Delving into Boston's Public Records

Going to City Hall for this assignment was actually pretty fun. As a journalist, there’s something special about going out and doing your work and research away from your laptop that I’ve always appreciated, though I don’t do it much. 

I requested the housing assessment for my apartment building. These were pretty easy to obtain once I found the right department. The first place I went to was a room number that I got from the Boston.gov website, and it was the Department of Law which is apparently not the first stop on most people’s public records hunt. I spoke with Deborah Alleyne from the law department and she was incredibly nice. She wrote me out a list of departments to visit on my search and explained how to navigate the confusing City Hall. 

From there I went to the Assessing Department, where I was able to get a copy of my building’s housing assessment. Every clerk I spoke with was very helpful and seemed to know I was there for a school project, so I definitely was not the first one to come through this week!

I didn’t find anything terribly interesting on the housing assessment, except that the building is registered to someone named David Geller in New Jersey, who I’ve never heard of. I was a bit surprised to see that my building was assessed at a value of $1,797,000. Honestly it’s not that nice, but I guess any real estate in the city is (somewhat) good real estate. 

I also pulled tax records for my building. I’m not really sure how to read them, as the concept of taxes has always somewhat evaded me, but it looks like taxes were last paid on May 1, 2019. 

Voting records were also super easy to get, which sort of surprised me. I feel like voting is a somewhat personal thing, and it’s weird that we call them voting records even though you can’t see who the individual voted for. To me it’s more of a record of attendance for elections. Regardless, I gave the clerk two names in case one didn’t turn up with anything but luckily both names had voting records attached. I pulled records from Brian McCook and Airline Inthyrath, two Boston residents who also happen to be two of my favorite drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race. They use different names while performing (Katya and Jujubee, respectively), but a quick Google search gave me their real names and the search was overall successful. I also found out that both of them are registered Democrats, which is quite honestly what I expected from two Boston drag queens. 

All in all, I was at City Hall for a little over an hour. That’s mostly what I expected, I definitely spent a decent chunk of time wandering around slightly lost until I got the hang of things. Everyone I encountered was super friendly and helpful, and although I don’t think there’s much of a story behind any of the public records I pulled, it was definitely a good experience.