What’s Ahead for the Place-Based Indicators Project

The Place-Based Indicators Project was launched with the goal of helping communities turn the masses of data on all aspects of daily life into useful, easily accessible information that can help them better understand the challenges they face and how to solve them. We want to see reliable, timely data in the hands of local policymakers so that they can make more informed decisions — whether it’s where to build more housing, how to target public health resources, or which neighborhoods need access to broadband service.

What We’ve Learned So Far

We had an exciting first year connecting with other data users who collect and analyze data about places. We learned how they are actively making data more accessible, and how, working together, we can advance our vision of ensuring communities across the United States have easy access to place-based indicators that address their needs and priorities.

Through these conversations, we learned that while more and more data are being made available to researchers and analysts working in academia or large research institutes, it is still a challenge for community-based researchers, local program administrators and evaluators, and community leaders to access data about the places where they live and work.

This past year, we also sought insights into the data needs and methodological challenges involved in building place-based indicators — and even hoped to unlock new indicators that anyone and anywhere could use. Among the highlights: our first data challenge, which asked students and recent graduates to turn green space data into indicators. We provided participants with a range of datasets that included government and commercial data and challenged them to turn them into actionable tools that can help local leaders better understand and improve their communities.

The response to the challenge was tremendous, and the submissions were excellent. What surprised me most was the degree to which the project teams cared about helping their communities. This was not just a data-crunching exercise for them; the participants wanted to use data to advance social justice.

While the contestants were only given a month to work on their projects, their analyses were quite sophisticated. Our incredible panel of expert judges was impressed. We awarded prizes in four categories: community health, community safety, physical environment, and specific populations.

The challenge underscored that the untapped interest in place-based indicators is huge — and so are the opportunities.

What’s Next for the Place-Based Indicators Project

We are already working on our next data challenge, which we expect to launch later this year.

We also have our sights set on federal data, and exploring how the government can make it easier for communities to turn these data into indicators. We continue to work with federal agencies to clarify the state of their administrative data: What data are accessible and how? What data remain inaccessible and why?

We also want to make users aware of the many reliable and consistent data points hidden in federal administrative data. I’ve been spotlighting some of these less well-known data on my LinkedIn posts.

While we want to expand and open the universe of data that can help communities improve their quality of life, we also recognize the need to protect privacy for community members. Data privacy will be pivotal to the framework for place-based indicators that we will be building with input from federal statistical agencies. The framework will serve as a guide for how to create high-quality place-based indicators using administrative data. A key focus will be on drawing a line on how much disaggregated data can be released without posing a privacy threat and what can be done to mitigate risks of disclosure. We will start this work near the end of the year.

We are also exploring how communities can use administrative data to guide their housing policy and program design. From property tax filings and building permits to home sales and rental listings, masses of data are collected by governments and commercial organizations every day that could inform local housing solutions. In spring 2024, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will publish a special issue of its journal Cityscape focused on place-based indicators for health and housing. I have the honor of serving as guest editor for this issue. We recently closed our request for abstracts and the response was incredible. I am excited about the diversity of submissions and the fact that several are for mature projects that are having an impact on local communities.

To Sum It All Up

A key takeaway from all this work is that those who house administrative data must consider the needs of all potential data users — not just academic researchers, who have very different goals and timelines than community leaders, program administrators, or evaluators. If you need data to help you understand a problem in your community, you shouldn’t be directed to a database with 100 million records and left on your own to find what you want. You need mechanisms for taking those data and turning them into useful information. That’s what the Placed-Based Indicators Project is all about.

We learned a lot over the past year, and we have a lot of exciting work ahead.