Affordable Housing

Our vision is to support the Durham community by aggregating and organizing housing related information in a way that moves community consenus 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. We are starting by getting our hands into Durham's relevant housing data by cloning the concept of the DataSF Housing Hub and redeploying it into a more manageable tech framework for the Durham Area. We don't currently have a web hosted version but should remedy that soon.

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

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.

• Non-Tech help
• Front end
• UX/Designers
• Back end
• Data Wranglers

Tech Overview

Using Flask Web Framework, d3, and Bootstrap (HTML/css), OpenStreetMap

Resources

• Setting up your local development environment (OS X)

Project Links

• Website prototype
• Github Repo: /affordablehousing
• Google Drive: link
• Email Listerve: cfnc housing
• Catalog of Potential Visualizations: Google Sheet - Feel free to add an idea!
• Slack Channel - Request an invite here

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

Project 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 Problems:

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

Current Plan / Next Steps

• Identify other community efforts (community mapping, advocacy, community surveys) ** Find a good mechanism to engage community to identify priority pain points needs
• Choose Housing sub-theme / focus area for a Housing Data Hack; so far it seems the common goals seem to be:
• Get a stakeholder thought leader meeting to identify optimal coordination & sequencing of events Human-Centered design brainstorming and prioritization exercises (do it during a Data hacking session
• Create outreach plan
• Send Save the Date TBD (Fall)

Potential Community Stakeholders

• Durham, Neighborhood Indicators Project: John Killeen, Laura Beidinger
• Neighborhood representatives?
• Austin Brown- Boondock Cities (Community Mapping)
• Volunters from Coalition for Housing & Transit
• US Census - opportunity to leverage their pilot partnerships http://opportunity.census.gov/
• Durham, Community Development: Reginald Johnson
• Mayor's Housing Task Force - James Svara svarajh@gmail.com
• Community Survey ?