Spark! Students Use Data Analysis to Support Bill in Massachusetts Legislature

Rep. Nika Elugardo

It’s not everyday that you play a role in a bill that’s making its way through the Massachusetts legislature, but Spark! students have that credential on their resume. Over the course of two years, Spark! teams have built upon the work of preceding cohorts to shape public policy that could affect the entire Commonwealth.

“I enjoy working on projects that create impact and tangible change … impacting the lives of people directly,” Project Manager Rishab Nayak said. Nayak led a team of four students as part of the Experiential Learning Internship this summer: Ethan Singer, Hope Ruse, and Zahra Daniar.

Rishab Nayak (GRE ’22)

Bill H.1396, presented by Representative Nika Elugardo, has the potential of increasing accessibility to affordable housing. According to the bill’s official text, it’s “an act enabling public housing authorities to borrow against real estate equity of publicly-owned properties.”

In hopes of repurposing underutilized land for affordable housing, Spark! students “developed a presentation that was portable across legislators that haven’t heard anything about public housing expansion … and to really walk them along the technical details without getting lost in the weeds,” Elugardo said.

Hope Ruse (CAS ’22)

According to Nayak, cost burden data shows that nearly 400,000 Massachusetts residents spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. 76 percent of towns are not meeting the minimum threshold of subsidized housing inventory. Pre-COVID, data suggested that only 1 in 5 families who needed public housing had it, Elugardo said.

Ethan Singer (CAS ’24)

To counter these odds, Spark! students worked “to understand the dataset, clean, analyze, and interpret the data to generate the findings that informed Bill H.1396,” Nayak said. Their data analysis helped identify parcels of land where there’s an opportunity for housing equity. 

“I believe that housing should be a fundamental human right,” Elugardo said. “If you’re looking to end poverty, housing is central to that. And it’s a place where we haven’t done enough comprehensive planning in Massachusetts.”

Zahra Daniar (CAS’22)

The bill has made it favorably out of the Committee on Housing and into the Committee on Ways and Means. It is now scheduled to be discussed in a joint hearing Wednesday, Sept. 15.