silky / who-owns-what

Who owns what in nyc?

Who owns what in nyc?

The Who owns What project is a new resource for community organizers and tenant leaders to demystify property ownership and shell company networks across New York City.

With this website, you can find crucial information about who is responsible for your building. The site utilizes a database of 160k other properties to connect the dots and discover other properties that your landlord might own or be associated with. Use this tool to discover what buildings in your neighborhood to organize in, what communities your landlord might be targeting, and if your building might be financially overleveraged.

This project is currently in active development!

Architecture

This site is built on top of the critical work done by @aepyornis on the nyc-db project, which is used to cleanly extract, sanitize, and load HPD Registration data into a PostgreSQL instance.

Backend logic and data manipulation is largely handled by making calls to PostgreSQL functions and prebuilding results into tables whenever possible to avoid complex queries made per-request. See the hpd-registration scripts of nyc-db for the SQL code that provides this functionality.

Backend

The backend of the app (/server) is a simple express build that connects to Postgres using pg-promise.

Frontend

The frontend of the app (/client) is built on top of create-react-app. See /client/README.md for all the info you might need.

Setup

In order to set things up, you'll need to start with the JustFix fork of nyc-db running on a local Postgre instance. You'll then need to run the code in sql in order to build the appropriate tables and functions that the back end relies on.

After that, make sure you have node/npm/yarn and then run:

yarn install-all

to grab dependencies for both server and client.

Then copy .env.sample to .env and edit it as needed:

cp .env.sample .env

Running in development

Check package.json in the root directory for all options. To run both express and create-react-app you just need:

yarn start

from root.

You can visit your local dev instance at http://localhost:3000.

Alternative: Docker-based development

As an alternative to the aforementioned setup, you can use Docker. Once you've installed Docker, run:

docker-compose run app python dbtool.py loadtestdata

This will build a nyc-db with test data, which is must faster than downloading the whole nyc-db. You can, however, opt to download the whole thing by running docker-compose run app python dbtool.py builddb, but be prepared, as it will take a while!

Once you've done that, run:

docker-compose run app yarn install-all

Then create an .env file and edit it as needed:

cp .env.sample .env

Then start up the server:

docker-compose up

Visit http://localhost:3000 and you should be good to go! If you installed test data, you can see useful results by clicking on the "All Year Management" portfolio on the home page.

Deploying

Package client-side assets through:

cd client && yarn build

Your express app will grab static files (i.e. the react app and assets) from client/build automatically.

Cross-browser testing

We use BrowserStack Live to make sure that our sites work across browsers, operating systems, and devices.

License

JustFix.nyc uses the GNU General Public License v3.0 Open-Source License. See LICENSE.md file for the full text.