NYC Open Data houses a data set of the Housing Maintenance Code violations. An entry is logged when a licensed inspector visits a rental dwelling and takes note of any conditions that violate the New York City Housing Maintenance Code. Beginning in 1960, this dataset currently has 5 million entries and continues to be updated. Some notable data that are logged include geolocation, violation section, date inspected, and the current status of the violation. 

This rich dataset can help us gain a better understanding of the common issues that residents face. Due to Mapbox’s file upload size limitation, data were filtered to the most recent three months of entries. This was around 11,000 rows. A map style was created in Mapbox studio and data were plotted using Mapbox GL Javascript. An interesting metric to visualize is exactly where each code violation was taking place and with what frequency. Some cleaning of the original dataset was necessary, as well as joining with a clean data table of the actual code violations found at NYCLaws.io. Further visualizations were made using d3.js. These visualizations include a treemap of frequencies of the most common Section violations and the frequency of the five most common violations over time.

The most common entry in the past three months at 48%  was “Section 27-2005: Duties of Owner” This is to be expected as it is an all-encompassing violation that will be documented given any other violation. Taking this project further would include dividing the NYC map by block and analyzing each block’s most prevalent issue.
Capitalism in a sharing city is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
developed at Master in City & Technology in (2019/2020) by:
Student: Eli Munn
Faculties: Diego Pajarito

Sources: 

Original Dataset:

NYC Laws: 

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Mapbox Documentation: 

D3.js Documentation: