Let's research the landlord! New York City is in a housing crisis. Some landlords leave their buildings in despair and let their tenants suffer without heat in winter. Others evict their tenants, legally or illegally, in order to flip buildings and profit off of gentrification. Affordable housing is a scarce resource.

Residents, lawyers, tenants, and organizers who want to use data in their struggle turn to proprietary databases and resources, like PropertyShark, designed for real estate or contend with CSV and printouts from city websites. nycdb aims to give technologists and researchers who want to volunteer their time helping community groups who are defending the city against the real estate industry a leg up by providing a ready-to-use database filled with housing data.

nycdb is a python program that downloads, processes, and loads the following public datasets into postgres:

• Department of City Planning's PLUTO (Includes the latest version via Open Data, and many other specific versions. See documentatino for details)
• DOB Job Filings
• DOB Complaints
• DOB Vacate Orders - From FOIA request by Jennah Gosciak
• DOB Violations
• HPD Violations
• HPD Litigations
• HPD Registrations
• HPD Complaints
• HPD Handyman Work Order (HWO) Charges
• HPD Open Market Order (OMO) Charges
• HPD Repair and Vacate Orders
• HPD Affordable Production (Building and Project)
• HPD Certificate of No Harassment
• Department of Finance Rolling Sales
• Department of Finance Annualized Sales
• Department of Finance Property Tax Exemptions
• Tax bills - Rent Stabilization Unit Counts (John Krauss and Atul Varma's data)
• DOF Tax Lien Sale List
• ACRIS
• Marshal Evictions - From DOI via ANHD's Displacement Alert Project and API (built by Jade Ahking)
• ECB Violations
• Oath Hearings
• Property Address Directory
• J-51 Exemptions
• OCA Housing Court Records (zipcode)
• BBLs of NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) Developments — From NYCHA via JustFix's scraper tool
• Speculation Watch List
• DCP Housing Database
• Major Capital Improvements (MCI) Applications - From FOIL request by Winnie Shen
• DOB Safety Violations
• DHS Daily Shelter Census - From scraping by Adrian Nesta and Patrick Spauster

Go to src/README.md for documentation on how to create your own copy of the database locally.

The Housing Data Coalition hosts their own copy ("instance") of nycdb. If you are not a member of HDC and would like to use it, please contact [email protected]

• Heatseek for ongoing support of the project and for their amazing work.
• @talos for his tax bill scraping to get counts of rent-stabilization units
• NYCDB's programmers
• Housing Data Coalition for their support and for hosting nycdb workshops

NYCDB - Postgres database of NYC housing data
Copyright (C) 2016-2020 ziggy & contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

The database files provided on this page are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.