This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Top Takeaways
Tenant-serving tech tools are being developed with urgency by small teams across the country. These tools have helped tenants get housing repairs completed, win judgements against their landlords, and respond to evictions.
A key challenge lies in scalability across geographies. Most of the tools we found were developed to serve tenants in a particular city or region.
Tenant-serving tech shows promise for chipping away at power disparities, but housing advocates emphasize that the real solutions lie in larger efforts. “The much-more dominant trend is that landlords are using tech against us . . . Tech can help tenants, but we’re behind.”
Dylan Pederson knows about difficult landlords. When he moved to Chicago after college in 2018, his landlord refused to provide adequate heat in his unit and even threatened to retaliate against him if he complained to the city. A few years later, Pederson moved to Los Angeles. While his LA landlord did fix some problems here and there, Pederson learned that the landlord wasn’t treating longtime tenants well, especially Latinx residents. In one instance, Pederson says, the landlord refused to repair a roof that had collapsed into a tenant’s kitchen.
Pederson joined a local tenants union and led a campaign against the landlord. Through research, he learned that the landlord operated under multiples names, using different last names on his property taxes and communicating with tenants using other pseudonyms.
“He was trying to make sure no one knew who he was. That really incensed me into action,” Pederson says.
A humanities major turned software developer, Pederson returned to Chicago in 2023, formed the nonprofit Tech Tools for Justice and created Landlord Mapper, an online tool that harnesses data from multiple public sources to help tenants find out who their landlords are, how many other properties they own, and their histories of violations and fines. He launched Chicago’s map earlier this year, after running a pilot project for Milwaukee last year.
“There are landlords out there who own dozens, hundreds of buildings, who quite literally directly control the lives of tens of thousands of people, often people living in the most precarious economic situations,” Pederson says. “There are only two ways to hold your landlord to account: through the courts and through tenant organizing. If you can’t even serve your landlord with a lawsuit [because you don’t know their address], then it’s impossible to hold them accountable in court. So this tool, at its core, [will] bring some kind of transparency and accountability to rental markets.”
Landlord identification is just one area in which data and technology have been harnessed in recent years to empower tenants, who almost always face significant power imbalances when trying to hold landlords accountable. We’ve found more than a dozen examples of tenant-serving technology that help renters not only track down landlords, but also respond to eviction, fight back against housing discrimination, monitor landlords’ use of digital surveillance, and more.
Of the tools we’ve found, most were developed to serve tenants in a particular city or region. We spoke with several tool creators to learn more about how the tech works, the impact the tools have had so far, and whether some tools can be scaled for use in larger geographic areas.
Tech Tools to Identify Hidden Landlords
As Pederson found, it can be a major challenge for tenants to learn who owns their building, much less connect the dots between a dizzying set of investors, property management firms, and various limited liability corporations, or shell companies, that obscure ownership details.
A major inspiration for Pederson’s tool was Who Owns What, launched in 2022 in New York City by JustFix, a housing justice-focused data and technology nonprofit. Who Owns What pulls together city data on more than 200,000 properties across New York City to identify and map the portfolios of buildings owned by any given entity.
“If there’s a pattern of practice by the landlord or the management company, cutting corners on maintenance, trying to bring in higher-paying renters, it’s probably happening across its properties,” says Joel Stillman, JustFix’s co-executive director. “There’s no public database listing what else an individual financial stakeholder or landlord owns. So advocates would go through public records—building registrations, financial transaction documents—and look for common names and building addresses, a manual, extremely time-intensive process that required expertise. We saw that this could be automated by scraping data from these docs and creating a network of commonality instantaneously.”
Who Owns What has sparked some dramatic results. In one case, an organizer was looking into repair issues, health concerns, and suspicions of intentional forcing out of rent-stabilized tenants in one building but discovered through Who Owns What that the building’s owner controlled dozens of other properties. Tenants in those other buildings, it turned out, were dealing with similar issues. They formed a cross-building tenant association and applied enough pressure to escalate their concerns to the New York Attorney General, who in 2022 found Ink Property Group liable and forced it to pay back $400,000 to tenants, put $1.75 million toward preserving affordable housing, and revert dozens of apartments back to their proper rent-stabilized status.
“This is a good example of what happens frequently, but just rarely gets a press release about it,” says Stillman. “Who Owns What tends to act as an early catalyst to make a process unfold which otherwise may not have happened.”
Other examples of landlord and property sleuthing tools include the Organizers’ Warning Notification and Information for Tenants, or OWN-IT! app, developed by Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) for Los Angeles, and Evictorbook, a project of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in partnership with the Oakland Preservation Table. Evictorbook launched publicly in 2022 to trace San Francisco and Oakland rental property ownership, identify “serial evictors” and publish lists of the top evictors in each community. In Albany, the Albany Landlord Report Card, created by a volunteer-led nonprofit, allows tenants to search a building address or landlord name and find out how many properties the landlord owns and the letter grade they’ve been assigned based on code violations and eviction numbers.
Bolstering Tenant Power in Housing Court
In most housing courts, tenants rarely have legal representation. On average, more than 80 percent of landlords have counsel, according to the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, but for tenants, that figure is less than 5 percent. In some cases, eviction rulings are handed down in as little as 30 seconds. While a growing number of places have passed “right-to-counsel” laws—which aim to provide free legal representation to renters who have low incomes—the disparity remains stark.
New tools are helping tenants in some cities arrive at their hearings prepared not only with the proper forms and evidence in hand, but with greater confidence and knowledge of their rights.
In California, the Tenant Power Toolkit, launched in 2022, helps tenants across the state who must respond to eviction notices under tight deadlines. The free online tool is a collaborative effort of the LA Tenants Union, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, and legal service providers and anti-eviction lawyers.
The toolkit’s Answer Tool prompts tenants with a lengthy list of questions and then produces completed legal paperwork—customized with the appropriate defenses for their circumstances—that can be brought to court or, if they live in LA County, filed electronically on the spot. The tool effectively buys tenants some breathing room, preventing a default judgment that would mean automatically losing their case.
Landlords have so much data about tenants. In making these tools, we’re trying to undo that data disparity and understand the landlords better.”
Erin McElroy, Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
“The paperwork is quite dense, quite difficult,” says Paul Lanctot, a software developer for The Debt Collective and an LA Tenants Union organizer, who was the toolkit’s main programmer. “The tool has really helped give tenants more leverage in the eviction process, and decreased the rate of defaults.”
In Los Angeles County alone, about 500 tenants each month file eviction responses using the Tenant Power Toolkit, says Lanctot. That represents around 10 percent of the 5,000 evictions typically filed per month in the county.
Other tools for courtroom help include the Massachusetts Defense for Eviction (MADE), a self-guided online tool created by Greater Boston Legal Services that “interviews” tenants to help them prepare forms for eviction defense and to set up reminders for key deadlines, and the Eviction Free NYC tool, created by the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition and JustFix, that helps tenants learn if they are eligible for a free attorney in housing court under right to counsel legislation and provides guidance and further resources. Another tool—The Landlord-Tenant Rights Assistant, a prototype developed by Nischal Subedi, a doctoral candidate in Statistics and Data Science at the University of Delaware—uses an AI chatbot to answer questions from tenants and small landlords about laws, rights, and obligations.
Fighting Housing Discrimination
Rental voucher holders often face discrimination while apartment-hunting, whether through outright “no vouchers” responses or simply being ghosted by brokers and landlords. Unlock NYC is working to combat discrimination with tenant-serving apps such as the Rights Recorder that housing-seekers can use to record calls and keep screenshots of emails and text messages to help document unfair treatment in the search process. UnlockNYC is also using data from the tool’s use to generate reports about emerging housing discrimination tactics in the city.
Communicating with Landlords
Fear, worries about retaliation, confusion about rights, language barriers, and hard-to-find landlords can all complicate the process for tenants seeking to report needed repairs. JustFix’s Letter of Complaint tool assists tenants by generating a formal letter of complaint and sending it by certified mail to the landlord’s official mailing address as registered in the building’s registration document with the city— location information a tenant may not always have, JustFix’s Stillman notes.
In Delaware, the Delaware Justice of the Peace Court Online Dispute Resolution System is a no-cost virtual service to help tenants and landlords resolve disputes outside of court, with or without a mediator.
Monitoring Landlords’ Use of Tech
Some tenant-focused watchdogs are working to monitor and report on how landlords are deploying technology in ways that are potentially disempowering or harmful to tenants.
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project tracks technology deployed in residential buildings across the country. Its crowd-sourced “Landlord Tech Watch” survey helps populate a map showing where landlord tech—from facial recognition cameras to keyless entry systems to smart home technology—is in use. Launched in 2020, the tool’s purpose is less to be a direct aid for tenants than a vehicle for data-gathering and research. The project has helped inform published reports detailing the “geographies, harms, and histories of surveillance-based landlord tech” in New York City and San Francisco.
“Landlords have so much data about tenants. In making these tools, we’re trying to undo that data disparity and understand the landlords better,” says Erin McElroy, co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. “There’s extreme inequity when it comes to data. We’re trying to fight back.”
Challenges of Scale, Accessibility, and Imprecise Data
Tenant-serving tech tools are being developed with urgency and enthusiasm by small teams across the country, but a key challenge lies in scalability across geographies. JustFix’s Who Owns What is specific to New York City; the Tenant Power Toolkit works only for Californians; OWN-IT! covers Los Angeles; the Landlord Mapper covers Chicago and Milwaukee.
In addition, when local laws or court procedures change, developers must often update their tools. But they also can see a tool become useless. For example, JustFix in 2020 developed an online tool for New York City tenants to petition for repairs when a landlord or managing agent has failed to act. The tool was launched in collaboration with the NYC Housing Court at the start of the pandemic, when hearings and document filings couldn’t be done in person and the fee was waived. But in mid-2021, the court abruptly reinstated the filing fee and resumed a requirement that each filing be notarized, making the JustFix tool inoperable.
A tool called the H.A.R.M. Calculator (Habitability, Abatement of Rent, Mathematical) had early success in 2019, helping one Albany, New York, tenant win a $2,219 judgment against her landlord for failing to respond to requests for repair. The program, designed for lawyers and the law students helping them, searches prior court cases in the state to calculate how much back rent a tenant should demand for a landlord’s failure to comply with local habitability laws. It also produces a trial document that summarizes the nature of the claim and a calculation of reasonable damages.
“This piece of paper makes for a great negotiating tactic. . . . It says, ‘I’m serious about this, and I’ve got New York case law on my side,’” said Jordan Fruchter, who co-created the tool in 2019 when he was a law student at Albany Law School, alongside Edward De Barbieri, a law professor and the co-director of the school’s Community Economic Development Clinic.
But that tool hasn’t been used much recently, according to a local tenants union, though not for lack of need. Developers at the Albany Law School are working to refine the user interface, as well as adapt it for use in additional New York courts, they say.
The data itself, which the tools need to pull from numerous sources, isn’t always perfectly clean, either. Pederson of Tech Tools for Justice notes that building unit counts are sometimes missing, average rent figures can be underestimates, and reported code violations don’t necessarily specify their severity.
There are also ever-present challenges in making tenant tech tools clear, understandable, available, and accessible to all of the users who might benefit from them. Simply getting the word out can be a challenge, not to mention simplifying apps for layperson use, making them available in multiple languages, and/or ensuring there is assistance and training where needed.
De Barbieri, who has studied digital literacy disparities and helped develop the H.A.R.M Calculator, notes that lack of familiarity with online tools and with legal statutes and language makes both court processes and tech tool use difficult for some tenants.
“One of the greatest challenges I’ve seen is the literacy aspect. Tenants need to know they have a legal right, understand court process, and be able to use the tech to assert their rights through the process,” he says.
What’s Next?
The developers of tech tools for tenants that Shelterforce spoke with say they hope to expand to more users, more features, or wider geographic areas.
JustFix, in partnership with Housing Justice for All, released a new tool in April called Good Cause NYC, which enables tenants to find out if their unit is subject to New York City’s Good Cause Eviction protections and to calculate the maximum rent increase their landlord can impose.
Tech Tools for Justice recently won a contract with the University of Minnesota to develop a map tool for Minneapolis tenants and organizers. In addition, to ease the path toward geographic scaling, Pederson is building what he calls the Open Property Network Database (opndb), aiming to automate the map-creation process to save other developers the labor of creating the code anew for their cities.
“I think it’s worth it to pool resources and think bigger,” Pederson says. “That’s why I’m building opndb, so that any researcher who wants this landlord data for their municipality can just open up the tool, and then if they have the raw data, they can just put it in and press ‘play.’ I’m trying to build a standardized, city-agnostic, landlord-property-linking data tool.”
The much-more dominant trend is that landlords are using tech against us . . . Tech can help tenants, but we’re behind. We need to catch up.”
Tara Raghuveer, Tenant Union Federation
Pederson is also working to integrate Landlord Mapper with a Chicago tenant hotline so that hotline staffers fielding calls from distressed tenants can immediately access information about their landlords and see whether other tenants in that owner’s buildings have similar complaints.
McElroy’s team is working to expand Evictorbook to other Bay Area counties and considering building one for Seattle. In addition, she is about to launch an oral history project at the University of Washington, where she directs the Anti-Eviction Lab. She’ll work with students to interview Landlord Tech Watch survey participants.
Tenant-serving tech shows promise for chipping away at power disparities, but developers and advocates emphasize that the real solutions lie in larger efforts.
Lanctot says the Tenant Power Toolkit was built intentionally with features that go beyond document-preparation to help connect tenants and build organizing power.
“Tech is not going to solve the tenant rights crisis. It’s not going to solve the housing crisis,” he says. “What we need to be angling for is supporting organizing efforts, supporting building a movement, so that tenants are able to have more power and be able to change laws and push for the right to stay in their homes. To me, the focus of a lot of this tech has to be how we can use it to give people more power by being able to organize.”
Tara Raghuveer, director of the national Tenant Union Federation, says, “The reality now is that tenants are behind. The much-more dominant trend is that landlords are using tech against us, to surveil and to anonymize and distance themselves from impact on tenants. Tech can help tenants, but we’re behind. We need to catch up.”
The Tools Tenants Are Using
FOR COMMUNICATING WITH LANDLORDS
JustFix’s Letter of Complaint tool generates a formal letter of complaint and sends it by certified mail to a New York landlord’s official mailing address.
The Delaware Justice of the Peace Court Online Dispute Resolution System is a virtual service that helps tenants and landlords resolve disputes outside of court, with or without a mediator.
FOR IDENTIFYING LANDLORDS
Who Owns What pulls together city data on more than 200,000 properties across New York City to identify and map the portfolios of buildings owned by a given entity.
The Landlord Mapper tool for Milwaukee and Chicago helps tenants find out who their landlords are, how many other properties they own, and their histories of violations and fines.
The OWN-IT! app maps Los Angeles rental property ownership.
Evictorbook traces San Francisco and Oakland rental property ownership to identify “serial evictors.”
FOR HOUSING COURT
The Tenant Power ToolKit helps California tenants who must respond to eviction notices under tight deadlines.
The Massachusetts Defense for Eviction helps tenants prepare forms for an eviction defense and it sets up reminders for key deadlines.
The Eviction Free NYC tool helps tenants learn if they are eligible for a free attorney in housing court and provides guidance and other resources.
FOR HOUSING DISCRIMINATION
The Rights Recorder records calls and keeps screenshots of emails and text messages to help document unfair treatment in the apartment search process.
FOR MONITORING LANDLORD TECH USE
The Landlord Tech Watch survey shows where landlord tech is in use. This includes facial recognition cameras, keyless entry systems, smart home technology, and more.
About the Author
Tags
Comments
One thought on “Tech Tools Help Tenants Push Back Against Problematic Landlords”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Thank you for what you guys do. From a tenant in Northern California who is being harassed and retaliatory evicted by the mega rich owner family who manages their 5 complexes by themselves. The wealthy family invades tenants’ privacy and quiet enjoyment with impunity. In California this is illegal. Many tenants do not know this and put up with it just because it’s in the lease (or even if it’s not in the lease), and for fear of being evicted. The family brazenly walks into people’s bedrooms, snoops, takes notes on a clipboard, uses their phone flashlight to “inspect” the bedroom and possibly record video. All under the auspice of “doing their due diligence to make sure the building is habitable”. Tenants are waking up to their lawlessness though. A Tenants Union for Northern California (not bay area) is needed.