Tech Tools for Justice Inc

Tech Tools for Justice Inc is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is spearheading the development of the Landlord Mapper web application as part of a broader civic tech initiative aimed at combatting ownership obscurity.

Landlords tend to hide their identity from both the tenants and the general public to avoid accountability, and in some cases even to evade taxes. They use complex webs of trusts and shell companies to keep their property holdings and personal identities secret, making it extremely difficult to figure out what they own and how powerful they are. This tendency is referred to in the research as “ownership obscurity”. This often leaves tenants feeling helpless in the face of negligence or outright abuse on the part of the landlord, while local officials are left clueless about who the biggest and most powerful landlords in their cities are.

Our organization's work involves exposing networks of urban property ownership through leveraging publicly available property taxpayer and corporate data to create high quality, free and open landlord datasets. The web application serves the following objectives:

1. Provide tenants with easy access to information about who their landlord is, and the other properties that their landlord owns. 
2. Maintain a searchable database of landlords and their properties (including property values, complaints, code violations, evictions, etc.) that is free and open to the public
3. Develop an interactive web map that serves as an educational tool to raise public consciousness about corporate landlordism and its impact on communities in Chicago and beyond

Beyond the web application, the Landlord Mapper initiative seeks also to bring together individuals, researchers, activists and others who are involved in similar work elsewhere in the US to collaborate and share ideas. The ultimate goal of the initiative is the creation of a NATIONAL LANDLORD DATABASE, which spans across multiple cities and provides data not only on individual landlords, but also on the trusts, shell companies, property management companies and institutional investment firms involved in landlordism.