Core problem
Regional housing decisions are made with fragmented and lagged information. Policymakers cannot easily see what homes were proposed, permitted, completed, rented, or lost; residents lack a shared record of rents and landlord performance; and planners struggle to understand where households of different incomes and sizes are moving.
Build challenge
Build an interactive regional observatory that combines administrative, market, and responsibly crowdsourced data to show how the housing system changes over time. Users should be able to move from a regional pattern to a tract, parcel, building, or project where the underlying data permit. The tool should make missingness, reporting bias, and privacy protections visible.
Success looks like
A policymaker can answer how many homes were built, where, for whom, and at what apparent rent or price; a resident can contribute or retrieve useful information without exposing personal data; and every visualization communicates data quality.