The most important defense to get right is simple: not every landlord-tenant contact should be treated as a habitability complaint — and STLCA does not count them that way.
Physical housing-condition complaints supported by the tenant narrative.
Notices, rent, deposits, lease, entry, retaliation and related tenancy matters without a strict physical-condition match.
Rights/information requests kept separate from physical-condition complaints.
Records that function as staff/process notes rather than a substantive tenant complaint narrative.
No strict issue wording detected by the current rules. Borderline records are reviewed separately.
Among 17,989 strict habitability records marked Closed or Completed, 9,074 have no inspection date in the public-data field — 50.4%.
Evidence-safe interpretation: the published field does not establish an inspection date for those records. It does not establish that no inspection occurred.
At least one critical physical-condition category in the complaint text.
Current record status.
48.3% of the closed/completed critical cohort.
Within the 5,642 critical-condition records above, 730 have no public inspection date and an SDCI note containing at least one review disposition such as no contact, withdrawn, administrative closure or no violation. This is a review cohort — not a finding that all 730 were improperly closed.
The maps show tenant-reported problem wording. One complaint may contain more than one problem. Borderline wording is excluded from strict counts.