NYC Housing Info

Using 311 data to vet apartments

In a city where apartment issues may not be visible at first glance, this app was built to allow home seekers to look up a building's complaint history. Users could check whether a building collected heat, vermin, mold or other maintenance complaints.

The app consumed data from NYC's 311 call logs and mapped them to the city's residential buildings. The call logs had recently been made public as a downloadable dataset on the City of New York's open data portal.

In addition to building the public-facing app, various data analysis was performed to assess trends in the local housing stock. Fortunately, the vast majority of residential buildings in the city were determined to be problem free. It was unusual to see more than a complaint or two for any given building within the past year. However, problems were reported more frequently in a handful of larger mid-century buildings and certain low-income neighborhoods.