As stated in last week's article about EvictionLab, the month of April has seen two big releases of data from housing focused think tanks around the country. Last week we covered one, and as promised, this week we will look at the second, the "2018 State of Rental Housing in Cook County" released by DePaul University's Institute of Housing Studies (IHS). Unlike the EvictionLab website which provides mostly data with little commentary, the IHS report provides mostly text-based analysis with some charts and maps as side illustrations. However, as it is focused entirely on Cook County it may be more relevant to the interests of Chicago renters.
We stated last week that we would look at both data releases using the same article structure. Below you will find that we have indeed viewed the IHS release through the same lens that we used for EvictionLab.
Who is the Institute for Housing Studies?
Based out of the DePaul University School of Business's Real Estate Center, the IHS is a combination of think tank and graduate/doctorate level research facility focused on housing and real estate including residential and commercial property, both purchased and rented. The staff of IHS is a combination of full-time administrators and students of the Business School. A glance at their original 2009 site on archive.org shows that out of the original staff, only Research Director Jin Man Lee remains. The rest have been replaced by new experts and students, as can be expected for an academic group.
While the newer EvictionLab is based out of the department of sociology at Princeton's grad schools and therefore approaches research from the perspective of sociology and public policy, IHS is more established and rooted in economics, real estate and finance. The difference between the two groups can be clearly seen in their respective websites. EvictionLab is flashy and modern, full of sliding panels and animated maps, designed for mobile access and easy consumption by media outlets. IHS has a more conservative and traditional website although their data is still quite valid. Continue reading IHS’s State of Rental Housing in Cook County: What Chicago Renters Need to Know
Hey folks! We're back! Sorry about the lack of article last week. When my computer failed on Tuesday the 10th I figured that I would be able to have it back up and running by the weekend, with enough time to create an article for Monday the 16th. Unfortunately a missed FedEx delivery meant that I was, in fact, offline until Tuesday the 17th, at which point I had to start working on this article here. C'est la vie.
While I was away, not one but two major housing research organizations dropped some pretty major reports on us and my mailbox exploded with people linking me to either the New York Times article on Eviction Lab or the 2018 State of Rental Housing in Cook County from DePaul's Institute of Housing Studies. We're going to be looking at both of them over the next two weeks, starting with Eviction Lab. In fact, since they arrived so close together we will be using the exact same format to examine each.
Who is Eviction Lab?
Way back in 2014 I received an email from Matthew Desmond when he was at Harvard University working on a thesis about evictions in America. He asked me for some data I had purchased from the Cook County Courts for an article in my old, dearly departed real estate blog. I provided it to him. His thesis went on to become the Pulitzer Prize winning book "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City." Desmond is now helming the Princeton University team behind Eviction Lab. They've got a heck of a lot of funding and some very smart statisticians and housing research gurus on the team. Continue reading Eviction Lab: What Chicago Renters Need To Know
We want to start this off by saying that this is not a voter's guide. We had planned to do a voter's guide. In the previous articles in this series we said we would do one. Upon examination of the ballot we've decided that there are just too many races for us to cover in a single article. So while we will mention a few individual candidates here we will not be giving endorsements. (Since we're a business we really shouldn't be giving endorsements anyhow.) Rather, we will be looking at some of the main issues at stake in the March 2018 Chicago primaries and things that renters should consider as they review the candidates.
Rent Control (100/HB 2430)
State Representative Will Guzzardi's campaign to repeal the statewide ban on rent control has been in process for two years now. Some of our regular readers may in fact be surprised that we have not yet done a full article on the issue here in the blog. We have, however, addressed it in our monthly newsletter way back in March of 2016. It is our belief that while rent control is a great concept in theory and that it might work for other cities and towns within the state of Illinois, it will not work well for a city as segregated as Chicago. Rent control is a way for the government to cap rent increases in privately-owned rental housing. In an ideal world, tenants in a rent controlled apartment would be able to stay in one place for a long time without worrying about exorbitant rent increases. Landlords are, however, able to raise rents to match market rates again once the rent-controlled tenants move out. Continue reading March 2018 Primaries: The Issues for Renters
Over the past few months we've learned a lot from the public data made available on the US Census Bureau's website. We learned how tenants are apathetic about community involvement. We learned about the number of immigrants working in apartment maintenance. We found a list of the most and least common apartment types in Chicago. And of course, every RentConfident apartment safety report contains data from the US Census so that renters can get an idea of what to expect from their new neighborhoods. But the census bureau is not infallible. In fact, on Wednesday a simple error in an email from the census bureau this week caused major ripples throughout the open data community. From this event we can learn quite a bit about how readers interpret digital information, and apply that to rental situations.
Those of you who don't do data work might not know what an API is. Basically it's a way for one website to retrieve information from another website automatically without logins or passwords. When a website has a "share on Facebook" button, they are using Facebook's API to submit their content to Facebook. RentConfident uses APIs to regularly pull updated information into our reports from about 30 different sites. (The rest of our data is added in by hand.) We pull code violations from the city of Chicago, map data from Cook County, and of course population data from the US Census Bureau's API.
This week I and many others within the open data community received the following email from the US Census Bureau:
Click to view full size.
Note that there is a PDF file attachment. I read the email, read the attachment, and chuckled to myself. Then I went to check Twitter. Sure enough on Twitter I saw messages like these:
Surely there is a better way to complying with the HTTPS requirement than completely terminating the Census API? cc: @OliverSherouse [2/2]
People were claiming that the API was shutting down permanently, which would break a lot of websites. People were blaming the government and crying "censorship," but they were mistaken. The cover email was flawed and didn't state the whole story. The PDF attachment - which that last tweet even linked to directly - provided more extensive information stating that the address used to make API calls is going to be moving to a new location (from "HTTP" to "HTTPS"), and that therefore any links to the old server would stop working. Unfortunately, recipients just read the cover email and immediately sent out false information on Twitter. It was a simple courtesy message that went horribly wrong.
The authors of these tweets are very intelligent people. I'm sure most of them are tech folks who know how to debug and read code for those tiny errors that can make a computer program break. I'm sure most of them have college educations. But they still missed the whole point of the email and then spread their misconceptions around.
Upon being notified of the problem, the US Census Bureau issued a clarifying tweet immediately, and sent out a follow up email the next morning. Pretty quick response for a government agency. On Thursday a lot of top open data Twitter users had to issue retractions and apologies for jumping the gun yesterday.
We can learn a lot from this incident.
Attachments are Dead. In this mobile era you cannot expect people to open PDF attachments. Senders may assume that everyone will read the full content of an email, but in reality people skim and may not be able to open attachments for several hours. This is something landlords and agents in particular need to keep in mind when emailing tenants.
Corporate Emails Have a Lot of Authors. Corporate communications pass through many hands before getting sent out. In the case of the Census email I would guess that the IT folks assigned the drafting of the email to an intern, who wrote it and sent it to the legal department, who then passed it to the public relations department, totally changing the nature of its message by the time they sent it to everyone who uses the API. So tenants, when you get a message from property management saying something totally bizarre, (like "all tenants must like us on Facebook or get evicted") make sure you check with a decision maker in the office to make sure you are interpreting it correctly.
Sometimes it isn't the government's fault. If something goes wrong involving people, agencies and the government, laypersons are going to immediately blame the government, no matter who is really at fault. I saw a number of tweets blaming the Trump administration for shutting down the API, when a) the government mandate that forced all government sites to switch to "HTTPS" was issued during the Obama administration nearly two years ago, b) it wasn't even closing down in the first place, and c) data encryption is actually a good thing that harms no one.
This also has echoes in the landlord-tenant arena. Both sides are quick to blame their problems on the laws that govern rentals rather than their own inability to communicate well and simple human error. Tenants are quick to blame their landlords for errors made by their staff. I'm all for accountability but one needs to focus one's anger in the right directions.
Consumers are suspicious. Consumers of social media have come to assume malicious motives and conspiracies lurk behind every message received from authority figures. While in some cases this may be true, in most cases authority figures - be they government agencies, software developers, your parents or your landlord - are not making decisions specifically to cause you harm. They may act carelessly or selfishly, but they generally are not outright malicious.
Trust but verify. Twitter - and social media in general - consists of a lot of wannabe pundits all trying to scoop each other, especially on big changes. I'm sure those who tweeted that the API was closing down were trying to be helpful to their friends or to boost their reputations as informed members of the open data community. If you see something on Twitter that looks like big breaking news, make sure to verify the information before you spread it around. Even respectable news establishments can be misled based on early information, flawed eyewitness accounts and tweets. Renters, when you are reading about a landlord on a site like Yelp, make sure you consider the source as well as the content.
Read the fine print. Finally, when you receive something in writing from an authority figure you must read the fine print. This includes things like leases and appliance instruction manuals from your landlord. Failing to read the find print caused a lot of embarrassment among the Twitter open data community this week. I hope it didn't cost any data engineers their jobs.
Was there ever a time when you got called out for jumping to conclusions? Have you ever stuck your foot in it on Twitter based on gossip? Let us know what happened in the comments, and we'll see you next week!
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Every once in a while we get questions from our readers about the finer details of renting. Some are from tenants, others from landlords, and still others from parents, attorneys and agents. Today we're back with another question from the mailbag! This one required such an in-depth answer that we're spending the entire article on it.
If you have a question you’d like us to answer in a future installment of Dear RentConfident, leave it in a comment below, or send us a message through our contact form.
Dear RentConfident: I was hoping to get your insight on where the affordable housing is in Chicago. I searched your site and didn't find a specific blog article about this so I thought I'd reach out about the City's Affordable Requirements Ordinance. Based on my understanding of the ordinance, developments that receive city financial assistance or involve city-owned land must provide 10 percent of their units (if the building is more than 10 units) at affordable prices. The problem I'm having is that the City's Affordable Rental Housing Resource List doesn't seem right. For instance, it only lists one development in the loop, but it seems to me that new apartment buildings are popping up in the loop every week. I'm interested in finding out how low-income individuals can find these building online.
I have two brothers who work full-time but are still considered working poor. They make about $27K and $31K respectively and have not been able to find an affordable apartment in Chicago. The issue they keep running into is the property manager saying that don't make enough money annually. One of my brothers went to [address redacted], which is on the City' ARO list, as well to several landlord owned properties on the south side but was told just that. Another brother went to [address redacted] but was told the waiting list for affordable apartment was two years. Combining their income is not an option because they've tried living together in the past, and they get along much better when live a part. They both would like to live close to downtown since it's a considered an opportunity area with more access to resources.
