Looking for a new apartment in New York City? Slumbot will search through public data to find warning signs for any apartment building: noise complaints, building code violations, nearby construction, and more.
A live preview is currently deployed at http://slumbot.winer.ly/?preview.
This is currently unpolished, unfinished software, very much a work in progress. I started writing it on May 12, 2014, mostly to have something decent to submit to my Significance Labs application.
- Google Maps does the address lookup
- NYC Department of Buildings information is scraped from BIS
- 311 information information comes from NYC Open Data
- Possible future stuff:
- Building permits info from this table to check for nearby construction & demolition.
- Property tax records (including number of units, avg. worth of apartments) could come from this MS Access file
- Look up Yelp reviews on building management
- Apartment turnover info from StreetEasy
It's a pretty straightforward Scala Play 2.0 app. To run locally, you'll need to set your Google API Key in
conf/application.conf. Then, just type ./sbt run and go to http://localhost:9000/?preview.
State of the union:
- Scala: reasonably happy with the structure of the code.
- JavaScript: using just straight jQuery for simplicity / development speed. It'll start to get very messy if the site gets any more complicated
- Testing: entirely nonexistent
- Error Handling: horrible. Definitely necessary before release - many of the data sources (especially the BIS web scraper) have a ton of planned and unplanned downtime, and I'm sure the source data isn't as consistent as my code demands.
- UI Design and Polish: pretty crappy still, there's plenty of little tweaks queueing up on my Trello board