Basements flooded with sewage. Gender discrimination. Delays in repairs.
When Emilia Morris spoke to University of Pittsburgh students about their housing situations, she heard all of those problems and more. But there was a common thread in her conversations: Student renters rarely acted on their concerns because they felt that they “didn’t have it as bad as other students,” said Morris, the former chair of Pitt student government’s Renters First Committee.
So Morris and other Renters First members built Rate Yinz Landlord, a website where renters can leave anonymous reviews of their landlords. Users can evaluate management companies’ and landlords’ communication, maintenance and respectfulness on a scale of one to five. The site prompts reviewers to share their monthly rent and asks if they’d rent from that landlord again.
“There’s not a lot of protections that exist for tenants right now in Allegheny County,” said Morris. “We want to make sure that people feel empowered to tell the community about situations they’ve been having with either their current or former landlord.”
A model familiar to students
Last fall, Morris and other Renters First members began discussing how to make it easier for Pitt students to hold landlords accountable and share more information about their experience as renters. They threw around various possibilities — a Reddit thread, a forum-based website — before Josh Small, a committee member, suggested they make a landlord version of Rate My Professors, a site launched in 1999 to review college instructors.
Sarabeth White, a fellow committee member, thought Rate My Professors offered an ideal model because of its familiarity among college students.
“Resources online and files, they’re great, they’re helpful, but they also don’t incentivize a lot of interaction,” said White. “We do know that Rate Your Professor has a lot of online interaction. That was a big inspiration because us students, like most people, like to be entertained and stimulated online.”
To launch Rate Yinz Landlord, Morris recruited her friend Sebastian Castro, who coded the website in his spare time as a computer science student. Making the site approachable was a priority, and continues to be under Maryn Dubay, who in January took over as chair of Renters First after Morris graduated in December.
“The actual process of filling out a review or adding a landlord, we tried to design to be straightforward and accessible and not super time-consuming,” Dubay said, “because we didn’t want it to feel like a burden or another thing to add to a to-do list.”
By January Renters First members purchased the website domain and quietly began sharing the site with friends ahead of a Feb. 23 public launch date. Committee members plan to push the website to Pitt clubs, hand out QR codes at Oakland bars and eventually canvas apartments. Though the Renters First committee is focused on Pitt students, they encourage all renters in the city to add ratings to the site.
Who will ‘complain the most’?
Committee members said the fledgling site hasn’t yet drawn complaints from landlords. John Petrack, executive vice president of the Realtors Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, thinks some might take umbrage at not being able to respond to the reviews.
“There’s no mechanism where what’s being placed on the site can be measured or tested, or validated,” Petrack said. “It might be the three drunk frat boys that tear the apartment up that complain the most.”
Users with University of Pittsburgh emails can post reviews without verifications, but website administrators will review submissions by external users. All posts are anonymous to protect renters from retaliation by their landlords.
Petrack said the site could be useful in warning renters about bad landlords, but he’s not convinced it will endure. Websites for reviewing landlords have come and gone before, he said.
LandOrSlum.com, created in 2007 by Pitt graduate students, has been defunct for more than a decade.
Landlord review sites have launched outside the Pittsburgh area with varying success, including a recent effort led by University of California, Santa Barbara students titled Rate My Landlord.
Small said keeping a narrow focus is core to the strategy for Rate Yinz Landlord. “The ones that have tried it to become a national service have teetered off,” said Small, “which is why we’re very focused on our target audience – every property that’s rented by students in Oakland – before we go out and expand.”
Student-heavy South Oakland and Central Oakland are represented on City Council by Bob Charland, the only elected city official who doesn’t own a home. Pittsburgh has recently become a majority renter city, with the U.S. Census Bureau estimating that 52% of housing units are renter-occupied.
At some point this year, Charland intends to buy a house. He said he’d probably add a (positive) review of his landlord to Rate Yinz Landlord to add to the database. It could be useful for those in the housing market to know if a landlord is particularly strict about the lease or doesn’t return the security deposit, Charland added.
“Renters in the City of Pittsburgh are at such a structural disadvantage because the landlord has a lot of the power,” said Charland. “A renter maybe wants to rent a location or rent the space or be in a neighborhood; there’s not a whole lot of bargaining you get to do.”
Abby Rae LaCombe, co-founder of RentHelpPGH, said the website has the potential to start a conversation on the aging houses and apartments around Pittsburgh. She’s unsure, though, whether RateYinzLandlord will reach the people who most need information about landlords.
“You’ll hear from people who are inclined to spend a portion of their time sharing their experience and their frustration,” said LaCombe. “In reality, really poor housing stock impacts really busy people. It’s college students, it’s working parents, it’s people who oftentimes are carrying two, three, four jobs. They don’t have a lot of spare time.”
RentHelpPGH workers share Rate Yinz Landlord with people when they seem inclined to publicize their experience with their landlord. But the website is all for naught if robust policy changes don’t follow, La Combe said, noting a recently introduced anti-retaliation ordinance at County Council designed to protect tenants against evictions if they’ve filed a complaint about housing conditions.
Top of LaCombe’s agenda remains a well-funded housing registry allowing the city to keep tabs on who owns rental properties and conduct inspections. Efforts to adopt one, first advanced in 2008 by then-Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, have hit obstacles in court. Former Mayor Ed Gainey launched a voluntary rental registry. The Apartment Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, a litigant against Pittsburgh registry efforts, did not return a request for comment for this article.
“Housing in Allegheny County is really complicated because we have allowed it to fester without meaningful regulation and oversight for so long,” LaCombe said. “It’s like we took what was a paper cut and allowed it to go gangrenous, and now we’re like, ‘Well, how do you fix it?’”
Pitt’s housing plans
Members of the Renter First Committee maintain Rate Yinz Landlord isn’t a solution to litigious landlords or aging housing stock. But they hope it could help to hold the University of Pittsburgh accountable for the wellness of students, even when they’re no longer living on campus.
“We are really advocating for Pitt to not turn a blind eye to these issues, to commit to its institutional master plan of building more dorms if it is going to increase enrollment,” Small said.
Pitt is working toward a new dormitory potentially including around 400-beds that could be open in late 2028. By that time, the university hopes to have around 600 more undergraduates studying in Oakland than it has now.
University spokesperson Jared Stonesifer wrote in response to questions that Pitt’s long-term housing strategy could include leasing more space, buying or building new dorms or converting other buildings to housing. He noted that the university also has an Off-Campus Student Services team which offers housing listings, renter education and help understanding leases in the interests of safe housing.
Rate Yinz Landlord will ideally be passed down through the renters committee, Morris said, so generations of students can learn about disrespectful landlords or management companies that don’t attend to repairs.
“We weren’t really motivated to do this because we hate landlords,” Small said. “We love Oakland. We want to see a complete and whole community.”
Ethan Beck is a freelance journalist who has written for The Washington Post, Pitchfork, Los Angeles Times and more. He can be reached at gordoncethan@gmail.com.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
