Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City

Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by leelin on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @03:23PM (#1740741)

I realize people are more motivated to complain than praise, but with the universe of apartments being so vast, they need a LOT of datapoints before the complement of a black list (all apartments with no complaints) becomes close to a decent whitelist (apartments that are likely to be good).

Imagine a site called One-Star-Yelp.com, a subset of Yelp that only has reviews which scored 1-star ratings. The only reason you would visit is for entertainment value, not to look for tips on where you will dine tonight.

Maybe the best solution is to log all 311 calls (NYC's complaint hotline), and then let entrepreneurs freely mine the data to be put to good use.

[EDIT: I see now the massive value of steering people to non-crappy, but I think a blacklist would be far too hard to construct to be valuable vs. a whitelist]

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Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by mrkurt on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @03:32PM (#1740783)

The effective scale is important, here. One star yelp wouldn't do much for me because the long term effect of a bad meal never extends past about 36 hours. A bad lease can cause turmoil for years.

There's also a slight difference in the services. It's quite easy to find out the positives about living in a certain place (location, size, etc) and if there's any information imbalance about something good the landlord/broker will do their best to rectify it.

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Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by maxawaytoolong on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @03:32PM (#1740784)

In New York most people on a realistic budget have no choice but to settle for a non-crappy apartment. Often times what looks like a deal, or even just affordable, is priced that way for a reason: it has bedbugs, it's right above a bar, it's right below the J train, someone just was murdered in it, etc. It's actually pretty useful to have a registry of what truly sucks so you don't waste your time.

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Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by pavel_lishin on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @06:16PM (#1741353)

> someone just was murdered in it

I never understood why this icked someone out (unless they were murdered by a random drive-by - that indicates a local crime problem).

I'd LOVE to find a place that wasn't renting because someone died in it - I wouldn't care in the least, and the rent would be low.

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Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by jrockway on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @06:26PM (#1741395)

Same. Properly cleaned, what do I care. One day, I am going to die in my apartment, too.

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Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by chunkbot on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @04:04PM (#1740920)

GoodNYCApartments.com is available, if anyone wants to start the Five-Star-Yelp equivalent.

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Re:Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City by hugh3 on Wednesday September 29, 2010 @09:40PM (#1741922)

Could be worth snapping up... if this badnycapartments.com takes off then the "good" equivalent will immediately become worth serious money.

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