NYC School of Data 2025

NYCDB is an open-source project of the Housing Data Coalition intended to make it easier for housing justice advocates to fight displacement in New York City.

Join Maxwell Austensen of the Housing Data Coalition for this interactive workshop, where you'll learn about the basics of NYC's housing-related open data by asking questions of NYCDB. You'll learn what a BBL (Borough-Block-Lot) is, and how to query NYCDB using a language called SQL. You'll also learn how to use other tools that build on NYCDB, like Who Owns What and the Displacement Alert Project (DAP) to aid you in housing research. 

At the end of the day, you'll have learned the basics of how to query the database to answer your housing questions and have a better understanding of NYC's Open Data landscape.

No prior experience with open data or databases is required to attend this session.

In April 2024, Good Cause Eviction Protections were signed into law in New York State after years of organizing by tenants. However, the answer to "Do I qualify for Good Cause?" is not always straightforward for tenants in NYC. JustFix, in collaboration with Housing Justice For All, created a tool for tenants in NYC to easily check their Good Cause coverage. In this session, we will discuss the product development process of the Good Cause Eviction Screener and in particular, how the rich open data ecosystem in NYC has allowed us to create a simple, easy-to-use product for all tenants.

New York City is filled with hidden plazas, pocket parks, and vibrant gathering spots—not all of which show up the same way on google maps? NYC Public Space is a mobile app for iOS and Android that aggregates open government data to present a comprehensive guide to the city’s public spaces.

Join Chris Whong - urbanist, mapmaker, and data junkie - for an inside look at how the app was created, from leveraging NYC’s open data resources to designing an intuitive, user-friendly map experience using the Mapbox Maps SDK for Flutter. We’ll explore the challenges of working with government datasets, our approach to crowdsourcing updates, and how you can use the app to discover new places to relax, work, or socialize. Whether you're a city explorer, an urbanist, or a developer interested in civic tech, this session will show you how open data can transform the way we experience public space.

In this multi-specialist panel, doctoral students from the CUNY Graduate Center will discuss how access to, and the experience of, long-term housing in NYC has changed as a result of open data sources available in the city.

This will include a presentation by Sam O'Hana, doctoral candidate in English and Advising Fellow in Data Analysis and Visualization, who will discuss the publicly-available repositories of information (DHCR, HPD, DOB, DOF) that are necessary to challenge illegal deregulation of rent stabilized apartments in the city. He will share updates from a pending lawsuit against his landlord in the NYS Supreme Court.

We will also hear from Ian Williams, MSW, a doctoral student in Social Work with a background as a social worker involved in issues surrounding tenancy, governance structures and open source digital resources.

The third panelist will be Holden Taylor, doctoral candidate in English and Organizer for the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union, who will present work relevant to his dissertation on the issue of housing, including the use of open data for tenant organizing.