I spent two years renting in New Haven while getting my MPH, and during that time I filed more than fifteen repair requests for a bathroom that was never properly fixed, called the city's housing enforcement agency, and eventually had to break my lease and move to a new city because my apartment was no longer safe to live in. When I started talking to other tenants, I found out my experience wasn't unusual, and it wasn't even close to the worst.

What struck me wasn't the number of people with similar stories. It was the fact that none of that knowledge went anywhere. Every tenant I talked to had learned something real about their building, their landlord, the conditions inside their walls, and every one of them had learned it only after signing a lease and moving in. When they left, everything they knew left with them, and the next tenant walked in just as blind as they had been.

This is a straightforward information asymmetry problem, and it's strikingly neglected. You can read hundreds of reviews before booking a hotel for a single night, but there is no equivalent infrastructure for the place where you'll sleep, cook, and live for the next year or more. According to the National Center for Healthy Housing, nearly half of all homes in U.S. metropolitan areas have at least one significant health or safety hazard. Public health researchers have spent decades documenting what these conditions do to the people living inside them, and they've built validated instruments for measuring them systematically. The science on which housing conditions make people sick is well established. What's never been built is anything that translates it into a tool a renter can use before they sign.

So I built one. RateMyPlace is a free, tenant-led review platform where renters rate their apartment, building, and landlord using a 27-item structured survey adapted from validated housing quality instruments, including the Observational Housing Quality Scale, the Physical Housing Quality Scale, and the WHO LARES framework. Unlike typical review platforms, the scoring is weighted by health impact: mold and pest infestations carry more weight than cosmetic complaints, because the epidemiological evidence says they should. That means a building with a serious mold problem can't be masked by positive reviews from tenants who loved how easy it was to sign the lease, and a building that's genuinely well-maintained will score accordingly, regardless of whether the kitchen is dated.

The methodology behind the weighting is grounded in peer-reviewed evidence, not opinion, and each health and safety weight is tied to specific research on the strength of association between that housing condition and health outcomes. The full scoring methodology, including all citations, is published transparently at ratemyplace.org/methodology, because I think any platform asking tenants to trust it with their experiences owes them that transparency.

Privacy protections are structural rather than afterthoughts. Move-in and move-out dates display as seasons rather than exact dates, so a landlord can't match a review to a specific tenant. No unit numbers or personally identifiable information appear on any review, everything is moderated before it goes live, and reviewers can delete their reviews at any time. I also built a dispute process for landlords who believe a review is inaccurate, because this isn't a platform designed to punish anyone. It's designed to close an information gap, and it only works if both sides trust it.

On the backend, I research the ownership behind reviewed buildings through public property filings, because one of the things I learned from my own experience is that the person you interact with as a tenant is often several layers removed from the person whose decisions actually determine your living conditions. Making that chain of ownership visible is part of what the platform does, and part of why I think it offers something that existing review sites don't.

I want to be honest about where this is: it's early. There are a handful of buildings reviewed and a small number of reviews. I taught myself to code from scratch and built the entire platform myself, from the research behind the scoring to the design to the development, and while I'm proud of how it's come together, the platform is only as good as the people who use it. What it needs most right now is tenants willing to share what they know.

I think this problem is worth paying attention to for reasons that may resonate with this community. Housing quality is a well-documented social determinant of health that disproportionately affects lower-income populations, and the information asymmetry between landlords and tenants is genuinely neglected in a way that's hard to overstate once you start looking at it. The intervention itself, an evidence-based review platform with health-weighted scoring, is low-cost and scalable. Renters make up roughly a third of U.S. households, with the most vulnerable renters bearing the highest burden of poor housing conditions and the least access to information about what they're signing up for. Closing that gap, even partially, could meaningfully reduce preventable harm.

If you've ever rented, you know something about a building that the next tenant deserves to hear. It takes a few minutes at ratemyplace.org, and I'm happy to answer questions about the methodology, the design decisions, or anything else in the comments.