Across the UK, people are fighting to keep their homes, challenge exploitative landlords, and push back against a housing system that treats shelter as an investment rather than a right. They're doing this work with one hand tied behind their backs.

Not because the evidence isn't there… it is. It's buried in Land Registry datasets behind paywalls, scattered across council portals in incompatible formats, locked inside the institutional knowledge of organisers who've never had the time or tools to write it down. The people doing the hardest work in housing justice are often the ones with the least access to the information that could make that work more powerful.

The gap we kept seeing

When we talked with housing organisers in our early research, the same frustrations came up again and again. Tenants' unions re-inventing the wheel because there's no shared memory of what's been tried. Campaigners unable to name who actually owns the building they're fighting over. Grassroots groups sitting on rich local knowledge in people's heads, in WhatsApp threads, in folders no one's opened in two years with no way to turn it into usable evidence.

Meanwhile, the people and companies extracting profit from housing have sophisticated tools, legal teams, and data infrastructure at their disposal. The asymmetry is real, and it matters.

It's not just about access to data, either. It's about confidence, capacity, and the right to define your own questions. Too often, "using data" feels like something that happens to communities rather than something done by them.

What we're doing about it

Working alongside housing justice groups, tenants' unions, and grassroots campaigners across the UK, we're building something more useful than a database: practical, participatory ways of working with data that fit how organising actually happens.

That means helping groups get clearer on who owns the land and property they're up against. It means demystifying the legal and governance barriers (e.g. GDPR) that can feel like a wall between organisers and the information they need. It means shining a light on the flows of money through the housing system: service charges, viability assessments, social rents, the quiet extraction that often goes unnamed. And it means creating resources that are reusable, so the next group doesn't start from scratch.

Get involved

This project is ongoing and in collaboration with Digital Commons Cooperative, a cooperative that builds technology for social movements. 

If you're working on housing justice and want to be part of what we're building, or if you have ideas for collaborating, get in touch with janna@sharedassets.org.uk.

Keep an eye out on our Instagram page for open calls for upcoming workshops.

Resources

• Data Governance Handbook for housing organisers, free to use and share.
• Land Explorer is a free tool that makes hidden patterns of land and building ownership more visible. 

‍