It's About to Get Much Easier to Dig Up Your Apartment's Deep, Dark Secrets

For the wealth of information available on rental sites like Craigslist, or real-estate platforms like Trulia, there's a certain category of crucial information that you just can't get from charming property write-ups, sunlit photos, or even walk-throughs. Namely, all the bad stuff: code violations against the landlord for broken plumbing or faulty heat, noise complaints, that nagging history of chemical contamination.

It's about to become much easier, however, to get your hands on this information. We wrote last week about the importance of municipal data standards, a supremely wonky-sounding idea with some very practical implications. These common data formats used across cities have already brought us transit directions on Google Maps, and restaurant inspection scores on Yelp reviews. Now, Code for America, a half-dozen cities and several private companies are rolling out a third national data standard for everything you'd want to know about the health and safety of your (current or future) home: the House Facts Data Standard.