How We Know What We Know
Published January 2026 · Updated January 2026
Every claim on this site is supposed to earn its place — a document, a date, a source, something you could go check yourself if you wanted to. This page explains how that actually works, because "trust us" isn't good enough for a project built on the argument that homeowners deserve better than being told to just take the government's word for it.
We separate record from analysis, always. Every page on this site is either a 📄 Primary Source — something sourced to legislative text, an official hearing record, a court filing, or a dated public statement — or 📝 NYHOA Analysis — our own interpretation, clearly labeled as such. We never blend the two without telling you which one you're reading.
We use official sources wherever they exist. The legislative history on this site is sourced directly from the New York City Council's own legislative record system, Legistar — not our summary of it, not a secondhand account. Where a hearing transcript or official testimony exists in the public record, we link to it directly rather than only describing it in our own words.
We date and version everything. Nothing on this site gets quietly edited. When something changes — a bill's status, a statistic, a position — we update the page and note when, rather than rewriting history. Older versions are archived, not deleted.
We tell you what's interpretation, plainly, when it is. Some of the most important arguments on this site — like our read on why a certain vote never came to the floor — aren't things we can point to a single document and prove. In those cases, we lay out the facts we're confident in, tell you clearly that the conclusion is our own reading of those facts, and let you decide whether you land where we did.
That's the whole method. No trick to it — just the discipline of not asking anyone to believe something we haven't shown our work on.