GIBCT Redesign: Research Cost of Living Tools

[dneel-bah]

As a developer, I need to research cost of living near the school functionality that can be incorporated into the comparison tool so that the comparison tool users know what living costs will be in the area.

Assumptions:

1. N/A

Acceptance Criteria:

1. Documentation outlining cost of living near school tools and/or APIs that can be leveraged within the comparison tool.

   Documentation includes, but is not limited to:

   • Pros / Cons
   • Pricing information
   • ...

Supporting Artifacts:

1. N/A

[zurbergram]

Zillow

https://www.zillow.com/research/data/ https://www.zillow.com/research/methodology-zori-repeat-rent-27092/

Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI): A smoothed measure of the typical observed market rate rent across a given region. ZORI is a repeat-rent index that is weighted to the rental housing stock to ensure representativeness across the entire market, not just those homes currently listed for-rent. The index is dollar-denominated by computing the mean of listed rents that fall into the 40th to 60th percentile range for all homes and apartments in a given region, which is once again weighted to reflect the rental housing stock. Details available in ZORI methodology.

Pros

• Has rental data by zipcode by month in a CSV file, http://files.zillowstatic.com/research/public_v2/zori/Zip_ZORI_AllHomesPlusMultifamily_SSA.csv

Cons

• It's from a private company
• no API
• Will need at UI "help" element to link to explainer about ZORI and note data is from Zillow

Price

Free

[zurbergram]

Housing Price Index

https://www.fhfa.gov/ https://www.fhfa.gov/DataTools/Downloads/Pages/House-Price-Index-Datasets.aspx

Pros

Government Data

Cons

Index instead of dollar amount

Price

Free

[zurbergram]

Consumer Price Index

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

Pros

government data

Cons

Index instead of dollar amount

Price

Free

[zurbergram]

WolframAlpha APIs

https://products.wolframalpha.com/api/

Pros

Aggregates data, possibly in a easy to view addable piece to website

Cons

• Costs money
• uses index instead of dollar amount
• Unknowns
  • couldn't test out the Summary Box feature
  • Full Results API Explorer doesn't appear to return same information as going to https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+index+charleston+sc

Price

https://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing/

[zurbergram]

Numbeo

https://www.numbeo.com/common/api.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/api/doc.jsp Looks GET /api/city_prices and GET /api/rankings_by_city_current returns similar dataset to https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Charleston

Pros

Provides a variety of values to display in either dollar amounts or indices

Cons

• Costs money

Price

https://www.numbeo.com/common/api.jsp

[zurbergram]

Indices are percentage change from an initial measurement which would require finding original value and calculating relevant information.

[desireeturner]

@zurbergram Can you add this research to the following GH folder: https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/tree/master/products/education-careers/school-comparison-tool/redesign/research

[zurbergram]

@desireeturner https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/blob/master/products/education-careers/school-comparison-tool/redesign/research/cost-of-living-tools/research.md