I live in a house with 11 other people. It’s an old Victorian-style number complete with bay windows, wood floors, frequent plumbing problems, and pests. Like an increasing number of renters, the bottomless pit we toss our money into each month takes the form of a corporation that’s probably part of a real-estate index fund in your (and my) 401k.

Recently, we received a letter from our landlord informing us of their plan to raise our rent by the maximum legal amount. We already felt that we were paying too much, given the condition of our building and how slow the management is to address problems for which they are legally responsible. We’ve gone months without hot water, had sewage repeatedly coming out of our downstairs drains, dealt with leaking pipes, and when there’s any issue with the building, they drag their feet to provide a half-assed solution. Add to that the rising cost of living and the fact that many of us have been finding it hard to be comfortably employed lately, and it’s more than just a matter of principle that we push back. It’s a necessity.

Fortunately for us, we live in San Francisco, a city with relatively strong renter protections. As part of those protections, there exists a city agency called the Rent Board, which serves as a neutral party in disagreements between tenants and landlords. Meaning they can help us.

Not that I’m ungrateful, but the process of getting help from the Rent Board has required a fair amount of executive function, coordination and acting in spite of ambiguity. We can submit petitions to the Rent Board which either A.) delineate how the landlord has substantially reduced housing services without corresponding decrease in rent or B.) in the event of a rent increase, enumerate ways the landlord has failed to repair and maintain the property. We’re working on both A and B, which both take the form of PDF forms.

Speaking of which, PDF forms are the unholy offspring of paper and software. With a PDF, when one of us makes a change, we have to remember to re-upload the latest version somewhere everyone else can access it. Also, there’s a fixed number of rows in the table for enumerating our complaints, less than the number of complaints we ultimately decided to include, so we did some PDF surgery to add an additional copy of that page. Within this table, there is an easy-to-miss bit of text instructing the user to attach evidence and written notices to the landlord for each item, so we gathered that up and included it on additional pages, organized so it’s easy to find the corresponding evidence for each complaint. There’s also some overlap in terms of the information needed on both forms, which is annoying.

Another difficulty had to do with the inevitable uncertainty involved in mapping the complex, messy details of our collective recollections and lived experiences to the form’s strictures. I am grateful that I was able to get someone from the Rent Board on the horn to answer all my questions about the forms, like how to attach a dollar amount to two months without hot water.

Having been a software engineer for several years, I couldn’t help but think about how I could apply my professional background to improve this situation. I’d be willing to bet that there are a lot of legitimate grievances that are never formally considered by the Rent Board because the tenants involved simply lack the bandwidth to navigate the process as it currently exists. If there was an application that they could access on personal computers, smart phones, or public kiosks, and this application made it as easy to submit quality petitions as TurboTax makes doing taxes, what effect would this have on the Rent Board, tenants and landlords? On the housing rental market? On the city’s affordability crisis?

The Rent Board also accepts petitions from landlords, though I suspect that landlords generally have more bandwidth to submit petitions, so making the process easier for them wouldn’t have as much of an effect. But once the system is in place, it would be trivial to support the landlord’s petition forms too, and would be sporting.

So, how would this software work? At a high level, I envision a conversational interface, such as a chatbot, that would collect information from the user and generate the right kind of document for the Rent Board, which could be identical to the PDF form they use today. This wouldn’t necessarily involve AI (e.g. large language models or machine learning). TurboTax and Lemonade insurance have successfully deployed conversational interfaces long before OpenAI released ChatGPT. You could look as far back as ELIZA for an idea of how sophisticated chatbots can be without using modern AI techniques.

I would implement this vision as a mobile-friendly web application so that it’s easy to access on any device. It would need to integrate a identity system capable of determining whether someone is a San Francisco tenant, landlord or city employee, to prevent unauthorized use. It would need to be “multiplayer” in that multiple users can potentially view and interact with the same in-progress petition. Other requirements would probably become clear after talking to the Rent Board.

Writing this post is just the first step. I want to make this vision a reality. Not because I see a pile of money in it, though I do really need income. I want to “scratch my own itch” and in doing so, possibly make living in this city a bit easier for other renters. I’ve heard so many stories of negligent, abusive landlords, and now I’ve experienced it myself. It’s great that we have strong renter protections in this city, but it’s also one of the most expensive places to live in the country, so I think there’s still room for improvement.

It’s likely that if there’s a bottleneck, it’s with what happens after a petition is received by the rent board, and so making it easier for people to submit petitions would only make this bottleneck more obvious. If that’s the case, then this particular strategy to create my own job is probably ill-fated. I fully expect there to be a long series of impediments in the way of making this a reality, from finding the right people, selling the idea, selling myself, finding funding, politics, foul play… but if I can validate that this idea can significantly improve life for a large number of people, then I can persevere.

You might say, why don’t I use my software skills to found an AI B2B SaaS that turns a US state upside down and make a pile of money so I don’t have to rent anymore? Well, first of all, it’s not that easy. I know there’s other ways to finance home ownership, but they’re all similarly individualistic. It would solve the problem for me, but this individualistic mentality is part of what’s got us into this affordability crisis to begin with. More importantly, I think the practice of working an unfulfilling job because it will eventually provide the means to do what you actually care about is responsible for a lot of the ills in our society today, and I don’t want to be a part of that anymore.