#StartupEverywhere profile: Georges Clement, Co-Founder and Acting Executive Director, JustFix.nyc
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Bringing Greater Justice to the Housing Movement Through Technology
Founded in New York City, JustFix.nyc is a nonprofit startup that is harnessing technology and data to promote housing justice across the city. As New Yorkers continue to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has issued an eviction moratorium and closed its housing courts except for virtual-only emergency repair and illegal lockout cases. JustFix.nyc has partnered with the housing court system to adapt their existing tools in order to streamline the emergency filing process for tenants. We recently spoke with Georges Clement—JustFix.nyc’s Co-Founder and Acting Executive Director—to learn more about the startup’s work, how technology can be used to promote housing justice, and how they’re working to support tenants amidst the coronavirus outbreak.
Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?
I mostly grew up in New York City, and I began my startup career here after I came back to the city after undergrad. I worked as a product manager at a couple different education-focused startups in New York, including General Assembly. After that, I did a fellowship with the Robin Hood Foundation in New York, which was starting a program out of Blue Ridge Labs, which was an incubator. The fellowship was aimed at bringing people from backgrounds in engineering, design, and product to develop digital products that would address issues faced by low-income New Yorkers.
It was there I met the other co-founders of JustFix, and we started researching how to leverage data and technology to play a meaningful role in the housing justice movement. We started working with tenants, tenant organizers, legal aid attorneys, and city officials to see where there were gaps or opportunities for data and technology to support the movement that was happening.
Tell us more about JustFix. What is the work you’re doing, and how are you leveraging technology to provide solutions for housing and community needs?
There’s two sides to the work that we do. On the one hand, we build really simple, accessible digital services for tenants facing a variety of housing issues—from facing eviction, to landlords not making repairs and harassing tenants. We help tenants with everything from sending an automated letter of complaint to their landlord, to actually creating the court filings to sue their landlord in housing court, or to figure out if they’re eligible for a free attorney in an eviction case. We’re trying to streamline these processes to become a sort of TurboTax for dealing with landlord-tenant issues. Our goal is to support tenants by having a more accessible, user-friendly method to navigate a really stressful and complex process.
The other half of our work is focused on data analysis. We run a website called Who Owns What that does a couple of things. It lets people look up any residential address in New York City and see all of the aggregated open data about that building. It shows things like how many violations there are, or how many evictions there were last year, or how many rent-stabilized units there are, and those types of data points.
The second piece of this is sort of the ‘special sauce,’ where we link together buildings with the same ownership or management with buildings that someone is looking up. We map out the network of ownership to show the landlord portfolio of all the buildings associated with a particular building. Historically, this has been very difficult because each building is owned by a separate LLC, so it has been really hard to connect those dots. We’re able to do that programmatically and look at a variety of different data points in the background to make those connections.
We have primarily worked in New York City but we’ve started to do projects outside the state—principally in Los Angeles—where we are working with a partner organization called SAJE (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy), a long-standing tenant organizing group. We’re partnering with them to see how the tools we’ve built can be replicated in Los Angeles to help tenants and the housing movement.
How are you responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and across the country?
There are a lot of renters who live in apartments or homes with poor conditions that potentially have serious health implications, such as mold or lead paint or rats. Those issues are especially aggravated right now because the tenants can’t leave those homes. When you think of the health consequences of being stuck in an apartment with those kinds of issues, those can be some really scary situations. A lot of people are also struggling to pay rent. A lot were struggling on April 1, and May 1 is going to be even worse. As we roll into June and July, it becomes completely impossible for a huge section of the country to pay. So poor housing quality and the lack of affordability are becoming especially acute issues in this context.
In terms of the work that we are doing, In New York we already offer a service to help tenants file cases in housing court for repairs or harassment. These are affirmative tenant cases, with a tenant suing their landlord in Housing Court. We have partnered with the Housing Court system, as well as organizing and legal services partners, to adapt that tool to be able to create emergency filings. While there’s an eviction moratorium in New York and the Housing Courts are closed, there is still a need to hear emergency cases. These cases have to be filed electronically somehow and submitted to the courts electronically, so lawyers are doing that through email and tenants can do that through JustFix. It gives tenants the ability to create the filings and have them officially submitted to the courts, and have these tenants that are in these emergency situations also be able to connect with a lawyer from a legal aid provider that can represent them in this case. We have streamlined that process, and that is available on our site.
The other project is norent.org, which was launched in partnership with SAJE. That project is focused on how we can support tenants living in Los Angeles. While the state of California has an eviction moratorium right now, there are also county and city level protections that are in place. All of these protections require tenants to notify their landlords that they won’t be paying, and then cite COID-related reasons why they aren’t paying. Some places require that tenants provide documentation as evidence of these claims. So norent.org is a tool to help tenants in Los Angeles compile and send those notices directly to their landlords, and understand what the requirements are for them to protect themselves as tenants right now.
I know a major priority for your organization is to protect personal data. Can you tell us about the steps you’re taking to protect consumers’ data privacy?
Privacy is critical. Tenants are sharing information and taking actions that are oftentimes the result of them being at-risk in their relationship with their landlord. It’s really important that this information isn’t made public and that we aren’t displaying or publishing any personally identifiable information. We want to protect information that would be able to pinpoint what tenants have taken particular actions with respect to their housing. This is really really critical and all of the actions that tenants take are completely private.
The other thing I would say is that we lean heavily on open data and strongly believe that government agencies should publish consistent, accurate data. These practices are critical to providing the proper tools and oversight needed in the housing sector. It’s important that we work very closely with government agencies that publish open data and find a way to ensure the use of accurate, real-time data to build the tools that we offer the community.
What makes NYC's startup ecosystem so unique?
My first job out of college—the first startup that I worked for—shared an office with Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit. One thing I remember him saying about the uniqueness and success of the tech industry in New York was that the city is a hub for so many different industries.
The startup ecosystem and the tech sector in New York are layered across many different industries, such as finance, fashion, art, and activism. You have technology that is being applied in all of these different contexts, rather than technology being developed in a vacuum. This plays into the diversity of New York City. The diversity of the people, and of the industry, makes the tech ecosystem that much stronger.
What are some of the startup-related policy concerns that you believe should receive more attention from state and federal lawmakers?
I would reiterate the importance of open data. I think it is important for government transparency and for the type of accountability work that we help with, so that is really critical.
I would say that New York City has a lot of programs that support early-stage entrepreneurs in getting off the ground. They have everything from the incubators to the accelerators and funding opportunities, city-run competitions, etc. All of this is super critical.
Another piece is the privacy and security aspect that we touched on. There has been a lot of progress on data and privacy in the past few years, and I think uniformity across the U.S.—rather than by the state-by-state measures that have happened—is a critical next step.
What is your goal for JustFix moving forward?
A big piece of this is making JustFix a household name. In New York, I think it’s important that JustFix be a resource for all tenants that are in need, which we know is a population of more than a million people in NYC. You are talking about 20 to 25 percent of the city that are considered vulnerable tenants at any given moment, so that is a big goal in terms of increasing awareness of these services in New York.
The other piece is getting this replicated in other cities. New York isn’t the only city in the U.S. that’s dealing with a housing crisis, an eviction crisis, and a homelessness crisis. We want to make these types of tools available in other cities to further support the housing movement.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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