LCI Launches Online “HQ” Built With A.I.

by Thomas Breen

LCI’s Liam Brennan, with Mayor Elicker: “This is the most accurate system we’ve had.”

The Livable City Initiative (LCI) on Friday rolled out a new “one-stop digital shop” for housing-related records and complaints — as part of a website that the agency’s director built with a coding tool powered by artificial intelligence.

That new online resource is called LCI HQ. Click here to view the site.

LCI Executive Director Liam Brennan took the lead in creating the online resource with the help of the “agentic coding tool” Claude Code.

“We’re not asking the A.I. for responses,” Brennan said at a Friday press conference at City Hall. “We’re just asking it to help us build the infrastructure that sits on top of the data that’s out there.” He said that LCI has seen “an uptick in accuracy” in its record keeping thanks to this new A.I.-bult site.

The website itself allows members of the public to look up any property in the city, review its history of housing-code and anti-blight violations, and check out the status of recent inspections, complaints, and enforcement actions.

The site also allows users to file new housing-related complaints that LCI will then follow up on.

Brennan and Mayor Justin Elicker announced the launch of the site during a Friday morning press conference on the second floor of City Hall. Elicker said that there are roughly 27,350 different properties in the city.

“This is truly a game-changer,” said Downtown/East Rock Alder Christine Kim, who noted that most of the concerns she hears from constituents are about housing. “I think this website will take care of so much of the issues our New Haven residents face every day” by providing a transparent, accurate, easily accessible tool for filing complaints and reviewing the status of inspections and orders.

“We can’t enforce the law,” or the terms of a lease, “without LCI and the Fair Rent Commission,” said Connecticut Tenants Union Vice President Sarah Giovanniello. With the increased transparency provided by this new resource, “we will waste less of our time” as tenants figuring out how to file complaints and then chasing down the status of LCI’s follow-up.

Brennan said that this new system — which will be managed and maintained in-house by LCI and the city’s IT department — will replace Veoci’s case-management system, which LCI previously used. He said the site is fully updated at midnight each day.

How exactly did he use artificial intelligence and Claude Code to create this new website?

Brennan said that, “with prior systems, we were having trouble getting the most up-to-date tax assessor records to import into LCI’s system.” He said there was “one particular gentleman who had sold his property but his records would not update in LCI’s system.” That’s a problem for New Haven’s housing-code-enforcement agency, because LCI needs to send notices to the right location in order to proceed with any kind of enforcement.

So, in his free time, Brennan started poking around with “agentic coding” and Claude Code. “I decided to see, could one of these coding systems create something that would draw down the most up-to-date tax assessor records.” He said that, “within a few hours,” he was able to create just such a system with Claude Code.

He then asked himself another question: “Could we map on a case management system onto that as well?” He wanted to create such a system that would be “as simple as possible for the staff.”

Claude Code helped him do that, too.

“Once I did that, we started chatting internally with the leadership team here and we brought it to the mayor. We said, we’ve been doing this. What do you think of this?” Brennan said Elicker’s response was: Go to the IT department, see what concerns they have, address those concerns, “then run with it.”

How confident is he in the accuracy of the information included on this website, given that so much of it was created by A.I.?

“We test this regularly,” Brennan said. “We have landlords calling, tenants calling.” He also noted that the website links to source documents from the Secretary of the State’s office as well as the tax assessor’s office. “We can go to the source document to see if it is accurate.”

That said, “this is the most accurate system we’ve had.” He said LCI fully started using this new site last month. “We’ve had the least number of complaints” with this new program.

What about more broadly at City Hall? Does the Elicker administration have any kind of policy in place for how department heads or other city employees should or should not be using A.I.?

“We’ve been working to create a working group to work through some of the questions on A.I.,” Elicker said. “This is the only example I’m aware of using A.I. to create some kind of platform” at City Hall. “It’s a work in progress.”

Connecticut Tenants Union VP Sarah Giovanniello.