Overdue fees. Penalties stacked on penalties. Charges no one could explain — addressed to a man who wasn't there to read them.
My grandmother kept the notices in a small wooden box on the kitchen table. By the time she asked us to look at them, there were dozens — some still sealed, some opened and refolded so many times the creases had gone soft. Different agencies. Different headers. The same name on every one.
She wanted to know two things. Why the city was still billing him. And whether she was going to lose the apartment because of it.
The records technically existed. NYC's open data portal publishes them in long flat files: HPD violations, DOF arrears, parking judgments, every notice ever mailed by every agency. You can download a CSV with three million rows in about a minute. You just have to know which dataset to pull, how to filter it, what the codes mean, and which fields actually reconcile against the paper in your hand.
Public, but not usable. That's the gap CivicByte lives in.
The gap isn't a technology problem. The data is there. The schemas are documented. The endpoints are open. The gap is that nobody has done the unglamorous work of turning the raw publication into something a person in their kitchen can actually use — not a developer, not a journalist, not a policy researcher, but a tenant, a parent, a grandmother.
So we started doing it. One tool at a time. Each one built around a single question someone actually asked us: what does the city already know about my building? Why am I getting these letters? Has anyone been evicted from this address before? Where does my kid's school's budget actually go?
The rules we set ourselves are short. A CivicByte tool has to solve a real problem someone in the five boroughs has, today. It has to be free, with no logins and no tracking. It has to be readable by someone who has never opened a spreadsheet. And it has to stay maintained — not just shipped and abandoned, but pulled fresh from the source on a schedule and held accountable to it.
That's it. There's no grand thesis. No platform play. No funding round. Just a quiet conviction that the data the city already publishes ought to be useful to the people whose lives it describes — and a willingness to do the boring middle-mile work of making it so.
The notices on my grandmother's table are still there. They're easier to read now.
Founding note · NYC, 2025