Streamlining City Services
This summer I worked as the Boston University Initiative on Cities Fellow for the City of Providence’s Department of Innovation. The Department of Innovation works with internal and external stakeholders to streamline the delivery of city services, promote public entrepreneurship, and enhance citizen engagement, to ensure Providence is a “City that Works” for its residents and customers.
During my time, I completed several interesting projects, including city data visualization analysis for the Providence Department of Inspection. The Department of Inspections administers and enforces building, housing, health, sanitation, and safety regulations mandated by City and State governments. The department manages the building, mechanical, plumbing and electrical permit issuances and code enforcement inspections. Every City resident or corporation is required to get approval for these permits before construction. By working with expert code officials, residents will benefit from their knowledge of building codes to ensure the owner’s construction project is built correctly, will be safe, and will last.
When I arrived in Providence, I discovered that Inspections data is manually inputted by the department clerk. This data is hard to read and, even for someone with technical skills, very difficult to extract. The data was also stored in different formats, which makes it hard to combine and difficult to track permits by ward or neighborhood. Locations were sometimes labeled incorrectly, which made parcels difficult to identify, and one couldn’t easily look up a parcel’s permitting history. In addition, because the inspections team was separated into four distinct types, there was no overarching process or information sharing for the department chief.
To address this problem, I converted the manually inputted address data into mapping software and corrected existing data about permit status in order to visualize the data with the city map. This visualization would help residents understand ward boundaries and the parcels that belonged to each ward. Outside of its usefulness to residents, the map visualization tool can also help the Department of Inspection indicate permits pulled on each parcel and track the permit close rate by each ward in different time periods. Knowing this will increase efficiency in the department by allowing them to assign inspections based on proximity and ensure that inspections are being scheduled as needed and not on an ad hoc basis.
I collected six years of Department of Inspection data and compared inspectors’ data with permit application data to determine the relationship between the success of permit applications and the tracking time for those same permits down the line. Visualization of this data would help the department assign inspections in more efficient routes. For example, if there are four parcels in one area that need inspections, the map can be used to assign inspectors strategically. One inspector can go to all those locations if it is planned properly in advance. Even with one building inspection team, if two more inspections can be done per team due to the new mapping tool, 400 more inspections closed in a year, which would increase the completion rate by 14%. To give an example, for the calendar year 2015, the closing rate hypothetically could have gone from 18.23% to 32%. This would be equivalent to the amount of time an additional employee would need to complete these inspections at a cost of $33,600 per year.
My visualization analysis about building permit and inspectors’ data helps the City of Providence develop a more comprehensive view of the community’s development process and the quality of their ongoing projects, thereby ensuring the safety of the city.
As a graduate student majoring in city planning, the actual analysis methods from the class were really helpful for the work. This Fellowship was a precious opportunity for gain a better understanding of municipal government. I was able to learn from my colleagues, not only from their skills and expertise about data but softer skills including office communication and networking. As an international student, their kindness and mentorship was invaluable, and I learned the true meaning of a “city that works for its residents and customers.”
About Yi Ding
Yi graduated with a Masters in City Planning in Spring of 2017. Before coming to BU, she worked for the China Urban Construction Design & Research Institute Company. Yi has since moved back to China, where her work has focused on transportation in cities.