From the Inside Out: Building a City Vacancy Portal
summary
A volunteer-built portal merges 12 different data sets into a comprehensive parcel dataset of about 130,000 rows to identify vacancy (roughly 8,000 vacant buildings and 13,000 vacant lots cited), normalizes ownership and permit records, and exposes a Tableau Public map, CSV downloads, an 18‑page methods doc and LRA pricing. Hosting is patched and slow but effective; inspectors now use tablets to feed updates, a demolitions demo tracker shows funding and contractors, and automation plus an API planned aim to make ingestion repeatable and sustain the project.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to speakers
- 1:25Defining the vacancy issue
- 3:57Challenges with city data
- 6:36Building the data portal
- 9:31Project methodology
- 12:54Exploring the website
- 18:45Community impact and tools
- 25:27Lessons learned
- 32:44Q&A session
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