Students across the country can now rate their landlords publicly based on a website originally created by Pitt students.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Created last semester<\/a> by the Renters First ad-hoc committee<\/a> of Pitt\u2019s Student Government Board, Rate Yinz Landlord<\/a> is a website that allows Pittsburgh residents to publicly review their landlords and warn future tenants about poor living conditions. In September, the creators of the site announced<\/a> a partnership<\/a> with national nonprofit More Perfect University to create a national version of the website, with a goal of reaching college students across the country.<\/p>\n More Perfect University is an offshoot of More Perfect Union, a nonprofit journalism organization with a mission<\/a> of \u201cbuilding power for the working class.\u201d The partnership allows More Perfect University to access and share the website\u2019s code so that students at other colleges can create similar websites.<\/p>\n Marley Pinsky, chair of the Renters First Ad Hoc Committee and SGB president at the time Rate Yinz Landlord was created, explained that the purpose of the website was to help centralize information about Oakland landlords. Rate Yinz Landlord was modeled<\/a> after Rate My Professor<\/a>, a website college students use to publicly evaluate their instructors.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThese are things that students should be telling each other about, and they\u2019ve already been doing it for years through Reddit or word of mouth,\u201d Pinsky said.<\/p>\n Elise Joshi, campus program manager for More Perfect Union, said the partnership began when her team saw Rate Yinz Landlord on social media and decided to reach out to the Pitt students who created it.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought it was really exciting,\u201d Joshi said. \u201cIn spite of not having local landlord registries, students are engaging in housing transparency to expose landlords and create the transparency we lack.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Josh Small, a 2026 Pitt graduate who was among the group of students that created Rate Yinz Landlord, is working closely with More Perfect University to plan the future direction of Rate Your Landlord. Small is overseeing the project as the project manager, working to identify students at other campuses who want to launch their own websites.<\/p>\n \u201cThe end goal for the project is for the students that we find at other schools to have full ownership and operate it independently,\u201d Small said.<\/p>\n According to Joshi, students at the University of Maryland and the University of\u00a0<\/p>\n Michigan have created their own websites, and students at the University of Colorado Boulder are close to launching their own.<\/p>\n \u201cStudents on over 30 campuses have expressed interest in building Rate Your Landlord sites since we launched a couple of weeks ago,\u201d Joshi said.<\/p>\n Small emphasized that the Rate Yinz Landlord partnership with MPU does not give MPU ownership over the website idea. The website still belongs to the students, Small said, including the original creators and new students who have joined to help.<\/p>\n Joshi said More Perfect University is compensating the students who are directly collaborating with them on student outreach and tech support.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pinsky and Small both said that the partnership with MPU was well received by all of Rate Yinz Landlord\u2019s creators.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of us have been fans of More Perfect Union for a while now, so we were stoked when they reached out to us,\u201d Pinsky said.<\/p>\n Pinsky believes landlord-rating websites can function as an instrument of positive change in renters\u2019 practices.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the problems we see, in theory, could be addressed by collectively speaking out against them, so that landlords would naturally want to provide better,\u201d Pinsky said.<\/p>\n