I was knocking around on the City of Chicago’s Data Portal recently and I was impressed to see this data set:
Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Service Requests. Here’s how they describe it:
Data set contains all 311 calls for open and vacant buildings reported to the City of Chicago since January 1, 2010. The information is updated daily with the previous day’s calls added to the records. The data set provides the date of the 311 service request and the unique Service Request # attached to each request. For each request, the following information (as reported by the 311 caller) is available: address location of building; whether building is vacant or occupied; whether the building is open or boarded; entry point if building is open; whether non-residents are occupying or using the building, if the building appears dangerous or hazardous and if the building is vacant due to a fire.
The Data Portal site has been the subject of widespread scorn since its launch, because its main focus seemed to be on providing lists of FOIA requests submitted by reporters:
This was considered a sly finger in the eye by most observers. Goose, gander, etc.
That’s why I was surprised to see such a high-quality data set there. It is updated daily and it contains great details. It’s not hard to see how a list like this can be useful to community groups and concerned neighbors.
The City’s Data Portal runs on software from Socrata, a really solid company out of Seattle. I’ve seen their services evolve over the last few years, and they are on to something. At every turn, their interface is about extending and sharing data. They take the verbs of video sharing (embed, discuss) as well as programming (export, filter) and Web development (visualization) and apply it to civic data.
That’s a worthwhile copy/paste right there.
So I downloaded the data (back over the Christmas break) and looked around. I really don’t have much on the technical skill front. I can do some things, but I cannot natively program anything.
So the point is, I downloaded the data in CSV format and really couldn’t do anything with it. I opend it in Microsoft Excel and marveled at the 9,601 records going back to February 7, 2008. I got that raw feeling of knowledge and power. It was pretty cool.
Think of all of the calls to the city’s 311 system that led to this spreadsheet on my desktop. How many call center operators had to ask how many questions of how many people to pull this detail out of them? We really do rail about city workers and corruption and Pam Zekman-craziness. But this is some great work product, and I am grateful for them.
The first thing I did in Excel was concatenate the various fields in the source data that made up the valid street address. Once I had a single string– and then hid the original, separate fields– I was ready to map the data.
For that, I tried BatchGeo for the first time. I found it to be crazy-simple and super-powerful. All I had to do was copy/paste the fields into a box:
At first, I tried to map all of the data, but the free BatchGeo system only goes up to 5,000 records. They have a paid service– Maptive— for larger data sets. I tried 5,000 records for a while, but the system kept choking on that as well. So I decided to go back to July 1, 2010, which was about 2,500 records.
This worked like a charm: Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Service Requests in Chicago, IL from June 1 to December 22, 2010.
View Vacant and Abandoned Buildings Service Requests in a full screen map
After I looked at the data on the page, I realized that the first item– the last one reported before I downloaded it from the City Web site– was for 1746 E 75TH ST, and was dated 12/22/2010. This is next door to the terrible fire and building collapse that killed two firefighters on the same date. This item was most likely entered by a city worker after the fire next door.
Public data is about life and death. The firefighters were inside the building when they died because they were searching for homeless people they believed were inside.
We’re winning– more and more data is being published, more politicians and policy makers are understanding the value of it. We need more developers to devote themselves to turning this stuff into better cities.