rePost::Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy

Uncloaking a Slumlord Conspiracy with Social Network Analysis
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
A client of ours — a small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] — used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of “slumlords” of various housing violations that the real estate investors had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:
raw sewage leaks
multiple tenant children with high lead levels
eviction of complaining tenants
utility liens of six figures
The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations. As the collected data grew in size, the EJO examined various ways they could visualize the data making it clear and understandable to all concerned. They tried various mind-mapping and organization-charting software but to no avail — the complex ties they were discovering just made the diagrams hopelessly unreadable. They turned to social network analysis [SNA] to make sense of the complex interconnectivity.
The data I will present below is not the actual data from the criminal case. However, it does accurately reflect the social network analysis they performed. The names and genders of the individuals, as well as the names of real estate holdings [LLC] and other businesses have all been masked. This case will be presented in the sequence the EJO followed, first they looked at the real estate holdings, then the owners of the holdings, and then their connections, which led to other connections, and more people and entities.
via Revealing Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Conspiracy.