Wrongfully Accused – NYC Housing Court

created by Austin Poor

This project was the equivalent of a senior-thesis that I worked on for the course Wrongfully Accused in 2018. I investigated litigation practices in NYC housing court. One of my main focuses was on the improper service of process for eviction notices.

In the course of my investigation, I spoke with numerous sources (lawyers, judges, process servers, and advocates), submitted a FOIL requests to the City of New York, visited NYC housing court, and used data science tools to web-scrape and analyze housing court records.

The final result of my project was a 4,000+ word article that you can read as markdown or as a pdf.

I've included in this repo some of the resources I used in my reporting. You can find the code I used for webscraping here as well as a subset of the data I scraped, in CSV format, here.

I also used some data downloaded from the NYC Open Data portal but the files were too big to include in this repo.