Imagine visiting a doctor due to an ailment. To diagnose the issue, the doctor requires your blood work.

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Instead of performing specific blood tests tailored to you, the doctor consults a tattered tome from their shelf. This book contains blood work statistics, gathered 3-5 years prior, from a bunch of other people. The doctor finds data based on profiles matching your age, race, gender, and perhaps a couple of other characteristics.

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Based on this information, the doctor provides you a diagnosis of your likely illness and prescribes some medication to address it. 

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Would you take those drugs? Neither would I. 

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And yet, this is essentially what is happening across the US on rental housing policy. 

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Talk to anyone working with rental data and they’ll tell you the same thing: the data we use to make critical decisions about rental housing markets is wholly inadequate. While we debate housing affordability and craft policy, we’re operating with a patchwork of incomplete, outdated, and inaccessible information, making poorly informed decisions that affect more than $100 billion of public resources. 

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You can read more about this problem in our Rent Madness report. 

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Introducing The Open Rent Initiative

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The Open Rent Initiative, a collaborative effort to build a public good to address this problem, is a follow-up to that report. The initiative consists of three core elements: 

1. Data Platform: At the heart of the initiative is an open data platform that will collect, clean, standardize, and integrate disparate rent and rent-relevant datasets into a single, reliable platform (e.g., parcel, rent registry, rental listings, modeled/estimated, Census, data partnerships). 
2. Partnerships: Collaborative framework that enables open source collaboration and coordination with local and regional organizations and experts.
3. Analysis and Data Tools: Production of analytical and data tools built with the outputs of the data platform, designed to meet the needs of researchers, government officials, policymakers, advocacy organizations and entrepreneurs. 

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Through this initiative, the Open Rent Initiative aspires to: 

• Enable New Avenues of Research. The platform enables study of complex longitudinal questions about neighborhood change, economic health, and housing stability that are currently difficult or impossible to study.
• Streamline and Reduce Costs of Research. As a centralized repository, it eliminates redundant and costly data collection efforts undertaken by individual researchers and organizations that lack resources. 
• Democratize Access to Rent Information. By lowering technical and financial barriers, the platform empowers a wider range of stakeholders to conduct data-informed research and advocacy.
• Support More Effective Resource Allocation. By providing timely and granular rent data, the platform enables public and philanthropic funds to be targeted with greater precision.  

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Working Together Towards Data Transparency

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Already, our team has made important progress laying the foundation for the data platform, including creating standardized schemas and addressing geospatial unification across disparate data sets. 

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We have also established important philanthropic and non-profit partnerships to begin work on our pilot locations in the coming months. Stay tuned for these announcements and more over the next several weeks!  

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The lack of national rental data is too big a problem for any of us to tackle in isolation. We’re building the Open Rent Initiative as a collective effort, and we invite you to join us in creating the transparent, accessible rental data our communities deserve.

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If you’re interested in learning more, catching a demo of the working prototype, or following along for updates, reach out to our team at rent@citizencodex.com!