About us

Landlords often obfuscate their identity through purchasing individual buildings with individual corporations and Limited Liability Companies (LLCs). Even law-abiding landlords enact such practices to mitigate the financial risks of holding such valuable property. However, this practice makes locating a landlord’s entire portfolio or even the true owner of a single property quite difficult. However, with the use of the city’s plentiful buildings databases, we have found that landlords frequently use the same address for many of their building transactions, including purchases, mortgages, and registrations. Using this link, we can begin to pierce the landlord-created corporate veil and understand the full contours of some of city’s largest building owners. This heightened understanding of owners’ portfolios will enable OAG to strengthen its aggressive efforts to combat harmful landlord practices, such as tenant harassment, deed theft, bank fraud, and other harmful violations affecting tenants and homeowners.

Building on last year's work, we would like to integrate additional datasets to enable better tracking of harmful landlord practices extending into building maintenance, permitting, etc.

Sponsor

CUSP Urban Modeling Group

Mentor

Debra F. Laefer - Professor at NYU Center for Urban Science + Progress

Team Member

Julian Ferreiro - jif245@nyu.edu

Jack Lundquist - jack.lundquist@nyu.edu

Keith Dumanski - kpd286@nyu.edu

Yixuan Tang - yixuantang@nyu.edu

Partnerships

Street Easy

Housing Rights Intiative

Attorney General

Public Advocate for the City of New York