San Francisco Residential Housing Ownership Map
To obscure ownership and limit liability, corporate landlords frequently create multiple shell companies for every batch of properties they acquire. This platform visualizes the makeup of ownership for residential buildings in San Francisco through capturing data, such as owner location, unit count, and network size. Built on parcel-level data, the project reveals how housing in the city is distributed across different types of owners — individuals, corporations, and real estate trusts — and how ownership scale and absentee ownership shape access to and control over housing. This tool is intended to highlight critical dynamics at the heart of San Francisco's renter's rights: corporate versus mom-and-pop consolidation of housing stock, uneven distribution of housing units, and out-of-town ownership.
