> After hearing through a FOIL request that it would cost the city $50,000 to deliver the building-by-building data (which implies that the city itself does have the data readily available), John, and some peers at BetaNYC, went about scraping the tax bills for NYC buildings to get the rent stabilization information out of PDFs.

> In this new era of open data, you should not need to know how to write a PDF scraper to find a reasonably priced place to live, or discover where you are about to lose one.

I'm having a hard time imagining how it would cost $50,000 to export data.