Affordable Housing (Data Hub)
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Project Info

Users' URL
http://affordablehousing.pythonanywhere.com
Developers' URL
https://github.com/codefordurham/affordablehousing
Stage
Commenting: Initial status for project, it's an idea people are commenting on
README

Our vision is to support the Durham community by aggregating and organizing housing related information in a way that moves community consensus and investment decisions forward. We want to ensure that we do not wait until it's too late for Durham to make the needed investments to ensure we remain a community with enough housing near employment for all socio-economic brackets. To start, we have created a generic framework for exploring data - thinking about how to model after the DataSF Housing Hub and adapting it to the Durham Area.

How you can help…

We are looking for UX / UI Designers / Front End developers to help us with the site! As you can probably see we've taken a template and are just running with the data/backend side.

Project Links

For quick overview (if new to project), check out this Dec 10 affordable housing report provided by consultant Karen Lado to the City of Durham

This is an emerging project born out of this initial Project Scope Brainstorm.

Issue Brief:

Sustainable economic development is difficult to get right. Durham is growing fast and may be missing the window to get the right policies and organizations in place to ensure it stays a place where people of all socio-economic backgrounds can work and live. Durham already lacks 14,500 affordable rental units according to DurhamCares. We don't want to live in a place with the same dramatic tension that San Francisco has experienced between the innovation/tech economy and those not in that sector. We want to be the model of sustainable urban growth in the digital age. We need tools to help guide the discussion.

Lack of public awareness around changes in affordable housing options in Durham and ability to track local inventories of rent within affordable ranges block by block as Durham grows is one major problem

Other Housing Problems:

  • How many rental units are available for people earning at 40-60% Area Median Income (AMI)?
  • Startups & low-wealth communities are at-risk of œgentrification
  • Ensure housing inventory is aligned with workforce development efforts
  • Ensure affordable housing inventory is aligned with public transportation planning

Project Activity
Log Buzz

Update #13

Created interactive wireframes: http://lpmo40.axshare.com/#p=iphone_frame_for_desktop_view and visual design: https://slack-files.com/files-pri-safe/T02ETHD9P-F1ZBQ6Q95/affordable-housing.pdf?c=1470787142-db1f98582b91a0008027c57af240cae680023c51 for the basic format of the website. Feedback is welcome!

Posted on by Janet Danforth

Update #12

Here are some highlights of what we accomplished tonight:

We decided on a target audience we're going to focus on as the users for the firs draft of the site — Councilpeople of Durham.

We cleaned up the waffle board, and created several new waffle tickets.

We created a wiki page for running the site locally on OSX. We'll continue to build out documentation using the wiki.

We resolved 1 UI ticket re: the placeholder mobile header "Business Casual" with our "Affordable Housing" header.

We started work on determining how to integrate the pyzillow client for the Zillow api to gather data.

Posted on by Ron Stebelton

Update #10

  • Added a new graph for the ACS Gross Rent Percent Household Income ** The graphs were pretty cluttered ** Experimented with line, bar, stacked bar ** Experimented with rolling some of the data up ** Was pretty easy for Ron to manipulate the data and show visualizations locally

  • Worked with Sarah to bring her up to speed on the project and bounced ideas around with her to see if we could come up with a good way to show the data

  • Sarah had a great question - "What story do we want to tell?"

NEXT STEPS:

  • Need to be able to have others run the site locally
  • Need to deploy the site hosted externally
  • Need get a good grasp on the visualizations we want

Posted on by Ron Stebelton

Update #9

  • Created new, simpler application stack for exploring data (moved away from SF housing hub template)
  • Created Slack Channel for better remote, real time communications
  • Scheduled SME interviews with Karen Lado (Durham Aff Housing Consultant) & had call with Shoshana (Commercial Real Estate Professional)
  • Proved dynamic usage of Durham Portal data
  • Established process
  • Onboarded Jen H - Welcome!

Next Steps

  • Get current app hosted on GH pages (Ron)
  • Documenting latest app version in Github (Ron)
  • Create well-formed data for some new graphs (Ben)
  • Discuss strategy/priorities with Karen Lado (Adam)
  • Give UI feedback (Jen)

Posted on by Adam Martin

Update #8

The relative path issue for the css and links looks like it is now resolved on both the local and http://codefordurham.github.io/affordablehousing.

There is still an issue with the graphs not showing on http://codefordurham.github.io/affordablehousing, but they are showing up locally.

Posted on by Ron Stebelton

Update #6

  • Pushed ACS data to github repo (Derek)
  • Created Localized Map (Rob)
  • Chris/Adam discussed Karen Lado visualization
  • Created live data view of filtered (probable) Rentals Property map

Posted on by Adam Martin

Update #5

  • Merged new Data Browser to master repo
  • Downloaded ACS data for Durham
  • Started consuming JSON files
  • Worked on parsing txt to csv data visualization catalog

Posted on by Adam Martin

Update #3

Attendees: Derek (database/back end), Brittany (front end), Cat (front end), Ben (data/policy), Leah (data/research), Adam (Policy/partners), Chris K (real estate perspective)

  • Cloned the DataSF Data Hub Starter project in our affordable housing repo. To join the repo, just
  • Started a waffle board to add/manage next steps
  • Onboarded new members to the project
  • Reviewed the Dec 10 affordable housing report provided by consultant Karen Lado to the City of Durham

Posted on by Adam Martin

Update #2

[Notes from Ginny] Attendees: Brittany, Anne, Ginny, Adam, Mickey, & Derek

Summary: Good discussion on the history of this team and the priorities of those who arrived. A good discussion on activities that will help in the discovery:

  • Prototype a page or two from the San Francisco Housing Data Hub (housing.datasf.org)
  • Pull data from Open Durham (ex County Population Vulnerability) into various tools such as Watson, SAS Enterprise, Pandas, …
  • Compare Durham to similar cities to assess how we are doing for affordability and accessibility to housing
  • Determine if there is data that the community could request to be added to the Open Durham site.

Next Meeting Prep (December 15)

Posted on by Adam Martin

Update #1

What's happening in community: Recent discussions with Durham CAN, Durham City Council, Self-Help, Durham Housing Authority, etc centers around downtown housing near the Durham Transportation Station, mainly re: options for

  • the use of public property to incentivize private developers to create housing developments with some affordable units, and
  • competition for limited State HUD funds for different projects.

Recent News (see great sources below)

Courtesy of Lisa Soorg and Bull City Rising blog

Posted on by Adam Martin