What's this all about...

Live example: ungentry.codeforboston.org

##What issue does Ungentry address?

The city of Boston is already a very expensive place to live, and it is growing even more so by the day. Many are concerned about displacing long-standing communities from neighborhoods due to rapid development of high-end living quarters. Many people, from all walks of life and segments of society are simply unable to afford to live in Boston and the neighboring towns.

On top of an acute shortage of affordable housing, there is very little data directly pertaining to the issue. Most people you ask agree that Boston costs a lot, and that it is rising rapidly, but the conversation is anecdotal.

In order for community groups to advocate for keeping their neighborhoods affordable and avoiding displacement, they need access to the data that will illustrate the problem. To hold conversations with policy makers and hold decision makers accountable, they have to be able to demonstrate clear trends.

##How Does Ungentry Address this issue? Who is it for?

The first step in empowering communities is to display the depth and breadth of the affordability crisis. To do this we scoped our data collection to a very specific subset of census data, divided into three categories: demographic, financial and housing related.

Within these categories we worked to show bigger-picture data points, such as rent prices, and also finer-grained data points such as percent of household income spent on rent.

The data is shown over three maps, each representing one of the last three census periods. With a fairly quick glance, you can notice patterns over time of dramatic increases in cost. It also provides insight into what areas cost the most/least and in what areas of the city people are struggling the most to meet their basic living needs. In some areas of the city, people are, on average, spending 50% of their household income solely on rent.

With this data community groups have been able to understand their own areas of living better, and advocate for themselves using hard facts.

##What is your data use policy? Can I export the data?

All data in our project is sourced from the US Census and American Community Survey. It is freely available via those sources. We took it a step further by collecting relevant subsets then analyzing and cleaning them. We normalized the 1990 and 2000 Census data to 2010 census tract boundaries using aerial weights interpolation methods provided by the Longitudinal Tract Database. All dollar values are adjusted to 2013 constant dollars. Our compiled data is available via the Github repository for anyone who would like to access it.