COVID & Housing - Are Repair Issues Going Unchecked?
This month we revisited the question of what DAP Portal can show us about our housing landscape during the pandemic. One thing we found–there was a major decrease in housing violations issued by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) this year compared to the same time period in 2019. Violations have steadily increased since new COVID cases declined in June, but remain 17% lower than last year.
Decades of representing members that organize tenants on the ground have shown us that bad housing conditions don't magically disappear. Such a drastic decrease in housing violations means that HPD is inspecting conditions less.
Before the pandemic happened, it was an uphill battle for many tenants to receive basic services such as reliable heat, hot water, gas, and electricity and to have unsafe conditions such as mold and pest infestations remedied. As City services face budget cuts and cold weather looms, it's essential that tenants live in safe housing and have tools to hold their landlords accountable.
How Did We Get This Data?
We used ANHD's DAP Portal Custom Search to identify all properties in New York City that received at least 1 HPD violation each month. We then exported the results as a CSV and summed the total in Microsoft Excel to find the total violations each month. In the future, we plan to incorporate those totals into Custom Search directly on the Portal and explore analytics to view trends in neighborhoods and citywide.
If you have ideas for what you want to see, let us know.
