This story is part of (DIS)Invested — a longterm Reader investigation into Omaha’s inequities.
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On Thursday, April 7, The Reader released “In Omaha, Bad Landlords Get Off Easy and Tenants Pay the Price” showing how gaps in accountability have allowed some property owners to rent to tenants while accumulating violations of the city’s building code, many of which are never fixed.
That story started with two questions: Who are Omaha’s bad landlords and what are we doing to maintain safe housing? Answering the first required diving headfirst into some messy, confusing data. We built web scrapers, spent hours cleaning it and found a small minority of landlords and management companies — less than one percent of all code violators — make up 13% of all code violations.
But don’t take our word for it. We built a new database that allows you to see for yourself.
This new database shows a map of the city’s code infractions since 2015 when record keeping began. From there you can search by landlord, address, days the case spent open, and whether or not it’s been closed. It’s important to note not all properties are currently owned by the same person or company listed in this database. To see that updated information, search the address on the Douglas County Accessor’s website.
If you want to learn more about how we created this database, read our article about how we scraped, cleaned and built it.
Editor’s note: this story was updated on Aug. 3, 2022 to reflect not all properties in this database are still owned by the same person or company as the ones at the time of the code infraction.
contact the writer at chris@thereader.com