Mayor Thomas Menino has an analytics team that correlates citizen complaints with land use information, code violations, crimes, and tax records to predict where absentee landlords aren’t maintaining properties. This is part of the city’s Problem Properties Task Force, an initiative to try to clean up drugs and prostitution in the city and hold landlords accountable for what happens in the properties they rent.

Photograph by: Jodi Hilton/The New York Times/Redux