Diary of a Spreadsheet
April 16, 2025 at 04:30PMIn January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires displaced tens of thousands of people in Southern California. For n+1, tenant organizer Chelsea Kirk writes about the “rapid-fire monetization of disaster” in the Los Angeles rental market—and how homeowners and real estate agents capitalized on the chaos. Kirk recounts how she began collecting cases of price gouging on Zillow into a spreadsheet, and how her project evolved into a larger grassroots community effort to document and expose landlord greed.
There wasn’t one type of person contributing. Some were comrades in the tenant movement. Some were realtors, attempting to distance themselves from their industry’s worst (natural?) impulses. Some were homeowners—millionaires even—suddenly confronted with the reality of housing as something that could be taken away. Most appeared to be ordinary Angelenos, furious at what they saw, people I’d never met.
The vibe was scrappy and skill-diverse. Some folks had years of experience in data systems; others were there to observe, learn, or relay information to future collaborators. By the end of the call, we had the beginnings of a plan—and two Signal groups: a developer team focused on building the tool to extract rent-gouging listings from Zillow, and a research team ready to analyze the data once it came in.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/16/diary-of-a-spreadsheet/
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