Campaign season may convince the state to create a CompStat for housing, according to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
Adams said his recent conversations with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration have made him hopeful the state will get behind his yearslong push to create a system for predicting and preventing the loss of affordable housing.
Homes and Community Renewal, the state agency overseeing rent regulation, has historically not shared significant amounts of data due to privacy concerns, Adams said.
Adams said HCR’s participation would be important in terms of shaping the ability of various groups or the city to model a dashboard based on NYPD’s CompStat, which the department launched in the 1990s to pinpoint incidents and deploy police accordingly.
Alternatively, Adams said the state could opt to create an in-house system, and share the analyses it produces.
“Sometimes campaign seasons allow people to see the urgency of the matter,” said Adams, a retired NYPD captain. “We’re at a place now where we’re going to get this resolved.”
HCR’s spokeswoman Charni Sochet did not directly respond when asked if the agency planned to get involved with predictive data analysis.
“HCR is always reviewing the rent regulation laws and the agency’s policies to determine how to best serve and inform the public about the complex system of rent regulation. This includes continuous review of the privacy laws that dictate what we can and cannot share,” Sochet said in a statement.
Adams’ office spent more than a year convincing the housing court system to release data feeds, which groups like JustFix.nyc and OpenGov have used.
Although the city may be more limited in the sorts of housing it tracks without access to HCR’s roster of rent-stabilized housing, Adams said city agencies should consider predictive data analyses for what it can track, including public housing.
For instance, OpenGov can see that nearly one-fifth of housing court cases in Brooklyn were initiated by the New York City Housing Authority for nonpayment, according to Joel Natividad, director of open data at the firm that provides data analyses for governments.
Adams said it may be worth looking at why tenants are not paying rent and how a host of other concerns at NYCHA may have prompted some to stop paying the bill.
A spokeswoman for City Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
