For property management companies who want to better understand the capacity of their tenants to pay rent during the pandemic, The Closing Docs is a startup hoping to help.

The Closing Docs is an income verification company using automated income verification with three simple steps: Collect, Confirm, and Share. Currently 3 years in, the company supports income verification to lender offering vehicle loans and more than 700,000 landlord-managed units. This system is intended to significantly compress vacancy periods and underwriting cycles, resulting in applicants being approved in minutes rather than days or weeks.

The Closing Docs was co-founded by Mark Fiebig, a serial entrepreneur and investment property manager, and Stephen Arifin, a former engineer at Microsoft. They say that what sets them apart is that they have remained laser focused on one very specific, difficult problem in a giant market. The co-founders described when inspiration hit, “The ah-ha moment came when realizing potential customers kept telling us the same thing: They were waiting days for applicants to submit required information. A good market is more important than a good product. When you have both, you’ve struck gold.”

Fiebig said, “Because we offer instant access to up-to-the-minute income history, we are not only supporting applicant approval decisions and existing tenant renewal considerations, we are also giving property managers and tenants a tool to objectively communicate about current income status. Our data provided to both parties supports these negotiations in constructive ways.” The company claims that in some cases, using The Closing Docs decreases processing time (~30%) for rental applications and increases funding rates (~15%) for loans.

This works by the software connecting to the bank accounts of the applicants and analyzing their deposit history. It then organizes that data into an income report. Income screenings can be a standalone service or be integrated into an online rental application. Income reports provide a net income summary of an applicant, summarizing key metrics such as Annual Net Income and Monthly Net Income.

The Closing Docs pricing starts at $10.00 as a one-time payment, per user. There is a free version trial and they support workflows where either the applicant or the decision maker can pay the $10 report fee.

They say that everyone deserves a second chance – but with the Internet creating a permanent record of so many of our actions, it’s quite possible that mistakes from the past could come back to haunt us for years to come. Recent high-profile examples have included Kevin Hart stepping down from hosting the Oscars over homophobic tweets from years gone by, or Representative Katie Hill being forced to resign after her ex-husband leaked compromising revenge porn photos to conservative news sites.

Several countries around the world have varying degrees of success or failure implementing the “right to be forgotten” – that is, the legal right for people to ask for information about themselves to be removed from search engines.

The right to be forgotten is controversial. On one hand, victims of revenge porn and other slanders, like Katie Hill, have very little recourse to repair the ongoing damage to their careers and reputations. Others feel that people with a criminal record, especially for nonviolent and petty crimes, shouldn’t have to answer for their past mistakes forevermore.

Others argue that allowing people to remove information about their past infringes upon freedom of expression and could lead to censorship and the ability for history to be inaccurately rewritten.
In the United States, we lean towards the right of the public to access information. However, in countries around the world, the right be forgotten is gaining a foothold. For example, the European Data Protection Directive protects the right to be forgotten by requiring search engines to provide a process whereby a person can ask for links about them to be removed.

In fact, Google has entire Advisory Council dedicated to making such decisions by weighing the harm done to the individual against the rights of the public to know. As of 2014, Google has removed over a million URLs from its search results (webpages aren’t expunged from the internet – just from the search engine listings, making sites difficult, but not impossible to find).

Some of the decisions have been controversial, such as a case where a doctor had removed links to articles about malpractice in his past. Nonetheless, many countries feel that the right to be forgotten should be protected, and in recent years France has put pressure on Google to remove contentious links not only from Google Europe, but from all of its search engines internationally.

In the United States, there’s not much legal precedent for the “right to be forgotten.” So what should you do if you really want to erase incriminating links about yourself?

First of all, if you are a victim of revenge porn – don’t worry you’re not alone. Organizations like Cyber Civil Rights, Without My Consent, and BADASS Army can help guide you through the steps to get the content removed, deal with the emotional damage, and potentially take legal action, as posting revenge porn is against the law in many states.

And what if you want to vanish from the web just because? Lifehacker has a pretty comprehensive guide on how to “wipe your existence from the Internet.” This includes making private or completely deleting your social media accounts, emailing websites and asking them to take your name down, and opting out of people search sites. They even recommend a paid service called Delete Me who will, for a price, troll the Internet on an ongoing basis for content about you.

For now, there’s not much legal protection in the U.S. for the right to be forgotten and erasing something once it’s been posted may or may not work. We can’t necessarily control what reporters, public records, and exes say about us online – but we at least start by being careful with our own content and thinking twice before posting.

Throughout the summer, we’ve been having honest and urgent discussions about systemic disenfranchisement, policing, and punishment in our society. These issues affect nearly everybody and everything, even down to what we eat. Grocery stores, for example, are a rarity in lots of impoverished or densely urban areas. Places like this, without accessible sources of affordable and nutritious food, are called “food deserts”.

Multiple studies have indicated that without proper nutrition, children have more difficulty in school. Poor performance in school, in turn, is widely considered by juvenile courts to be a predictor of future criminal behavior, which influences the severity of the punishments that are handed down to young offenders. In other words, statistically speaking, growing up in a food desert may have a negative impact on the rest of a child’s life.

Since these problems are fundamentally related, the solutions could be tied together, too. That’s one of the ideas behind Growing Change, a non-profit farm and educational center located in Scotland County, North Carolina. Scotland is one of North Carolina’s poorest counties, with the highest rates of unemployment and food insecurity in the state.

Growing Change simultaneously addresses these problems and more, targeting food injustice in the Scotland County area while educating at-risk youth about sustainable farming practices, and connecting them with mentorship from wounded veterans returning from deployment. Their goal is to “flip” abandoned prisons across the state, turning Brownfield sites into clean, green farms while providing entrepreneurial opportunities for youth and vets.

In a statement from 2015, they explain that “North Carolina is one of the last two states in which youth are adjudicated as adults for all charges at age 16. By the time some 16 year-olds arrive in the courts they are permanently limited in their employment due to their ‘adult’ criminal record. We will help break this cycle by offering the courts, schools and communities ways of diverting youth from the criminal justice system.”

And they get results, too: Their unique Clinical Pilot Program in 2011 showed 92% efficacy in preventing recidivism among participants.

Skill building and personal development is instrumental, not just for teens and young adults, but for anyone to avoid or remove themselves from the dire life circumstances that drive crime rates. I have personally witnessed the power of this model – my former employer, YR Media, teaches classes in multimedia literacy and production skills to achieve the same ends in Oakland, California. When we help people to grow outside of negative roles and situations, more often than not, they happily do.

Growing Change began just under ten years ago, yet their mission is especially relevant now. The pandemic has only amplified the systemic injustices our country has been facing, long before George Floyd’s death transformed the world.

Effective solutions become almost an afterthought in debates about over imprisonment in the US, even though global statistics speak for themselves: The United States accounts for only 4% of the global population, yet is responsible for roughly 20% of the world’s prisoners.

Restorative justice can be a hard concept to understand due to our cultural notions about crime, and it’s impossible to have a full understanding without concrete examples of how these concepts work in real life. This non-profit is demonstrating a clear, creative vision for how we might build connections that nourish us all, from the ground up.