Simulating Rent Stabilization Policy at the National Day of Civic Hacking

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Medium

Yesterday was the 2016 National Day of Civic Hacking, a Code for America event that encourages people with technology and related skills to explore projects related to civil society and government. My friend Josh Tauberer wrote a thoughtful post earlier about the event called Why We Hack —on what the value of this sort of event might be — please read it.

For my part, this year I worked on one of the projects he discusses, understanding the impact of DC’s rent stabilization laws and what potential policy changes might yield. As Josh noted, we discovered that it’s a hard problem. Much of the most relevant data (such as the list of properties under rent stabilization and their current and historical rents) are not available, and have to be estimated. Getting to a realistic understanding of the impact of law and policy on rents seems incredibly valuable, but hard.

Washington DC on Harlan D. Harris

Simulating Rent Stabilization Policy at the National Day of Civic Hacking