- Get into contact with stakeholders at the DOB and other relevant agencies to share our framework, code modules and outputs, in case it can help them better do their job.
- Create
Urban science cannot be practiced in a cloistered environment. Cities create a vast amount of data and are attractive for researchers, but also contain complicated political structures, which can be easy to forget as academics. We witnessed this in our work when our original sponsor informed us that, due to a conflict of interest with one of the team members who works in real estate, they could not continue to offer us assistance. This show us how important it is to know about the implications and the legal limitations of a project before setting goals. Due to this unforeseen obstacle our work has suffered some delays, and will limit some of our original scope of work. Nonetheless, we have been able to conduct some analysis and preliminary server deployment that demonstrates both the feasibility and potential impact of a project using open data to help identify systematic tenant harassment in New York City.
Another consideration while developing this project is that, since we are trying to address a critical piece of the broad issue that is New York City's housing affordability crisis, a lot of work has already been done by NGOs, civic hackers, government agencies, in addition to last year's team. This gives us the opportunity to create something that makes use of existing work while reshaping them towards a new goal: identifying, visualizing and communicating traces of tenant harassment present in public data to concerned citizens and public advocates. Cities are immensely complex systems, and this work shows how the approach must be both incremental, achieving actionable and measurable goals, and pragmatic, taking into consideration both the existing political actors and work that has been done.