The ANHD Tenant /Landlord Web-Based Research Guide

Welcome to the ANHD Tenant/Landlord Web-Based Research Guide. This Guide brings together in one place the web-based resources that can be useful to tenant and community organizers, as well as community developers. This guide provides one-click links to the research sites that can make your work easier and more effective.

Find key information, including:

• The status of a tenant’s housing court case.
  
• The violations on record, or taxes owed for a building.
  
• The person hiding behind the anonymous corporation that owns a building.
  
• All the other buildings owned by a particular landlord, who wrote the mortgage for a building, or what kind of loans a particular lender is making throughout your neighborhood.
  
• Site or neighborhood data for a community development project.

Check out the links below.

RealQuest - This data service brings together all the information that is available for an individual building at the County Clerks office, but is far more useful because it allows you to search for data on a neighborhood, or even city-wide level. Suspect that a problem landlord is abusing other buildings? Find all the buildings he or she owns. Think that a particular mortgage lender is making terrible loans that harm your community? Track all the mortgages made by that lender. Need data for a community development project? You will probably find it on RealQuest. And much, much more. Use this information to plan creative and strategic organizing campaigns. This is an extraordinarily powerful, useful, and flexible tool for tenant organizing, community organizing, and community development.

RealQuest is the only research tool on the ANHD website that requires a password for access. ANHD has subscribed to a RealQuest master account so we can make the service available to New York City not-for-profit community-based housing groups. You can get a password for your agency at ANHD’s cost, which is $200 a year. (The price for your agency to subscribe to RealQuest on your own would be approximately $2,000 a year.) For more information, please contact Benjamin Dulchin or Rita Mazza at ANHD. 212- 747-1117. benjamin.d@anhd.org      rita.m@anhd.org.

Housing Court Case Search – Find out the history or current status of a housing court case.

Division of Housing and Community Renewal – Find out the status of a DHCR case, or other information about DHCR policy.

Department of Housing Preservation and Development – Find out the registered owner and managing agent, and Housing Maintenance Code violations on record for a particular building, and more.

Department of Buildings – Find out the Building Code violations on record against a building, whether the landlord has a permit to do work, and more.

Department of Finance – Is the landlord in trouble because he or she has not paid the real estate or other taxes for the building?

Department of Finance ACRIS System – A great website to access deeds and other property documents for an individual building.

New York State Department of State – Who is the individual behind the anonymous corporation that owns a building? Make sure you serve the court papers to or picket in front of the house of the right person!

Rent Guidelines Board – Want to know if a particular building is Rent Stabilized? (You never know with J51s). And much more housing research information.

Google.com – It is amazing what information is floating out there on the internet about a landlord that you are targeting.

Oasis Mapping – Get detailed land use and other maps of your community.

NYPIRG Community Mapping – Find out who are the political representatives of your neighborhood.

NYC.gov – The web-portal to every NYC government agency.

Department of City Planning – Land use and demographic information about your neighborhood.

New York City Housing and Neighborhood Information System – The NYCHANIS site provides a wealth of housing research data on a local, borough and City level.

Free Translation On-Line – Not really a tenant-related site, but does a surprisingly good job and makes translating flyers a lot easier. Make sure that someone fluent in the language proof-reads the final product.

This list is not exhaustive, but includes the sites that we think are the most useful. Please e-mail us if you think we should add a particular link to the site.