In New York City, the average rent is $4,700 a month and climbing. Over 500,000 housing violations are on file in the city, but the government database where they live is so outdated that most renters never see them. Farid Sofiyev, a sophomore and co-founder of Civic Reset NYC, built an interactive map of 40,000 of those violations and published the names of the 25 worst landlords in the city. This episode gets into how the map works, what the data reveals about NYC's rent crisis, and the zoning choices that got the city there.
Hello, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm of Strong Towns, and I'm excited to introduce you to another person who is doing work in their community in order to build a stronger, more vibrant community, as well as to address the real challenge that in the city of New York right now to rent a unit, the average price is about $4,700 a month — and that seems to also be going up these days.
With me today is the founder and executive director of Civic Reset New York City, a student-led nonprofit. Farid Sofiyev is also a Fordham University sophomore, and he, together with others, have started a group that is working to address the struggles that many have to find off-campus housing for themselves, and then also to shine a light on the realities facing so many more people. In just a few months, they've established chapters at a number of universities, they've created a fantastic bad landlord heat map, and created other tools and resources and articles to really help to shed light on what is taking place. So, Farid, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here, and I'm happy to talk about Civic Reset — any questions you might have about the New York City housing crisis, student involvement, civic engagement, anything like that. I'm happy to answer or talk about it.
Yeah, that's awesome. Why don't you start with the thing that really caught my attention — the landlord heat map, and the documenting of violations, the documenting of sites with frequent evictions, and some of the conditions that that is creating within the community, and the effort to actually put all of that info in one place in a way that is accessible to regular people, so you can see at a glance what's going on, but then also dive into the details.
If you're listening, definitely go and check it out. There's a weight of misery of stories there — probably some perverse incentives at work, all sorts of those things — and you're shining light on that with a really powerful tool. Can you share a little bit about that, and why Civic Reset put that together?
Right now in New York City, there are over 500,000 HPD violations. HPD, if you aren't familiar, is a government agency that you go to when you have a housing violation to report — a bad landlord, abuse, negligence, price gouging from a landlord. There seem to be about 2,550 landlords that have multiple properties throughout the five boroughs of Manhattan that get substantially more housing violations than others. The problem is that it's very difficult to access, and many people renting apartments aren't sure how to access these violations or how to check how many their building has.
Compared to modern websites, the HPD website is rather outdated and pretty difficult to navigate. If you're not experienced with renting an apartment in New York City, it's really difficult to navigate. So what we decided to do was compile 40,000 HPD violations onto a map, and then rank and list by name the top 25 landlords with the most housing violations.
It's an interactive map with all five boroughs on it. You can go around and see heat varying from yellow to red — the darker the color, the more violations a certain building has. There are little dots and hot spots, and you can essentially see which buildings are owned by the top 25 worst landlords, how many HPD violations each of them have, and how many the building has. When you press on that, there's a tool that shows you what percent of that area is rent stabilized and the trends in market price per month for that specific area, because prices just seem to be increasing continuously. Maybe you want to choose an area that isn't increasing as rapidly and has a high percentage of rent stabilization.
So how do you build something like that? I'm curious about the back end of it.
Angela handled a lot of the engineering portion of that one. Neither of us have a computer science background — I'll start off by saying that. We're not great at coding. I've taken a few coding classes, but for the most part we're using AI to help us code the actual database, and then we're pulling from multiple different sources — looking at the actual HPD website, websites where people can report landlords — and then essentially getting the code to compile the data and pull it into that map and make it interactive.
You identify on your site the effort to say we need more higher-density zoning, we need more mixed-use development, and then we need affordable housing mandates. Do you want to capture why, especially for a student-led organization, this is something that you feel you can really direct a lot of energy and attention?
100%. The first thing that shocked me when I first started all of this — when I was really looking through the statistics and trying to figure out why New York City housing is so expensive — is that I don't know a New Yorker that doesn't complain about their rent. When you look at it, they say it is the highest density city in the US for sure. Yes, it is a very high-density city, but when you look through the five boroughs, you see that over 50% of it as a whole is actually zoned for low-density housing.
You start to think, how does that even make sense? Low-density housing is usually single-family houses, but then you start to realize that it's really only the closer edges to Manhattan of other boroughs and Manhattan itself that has a ton of really high-density buildings. There's simply not enough housing — there are over 400,000 units missing that could be used to make housing more affordable. There needs to be more housing, but it can't be built if half of the city is zoned for low-density.
This is the fundamental root of the issue. There's simply not enough housing, but also not enough incentives for landlords to create more housing and affordable housing, because right now the system is heavily oriented to promote luxury high-rise apartments. Those are the ones that make the most money, but that's not how you fix a housing problem — that's how you have an influx of new people coming in and kicking out the old people who can't afford to pay rent anymore.
Yeah, I see that all the time. I wish that we would change the way that we talk about zoning in our context, and I love the language you're using on your site — instead of "low density" and "high density," the recognition that it's on a continuum and it's actually part of a process of persistent renewal. So eventually, those properties that we designate as low density, we've already in the language carved out this recognition that they need to remain low. But you're saying no — it's lower, sure, if it's at some distance from the town center or community core — and that should allow for the gradual escalation of heights over time, the gradual intensification of land use, creating those opportunities.
What also stood out to me on your site is you talk about spreading awareness using three good tools: policy articles, resident interviews, and awareness campaigns. No matter what city you're in — if you're in a smaller community and you're listening to this — as I think of the work that we've tried to do in our city for more housing and better land use in Delta, here where I live, you've got those three tools. With my efforts I've done two of those — policy articles and awareness campaigns — but that third one, resident interviews, really stands out and may be a missing ingredient of what I need to bring into my community. Can you share a little bit about why that's been powerful and how you've managed to bring it to the forefront?
It's a funny story. When we first started writing articles and posting on Substack, no one was really engaging, and we were trying to figure out how to grow this. We thought, let's literally go to the park and just walk up to random people on the street and ask them what they think about housing. We went to Astoria Park and Hunters Point South, and we would go up to people. Most of them thought we were trying to sell them something, but a few people were willing to engage. Most of them didn't allow us to record, which I think is normal — a lot of people are focused on privacy — but we ended up realizing that everyone cares about housing. It's just that they're not sure how they can make an impact, because there aren't that many opportunities for regular people to really get into the granular details.
To the average person, they're looking at the rent and thinking this is really expensive, and they're not sure why — aside from the fact that the economy has made it that way and that landlords want to price gouge as much as they do. So we were really trying to go around and tell people about zoning and get a broader history. We would ask people how their area had changed — we'd purposely go to areas we knew had changed and ask them how it had changed in the past decade or so, maybe 20 or 30 years for older residents. It was just so interesting.
For example, we were in a park in Long Island City, and from my understanding, that place in the '90s was literally just industrial manufacturing — warehouses, garages, not a good area, and there was a lot of crime too. Now, only 30 to 35 years later, it's completely transformed. It's like a mini Manhattan with skyscrapers. It's the most striking thing, because yes, there's higher density there, but the New York City government simply isn't investing enough money into the infrastructure to support that same area's rapid growth. Their school districts are maxed out, they can't fit the kids on the buses, they're having floods. It's a serious problem, because we need higher-density zoning, but you can't do it in a way where it's simply for developers to make a ton of money — where they'll put in a little affordable housing with a separate entrance, a different door, a different parking garage from the rest of the building. It's completely unfair.
In the name of the organization, you want to reset the civic setup, the arrangements — reestablish new norms and really help to establish a fairer future, one that works for a lot more people. Can you tie that into your own personal story, and maybe some of the things that have brought you to the point where you're spearheading this, championing housing affordability initiatives, as a student but also as a resident and somebody who cares about your community?
I always had an interest in trying to figure out how I can work directly to support my community and allow reforms to be made to things people didn't like. Even in high school, my senior year I ran for student body president and I won. I was always trying to make reforms because I would hear people complaining. I really think that a lot more people can do that — they just maybe sell themselves short.
When I was out here looking for apartments, me and Angelo were just thinking, this is insane — the prices are just a different level, a different beast. We were thinking, well, what can we do about it? Obviously the initial reaction is, well, there's not much — it's an extremely bureaucratic system — but then we thought, why not? If we were to believe that we couldn't do it, then we certainly wouldn't. So why not at least try and see what happens? At the least we can raise awareness of the issue, and maybe we might not directly lower the rent, but we might inspire someone who decides to become a policymaker and does figure out a way to incentivize developers economically to reduce rent prices, to not price gouge as much, and to make it more fair and more equitable.
That was kind of our thought process going into it, and Angelo had a similar mindset. He jumped on the idea and was excited. He said, "Whatever direction you want to take, I'm there to help. I want to do everything I can to help our community out. This is our community now."
It's good to give Angelo Matta a shout out as well — he's one of the founding partners with you in this. From the experience you've gleaned from this, I'd love to hear what your suggestions might be. Do you have a couple of suggestions for others who would consider doing something similar or following this path that you find yourself on?
For anyone doing something similar, first things first — you want to do your research. For example, we knew that there were a lot of housing groups, but we didn't find many that were student-led and had young people. This was something that fewer Gen Z people were involved in. The way that we viewed that was, well, the housing crisis is getting worse and worse, so actually we're going to be the ones impacted the most. A statistic that shocked me was that 30 years ago, the average age to buy a home was 28. Now, the first-time homeowner is almost 40 — I think it's 39 or 40. We were thinking, we need to start families, and we need to do something as Generation Z. But to answer your question...
Just curious — if you have tips or suggestions for people, something that you've picked up where you think this has actually helped me either save time or save energy, or be inspired, or have an impact.
The first step is the research. The second thing — some people might do the research, and then think, "Oh, but I can't do this." The biggest thing is just believing in yourself, because you're not going to do it if you don't start. You have to start somewhere. For us, we started writing articles on Substack, and even when people didn't engage, we continued. I think one of the easiest angles, if you want to get interested in policy or housing, is to go on TikTok or Instagram, make an account, and just start talking about it — start filming your experiences, start talking about statistics that you find interesting.
It's a really easy thing to do, and we got to it fairly late, but we realized we could make videos that we'd researched for five or ten minutes, and some of our videos have 100,000 to 200,000 views as 30-second videos. If you think it's just a social media video, it's really more than that, because the people using those apps are so young. When 100,000 to 200,000 people see something about housing, it permeates their minds and they start to think, maybe there's something to this, and maybe there's something I can do. It's like a domino effect — more and more people just want to start initiatives. Eventually some of them are going to blossom, some might fail, and that's okay. There's going to be a great learning experience either way. If enough of us do our part, we can reset the system, in all of civics in broader terms, actually.
That's really powerful. As you think of a civic reset — we need to receive the world as it is, but that doesn't mean we need to leave it just as it is, left to its own devices, because we actually do have that active role to play. I really like the language. You said some of the housing groups tend to skew older — certainly millennials and upwards — but each new generation requires its own surge of energy and organizing, and all of the work that goes into that. Along the way, I'm sure there are setbacks, things where you're just frustrated. But what's something that gives you hope as you carry out this work?
Something that gives me hope is seeing people we didn't reach out to interacting with us — like when you emailed. I'm not sure if Angela emailed you or if you emailed her, but just having opportunities like this podcast, people liking our Substack posts, emailing us, telling us we're doing good work. Last night, me and Angelo gave a little speech — we were guest speakers at the Bronx Community Board Eight. To see someone from New York City government reach out and acknowledge our work was just so, so inspiring. It pushed us to keep going, and it's amazing.
For folks who want to check out the landlord map as well as Civic Reset, where can they go to find more info?
Yeah, civicreset.org, and on all socials we're Civic Reset. If that doesn't pop up, then Civic Reset NYC. Everything is linked on the website — all of our socials, articles, the landlord heat map. You can also file a complaint against your landlord and provide evidence on our website, and we'll put that on the map ourselves if it's not already in HPD, because HPD can be quite bureaucratic.
I was delighted to see you've got a podcast, and one of the most recent guests was Alicia Sands Peterson, who is the Courtyard Urbanist. Alicia was also gracious enough to do a Bottom Up Short with me a number of months ago. If you're interested, definitely check out the podcast on their site, as well as the one with Alicia on Courtyard Urbanism and other approaches to weaving in great high-quality housing that works for all — and which can certainly help to address many of the housing pricing challenges that we face.
As you said, we have the land, we have the space, we have the tools — we need to use them in more effective ways. It's been fantastic to have you on, Farid. Thank you so much for joining us on Bottom Up Shorts.
Thank you very much. I'm very grateful to be here, very grateful to have the opportunity to spread the word about what we're doing and to get more people interested in housing and civics. Alicia Peterson is great — she's a great resource for anyone to check out. I highly recommend you watch that podcast, whether it's yours or ours. She was greatly influential in the way that we view mixed-density housing.
Totally fantastic stuff. I love that there's the overlapping work of so many different hands participating in this project of helping to address what's going on. As you look around at your community as well — maybe the rents aren't as high as they are in New York City to inspire musicals and other such things — but the needs are just as present and the challenges that we face are real. I believe that applying what Farid Sofiyev and the folks at Civic Reset are doing in your community can really make a difference. With that, take care, folks, and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.