New York City, NY

Housing | 2025

Creating real-time alerts that track evictions, code violations, and ownership patterns to help tenants and community partners take timely action to prevent displacement.

In New York City, tenants with low and middle incomes face a crisis of affordability, housing disrepair, and the threat of eviction, leading to disproportionate rates of displacement from their communities. In 2024 alone, 120,000 eviction filings were issued, one in three households were severely rent burdened, and one-quarter of rent-stabilized tenants lived with multiple health-impacting maintenance deficiencies. In this environment, where the threat of displacement is urgent, tenants and advocates struggle to hold landlords accountable because they lack a transparent view of issues by building and across landlord portfolios.

In response, JustFix will create a real-time reporting system that alerts tenants and advocates to the buildings, portfolios, and neighborhoods experiencing emergent and ongoing tenant instability. To build the system, JustFix will leverage its current data platform, Who Owns What, to aggregate ownership information and indicators of displacement for all private rental units in NYC. The alert system will connect these data—eviction filings, code violations, vacate orders, and more—into a weekly report that reveals trends of distress in every building, landlord portfolio, and neighborhood in the city. To ensure the system meets the needs of diverse stakeholders, JustFix will cocreate the service with community-based partners and incorporate ongoing feedback to guide service iteration.

JustFix’s displacement alert system will be used by tenants, organizers, legal services providers, and local government agencies and officials. These stakeholders will use the system to monitor the buildings and communities where they live and work. The real-time insights will equip them to organize against evictions or deregulation proactively, develop legal cases and investigations, and advance data-informed policies that address housing instability and its root causes. By revealing hidden patterns of displacement, JustFix aims to support tenants and community partners in driving systemic change, hold landlords accountable, and keep families in their homes.