Inspiration
This project is dedicated to our landlord, Scott. He espouses Christian values but fails to maintain the properties he owns, turning a blind eye on the people who put food on his table. Ideally the professional landlord would be a thing of the past, but while our society is burdened with them, we should ensure that they behave and perform their "job" in a responsible and respectable way.
What it does
Minneapolis Tenant Union creates a repository of tenant complaints and annual percentage rent increase, both organized by property owner. These data will be used to provide evidence for lawsuits regarding landlord negligence or predatory renting practices, both individual or class action. The biggest issue with facing landlord malpractice is the feeling of isolation; MTU aims to provide a sense of community and solidarity.
How we built it
The site is based on WordPress and uses PHPmyadmin to collect and organize information.
Challenges we ran into
Connecting the two services, managing the data once collected, and gathering enough data to show the functionality.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Most of all, having a working site! But also having the opportunity to create a project that address something personal to us and that we believe can provide a genuine service to people.
What we learned
The real MTU was the friends we made along the way. (And Python, and SQL, and WordPress...)
What's next for Minneapolis Tenant Union
We parsed through a lot of publicly available data in creating this, and we had observations that we would love to be able to share in a more organized way with more time. For example, there are 70 property managers that own at least 200 units in Minneapolis, and only 39 of them live in Minnesota. It would be nice to keep the site up and continue collecting complaints and connecting people with resources; perhaps pair with student legal services.
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