Skip to main content

Outreach & activism

Statistics for housing, tenants and the public

As we confront the disaster of increasing authoritarianism and its computational and data-based implementation, I think it is incumbent upon us as quantitative scholars that we challenge ourselves to do the difficult work of re-imagining our disciplines freed from their associations with the surveillance state. The Just Mathematics Collective provides some much needed initiative in that direction.

Rent control in Portland

Portland’s landlords report every unit’s rent to the city each year. I mapped five years of those filings (2021–2025): 5,353 rental buildings and about 95,000 unit-year records, each placed on its tax parcel. Click a building to see every rent reported for it.

Map of Portland, Maine, with a dot for each registered rental building, colored by median rent Open the Portland rent registry map →

Brunswick rent registry

Brunswick has no rent registry, so I built one: the town’s rental housing, unit by unit, from the assessor’s records, with current rents estimated from Census data and asking rents from Zillow listings. The report covers housing units, rentals and short-term rentals.

Map of Brunswick, Maine, with a dot for each rental unit, shaded by estimated current rent

PMP

I am a huge fan of the Prison Mathematics Project. If you can, please consider joining or donating.

Back to top