasn’t going to stop until she and her neighbors got what was right. Thankfully, now they can stop, because with Heat Seek's help, they won!

It’s not a story we hear all the time: of tenants forming a coalition strong enough to beat the landlord at every turn, securing that which should have been theirs all along: a safe home for their families. Often, there are just too many pitfalls: the landlord wins in Housing Court, tenants get intimated by the landlord’s actions, the city declares the building uninhabitable, and more. Thankfully, for Loraine and her neighbors in a small building in the heart of Flatbush, they combined lots of diligent work with skilled support, fearless grit, and a little luck.

Heat Seek began working in Loraine’s building last winter, when the temperatures were some of our coldest in the city: entire days in the low 60s, with the only heat coming when the city inspector showed up. After the season, we wondered why our organizing partners hadn’t initiated a group case in Housing Court or tried another landlord strategy. This season, though, we learned that sometimes the win comes a little later than we had hoped--and with a more enduring effect.

“This winter, I’d call the super to let him know our heat was low, and he’d immediately turn it on,” Loraine told Heat Seek. This was the same super who, in previous years, had refused to provide service to Loraine and the other long-time tenants, insisting that they call the management company instead. To what was this change attributed?

“They knew about the sensors this year. They knew they were being watched.” 

It’s a powerful testimony to Heat Seek’s impact for some tenants, recognizing that not all landlords are deterred by this monitoring and not all tenants want their landlord to know they have a sensor. Many landlords can abuse and harass tenants so effectively because it often takes place in the shadows: confrontations at a tenant’s door, cold temperatures except when the inspector visits, lengthy construction times meant to make life miserable for the building’s longtime residents. Thankfully, Heat Seek’s sensors are able to monitor landlord behavior, in real time and around the clock. 

But the heat in Loraine’s building is also a testament to the ongoing work of the building’s tenant association and the support of their organizers at Flatbush Tenant Coalition. These tenants have endured the worst of landlord tactics aimed to drive out these long-time, rent-regulated tenants and bring in market-rate tenants.

After an ownership change twelve years ago, the building started to deteriorate. “You could see the basement through the holes in my floor,” Loraine says, reporting persistent leaks and pervasive mold, damaged stairs, and a front door with no lock. After Loraine and her neighbors discovered that everyone was living in horrible conditions, they resolved to take action to get what they deserved. Letters to the landlord proved ineffective, so they escalated their efforts and showed up in front of the landlord’s mansion in a gated community, where the neighbors didn’t take kindly to this public shaming. 

Even after the repairs were made, however, the landlord made it clear not only that they didn’t want these tenants living there--but they sought to prevent any future tenants “like them” from renting apartments. “The landlord told a group of us one night that they didn’t want any Black people or people with children to rent there anymore,” Loraine tells Heat Seek. “They were trying to intimate us, so we fought back.” The tenants sought out the assistance of the Fair Housing Justice Center, which deployed testers to apply to an open rental in the building. The white and Asian applicants were approved; the Black and Latinx folks denied, which resulted in fines over $200,000. 

Despite these illegal rental practices, tenant harassment, and willful neglect, the landlord continues to buy up properties in Flatbush, a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. Living in the neighborhood that Loraine and her husband love so much, with family and friends from their home countries of Grenada and Trinidad, is becoming prohibitively expensive, especially as more rent-regulated units are converted to market rate. 

Loraine and her neighbors keep fighting, and Heat Seek is proud to support their longtime work, alongside our partner, Flatbush Tenant Coalition. “Heat Seek is an amazing tool, an amazing program,” Loraine tells us in a recent interview. “I hope for you all next year that you have more monitors in more buildings.”

We do, too, Loraine. We do, too.

To support our work with tenants like Loraine, click here.


 

Harlem Tenant Brings Heat Seek Log to Force Landlord

[Please note: names and identifying details have been changed to protect the tenants]

“Every time they came to fix it, they just touched the radiator and said everything was fine,” Sandra said of the maintenance workers in her building. While she’s lived in Harlem for many years, this was her first winter in this building, and it was COLD.

“I called to report the problem, and they wouldn’t do anything about it. I know it’s a building-wide issue that many of my neighbors struggle with,” but Sandra refused to let us. Since this was the main problem in her apartment--no other significant repairs to be made--she hadn’t yet engaged an attorney or community organizer. So, “I reached out to Heat Seek in the midst of my misery”, through a request form on our website. 

Because we had some extra hardware in February, we were able to install sensors for several tenants from our waitlist who lived in buildings that fit our criteria: bad landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods who are trying to drive out rent-regulated tenants. “There’s a concerted effort to get lifelong Harlem residents out of the building, raise the rents, and bring in people of higher incomes,” Sandra reported to Heat Seek. 

After a few weeks with a Heat Seek sensor, we confirmed that her temperatures were consistently below the legal limit, and Sandra wanted to take action. She knew that the city inspection system wouldn’t fix her problem quick enough, so she hand-delivered a demand letter to the landlord, which Heat Seek provided to her along with her heat log.

Her landlord was taken aback--by both Sandra’s persistence and Heat Seek’s sensor--so the chiefs of management and maintenance met with her. “This can’t be right,” they complained, upon first examining her heat log. “I know it’s right,” Sandra replied, confident in her data. Convinced by Heat Seek’s third-party testimony, the management agreed to send another maintenance person again.

“This time, they took the radiator apart, diagnosed the problem, and fixed the broken part. They spent two hours there, unlike their previous visits, and my heat was immediately better!” Sandra tells Heat Seek. “It was nerve-wracking approaching my landlord: I have a lease that ends and don’t know if they want me out. I would not have done it without Heat Seek, a third party without a dog in the fight who just monitors and reports what they see.”

We hear stories like this from many of our tenants: our third-party heat logs provide them much-needed tools in their struggle for sufficient heat. Our work can prevent them from the miserable process of Housing Court, by proving both the tenant's will and the severity of their temperatures. Sometimes, Heat Seek is enough to convince some landlords to do the right thing and turn up the heat.  
 

TENANT UPDATE: $128,000 FINE AGAINST BAD LANDLORD

After many months of appearances to court, Linda Smith finally won! While Housing Court does not offer "damages" to tenants, Linda secured two months of rent abatement [free rent]--on top of the two months she got earlier this winter. Her attorney also succeeded in compelling the city to punish the landlord with a $128,000 fine for his willful negligence of her building. Her attorney employed Heat Seek data to demonstrate that the landlord had failed to comply with the previous ruling, where he promised to provide legal amounts of heat.

Heat Seek is proud to support tenants like Linda, and we're so glad she continues to win better conditions for herself and her neighbors!