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Course Project

The Course Project will be split into multiple assignments, spread throughout the course. In order to more easily understand its full scope, this page includes all parts of it.

You've been recruited to work in the research wing helping to develop housing policy for New York City, focusing on identifying optimal locations for housing development and acquisition. Your analysis will support 2 key housing strategies currently being pursued by urban planners and housing advocates.

There are 2 components of the housing development strategy that you will work on research projects related to:

  1. Creating a development pipeline to identify and utilize underutilized public property for housing.
  2. Supporting the acquisition and improvement of existing multi-family housing.

Tasks related to each component:

  1. Public Property Development Analysis: You will identify existing public property that is unused or underutilized using NYC property records. Once identified, you will visualize where these properties are located across the five boroughs, and compute metrics of desirability for housing development.

  2. Multi-Family Housing Acquisition Strategy: You will identify existing inventory of multi-family housing across NYC, using the property records to determine priority buildings for acquisition. These analyses will focus on properties with favorable building-area-to-lot-area ratios, which may indicate development potential or undervaluation, making them less expensive to acquire. You will again apply desirability metrics including transit accessibility and school proximity, and create visualizations showing the distribution of opportunities across NYC's neighborhoods.

By the end of this project, you will have created an analysis framework that identifies both public development opportunities and private acquisition targets, visualized geographically, and prioritized using evidence-based metrics that best support housing development across New York City.

If you are curious about the data format, there is a document describing it Here.