About PulseCities
PulseCities is a public tool for tracking displacement pressure across NYC neighborhoods. New York's housing records are public, but they are scattered across separate city systems: permits, evictions, complaints, violations, ownership transfers and rent-stabilized housing data. PulseCities brings them into one place, so you can see where pressure is building and trace each signal back to the source data.
What PulseCities does
Look up an address or ZIP and see recent public-record activity nearby. Permits, complaints, evictions, violations and ownership changes sit in one place, and you can spot the neighborhoods, buildings and operators where several displacement-pressure signals appear together. Operator profiles are being expanded through public-record matching.
Who it is for
It is for tenants trying to understand what is changing around their building or block, and for reporters looking for public-record leads, landlord patterns and neighborhood movement. Legal aid teams and organizers can use it to triage the places worth reviewing, and researchers to study housing pressure, NYC public records and urban change.
PulseCities is an investigative tool, not legal advice.
Built from public records
PulseCities combines five public-record signals into a neighborhood-level score: ACRIS ownership transfers, DOB permits, 311 complaints, executed evictions and HPD violations.
Scores are normalized by residential units so raw counts do not overwhelm dense neighborhoods. A score ranks a ZIP against the other 176 on those five signals. It is not a prediction about a specific tenant or building.
The methodology page lists every data source and the scoring weights.
Built by Michael Espin
PulseCities was built by Michael Espin, a computer science and AI systems graduate focused on public data infrastructure, civic tools, and applied data engineering.
The project combines Python data pipelines, FastAPI, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, public-record scraping, geospatial scoring, and a fast MapLibre interface.
Michael also builds violationscout.com, which shows what is open on a New York building and whether it is being fixed. PulseCities is free and stays that way.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or story tips.
PulseCities runs on one server that costs about $50 a month. If it helped you, you can chip in on Ko-fi.
Data corrections
PulseCities uses public records that can lag, contain address inconsistencies, or change after publication. If something looks wrong, send the address, ZIP, source label, and record date. NYC public records have city-side reporting lags. ACRIS usually lags about two weeks and sometimes stalls for a month or more, and eviction data lags two to four weeks.
For reporters
Verified findings with ACRIS document IDs are collected on the press page, built to be checked against the source records. Reporters can cite PulseCities as a public-record analysis tool. When referencing scores or ownership patterns, please link to the relevant ZIP page, operator profile, or the methodology so readers can review the underlying data and sources.
Follow project updates: @PulseCities