Or, how do 311 Complaints affect the trigger for Property Standard investigations (if at all? Hint: They are related.) From a municipal process viewpoint, it's common for complaints made to a city to trigger investigations or increased services if the complaints reach a certain threshold (e.g. seriousness, safety concerns, frequency, etc.) In the case of... Continue Reading →
As with all municipal data, it can work much better for the City of Evanston if any data is available for better quality decision-making. The BENEFITS of the current data provided: It exists online! It can be accessed by date of the Property Standards hearing.In the most recent iteration of the Property Docket format, we... Continue Reading →
For the City of Evanston, the steps from Property Standards complaint through attempts at resolution are outlined on the City's website: For a larger view of the process visual, click here. For the City of Evanston's description of the process, click here. Currently, the process in Evanston is built with many opportunities for property owners... Continue Reading →
Mapping the occurrence addresses outlined on the property dockets (with respondents and # of violations at that address over time) has some drawbacks. Ownership of properties can change hands over time, and aggregating violations across owners of the same address can be problematic for some interpretations of the data.None of the data provided on the... Continue Reading →
Using the data provided by the City of Evanston regarding property violations between 2013 and 2022, I am most interested in looking for trends and patterns that help to show if specific property standards and municipal policies are operating as intended. At the very core, that means properties which are: Safe and healthy/sanitary and in... Continue Reading →
Property violations are relatively straightforward as the first experiment in opening and examining Evanston data because they are more easily available than a lot of data types. They have a purpose, geo-location, clearly-defined accountability relationship, timeline, and direct connection to the municipal policies. There are a few immediate problems with opening Evanston Property Violation data that are... Continue Reading →
Unfortunately, while technically much of Evanston's data is "open" (available on the internet, for instance), like many small municipalities most of the data really isn't open. That is, it's not in a format where regular citizens can use the data, check the data, analyze the data, and learn about their city. Thanks to efforts intended... Continue Reading →
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