Share your city’s residential inspection data.
Developed by a coalition of leading industry stakeholders, the City of San Francisco, and Code for America, the House Facts Standard is a uniform format for reporting government data on the health and safety of residential buildings.
This uniform format allows the data to be used in new and powerful ways. Local governments already do the hard work to inspect residential buildings and enforce health and safety codes. With the House Facts Standard, you can make the full health and safety history for every house and apartment in your city even more usable by citizens. Greater transparency helps keep owners accountable and further incentivizes compliance with regulations that ensure health, safety and habitability.
Like other civic data standards, this “machine-readable” format enables the development of apps, visualizations and other tools for making the most out of your government’s work.
Why participate?
Improve Housing Conditions
Over 6 million Americans live in substandard housing. Improving access to data on housing inspections can support tenant advocates and legal assistance agencies in their work to secure healthy living conditions for families. Greater transparency of inspection and violation histories can help motivate landlords to comply with the standards your government maintains.
Empower Citizens
Housing decisions are some of the most important and taxing choices citizens face. This standard helps prospective renters and buyers learn about how buildings stand in the eyes of local government.
House Facts helps governments share important data with citizens, including the 31.4 million monthly unique visitors to Trulia, along with other platforms and tools committed to using data published in the standard.
Drive Economic Development
Opening city data empowers people to build new products and services using that data, driving job creation and economic growth. Industry forecasts predict that governments promoting open data will foster 25% more private commercial activity in apps and services in 2013 than 2012.
Details
The specification
You can find the specification document for the standard here.
The document tracks issues and suggestions surfaced from interested stakeholders. Feel free to add your own with a comment–this is a living document that will be used to develop a more robust v2 of the House Facts Standard.
Finding the Data
You can download the data for San Francisco here.
We will encourage other cities to host their data on public portals, and aggregate a list of end points as data is made available.
Using the Data
Civic hackers can check out this prototype app. Use this app to view Housing Facts compliant data from San Francisco, and fork the code on Github.
If you are a business or organization that wants to learn more about taking advantage of this data, please submit this short form.
Updates
A standard is being created for the Texas region, with information provided by authoritative entities as well as local housing experts.
Information is being provided by Express Houston Home Buyer and Sell My House Easy Fast.
Some additional information on Code for America: