New York City, NY

Housing | 2025

Created 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 owners accountable because they lack a transparent view of issues by building and across landlord portfolios and neighborhoods.

In response, JustFix created two real-time reporting systems that alert tenants and advocates to the building portfolios and neighborhoods experiencing emergent and ongoing tenant instability: Building Alerts updates users about building conditions and evictions in any private rental building in New York City. Area Alerts presents real-time data about housing risk within any city neighborhood selected. To build the systems, JustFix leveraged its established data platform, Who Owns What, to aggregate landlord information and indicators of displacement for all private rental units in New York.  

Building Alerts and Area Alerts connect 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 systems meet the needs of diverse stakeholders, JustFix met with housing advocacy partners that use the alerts and created a survey to collect ongoing user feedback that will guide improvements.

Tenants, organizers, legal services providers, and local government agencies and officials use JustFix reports to track displacement. More than 3,200 users have subscribed to Building Alerts and more than 300 to Area Alerts since 2025. Tenants say the insights help them overcome fear of landlord retaliation and connect with neighbors, as the reports reveal that seemingly isolated experiences are in fact buildingwide. Housing organizers and legal aid providers use the data to challenge health code violations and evictions and to monitor neighborhood changes. Local government agencies, like NYC’s Housing Preservation and Development, are also working with housing organizers to inspect buildings with serious deficiencies. By revealing hidden patterns of displacement, JustFix supports tenants and community partners in driving systemic change, holding landlords accountable, and keeping families in their homes.