Open Data Helps Address Inequality
In 2014, the City of Pittsburgh, in partnership with the Allegheny County and the University of Pittsburgh, began to make City data open and accessible to everyone. Our regional open data platform, Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, currently houses over 250 data sets. As part of the Open Data effort, we’ve reached out to different Pittsburgh residents, community groups, non-profits, and researchers to see how they have been using this data to improve Pittsburgh. Read the full Open Data Progress Report for more user stories and the history of open data in Pittsburgh.
The RAND Corporation is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges and helps make communities safer, healthier and more prosperous. Linnea Warren May is a policy analyst at RAND working to help establish baseline measures for inequality using open data.
What do you do at RAND?
I am a policy analyst with a public health background doing work at the intersection of health, urban infrastructure, and sustainability. I’ve been part of a team working with the City for the last couple of years to help develop the OnePGH Resilience Strategy. Now, I’m involved with developing a measurement strategy based on the objectives of that Resilience Strategy.
What is the OnePGH Resilience Strategy?
The Resilience Strategy is a plan to help the city prepare for shocks and stressors. For Pittsburgh, we are looking at how we can grow responsibly in the face of chronic stressors such as our aging infrastructure, struggling education system, and the lack of affordable housing in certain neighborhoods. It’s a broad document addressing things from workforce issues to crumbling bridges. It’s very integrative of the different plans, programs, and recommendations for development in Pittsburgh.
What project are you working on right now?
We are working on an Equity Indicators project. It is funded by a grant provided by the City University of New York for RAND to partner with the City and develop an equity measurement tool for Pittsburgh. The City University of New York first piloted this tool in 2015 and is encouraging Tulsa, Dallas, Oakland, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh to use the same methodology to produce tools for each of their own cities. This would be the first step to benchmarking inequality in Pittsburgh and then we can track changes in these measures to start to understand the impact of various efforts, including the Resilience Strategy. Right now, we are developing the framework, domains, and specific topics for measurement in the Equity Indicators project.
How is the framework being defined?
We are focusing on several areas based on the p4 framework: People (including health, food, safety, education, and workforce development), Place and Planet (including housing, infrastructure, and environment), and Performance (including civic engagement). In each area, we are using data to find instances of the greatest inequity and produce an equality ratio between subgroups in our community (for example, comparing low-income vs. high-income families). We will take all of these individual ratios and roll them up to an overall equality score for Pittsburgh.
What is this equality score going to be used for?
The City would use this to identify where the greatest inequities are right now and to prioritize investments in different areas. It would help the government with decision-making and the allocation of different resources.
Do these scores correspond between cities?
We are not looking to compare across cities. We use different indicators because we have different issues in each city. A certain score in New York City would not necessarily be comparable to the score of Pittsburgh.
How often would you measure these indicators?
Annually. We hope to measure progress in equity and see where we have improved each year and where more change and resources might be allocated in the next year. The first equality score will be released in early 2018.
Which City data are you using?
We are using several datasets from the WPRDC such as vacant land data, public safety data, blighted property data, and DASH (Data Across Sectors of Health) data on health outcomes. As we continue to develop and revise the framework for the equality score, we may look for even more datasets released by the City.
What would you do if you didn’t have access to City data?
Call a lot of people. It’s all public data but it’s hard to get permission to use data from different organizations and governments. It streamlines the process by having data all in one place and categorized clearly.
This is a profile from our Open Data Progress Report. Check out the full report and corresponding article on Harvard’s Data-Smart City Solutions. You can also take a look at the City’s open data on Burgh’s Eye View — and see other datasets on the regional data center!
