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!