One of the friction points I’ve witnessed consistently over my time of observing Council and land use changes, is the desire for the public to be more informed of what is happening. A lot of time has been spent on improving public notice requirements but there’s still a gap between those that don’t live within the notice area wanting to be aware and getting that information out.
One solution the Development Coordination team routinely points to is the map of current locations.
Which is ok if you want an at-a-glance look of what’s going on in your neighborhood, however it’s not very efficient for tracking new development. How can you tell what’s new? Some of these applications go back to 2021. As a result of my inquiry to the GIS team, they added the ability to view the data as a table on the map. If you look in the menu on the top of the page, there’s a “Table” icon next to “Print”. That opens up a spreadsheet of sorts that provides sortable columns and text based information related to the data for each dot on the map.It’s exportable as a csv file, so you could manually export it, copying into a spreadsheet and track them that way.
I’ve taken it a step further. I’ve taken the raw data source and pipped it into an open source tool called Datasette that results in a searchable database of the current development coordination applications. Think of it as a subset of Accela. Due to the nature of the tool I’m using and the data provided for each item, there are default filters—facets—such that it’s easy to bookmark the page for all re-zonings. Only want re-zonings for Hyde Park/Spanish Town Creek? (Note, neighborhood fields are provided by the city data and should be used for reference only. I do not double check neighborhood boundaries to the location.) But the idea is, you can find the facet for your neighborhood, bookmark it, and be able to check back on a weekly basis to see if anything’s changed.
It’s not the fanciest User Interface and might not win any awards for user experience, but what it will allow for me to do is generate a weekly list of all new applications city wide. Eventually that could be built out for each neighborhood that could go to separate email lists. None of that is built out yet, if you’d like to fund that work please reach out. Also feel free to reach out if you have issues or suggestions. I’m also working on archiving applications once they’ve left the feed, but that’s also a work in progress
