Communities Need Data for Crisis Response and Recovery
by Jake Cowan and Kathy Pettit
A publication of the Local Data for Equitable Recovery Resource Hub
Since March 2020, data intermediaries have been providing their communities with data and insights documenting COVID-19’s disparate impacts and informing response and recovery plans. These groups drew from their experience providing actionable data during other types of crises — including natural disasters and police killings. Access to reliable and credible data is important in any crisis, and this blog post outlines four ways people have used data to respond to crises and aims to motivate other communities to build their data capacity for crisis response.
Real-time crisis data for real-time crisis needs
Immediate data needs after a hurricane include the locations and levels of flooding; locations of open services like shelters, grocery stores, and gas stations; and locations of critical infrastructure like drinking water, power, and Wi-Fi. During an October 2017 panel at the meeting of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), Denice Ross, who worked at The Data Center in New Orleans in 2005, and Jie Wu of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University shared their experiences meeting their communities’ data needs after Hurricanes Katrina (New Orleans, 2005) and Hurricane Harvey (Houston, 2017). The Data Center monitored visits to their website to learn what people were looking for and added new content in response, such as maps of elevation by neighborhood. The team also responded directly to technical assistance inquiries received through their website from residents, the media, community organizations, and others. In Houston, Kinder published data that included rainfall totals across the metropolitan region, the status of infrastructure managed by the flood control district, the location of requests submitted to local rescue groups, income maps used to identify vulnerable populations, and an interactive map with layers of data on emergency shelters, real-time traffic, grocery store locations, and more. All data needed to be as granular as possible, identifying the neighborhood of reference and specific locations for the services people needed.
According to Ross and Wu, one of the principal challenges of providing these data during a crisis is assessing data quality. Multiple data sources can appear to offer similar content, can lack documentation, and can be difficult to use. Data intermediaries like The Data Center and Kinder leveraged their established expertise and their data infrastructure to work through these challenges and bring their communities easy-to-use data, maps, and other content to help as those crises developed.
During the panel, Ross and Wu also noted that The Data Center and Kinder invest a lot of time in building relationships and trust with community organizations, local government, and the media. This helped make their data more visible and useful following Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey. The trust they’ve built with communities has also been valuable during the pandemic. Both organizations took the lessons learned from hurricanes to shape their approaches for providing information on COVID-19’s effects in New Orleans and Houston.
Data for communicating about neighborhoods with media and the public during a crisis
In Spring 2017, Freddie Gray died in Baltimore while in police custody. Protests and civil unrest followed. To try to better understand the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray was taken into custody, media began to report on data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance’s (BNIA’s) Vital Signs. BNIA’s director, Seema Iyer, noted during the 2017 NNIP conference panel that she found prominent media examples of their Vital Signs data being used in sensationalistic ways and determined that BNIA needed to get proactive. BNIA used social media to engage with and respond to incorrect or misleading media reporting. In addition, BNIA put together a synthesis of their recent research to explain why neighborhood context matters for understanding the roots of this civil unrest and objectives for eliminating neighborhood disparities. BNIA was able to do this work effectively because of their deep local knowledge and trusted relationships.
BNIA had a similar role in informing Baltimore about how neighborhoods were faring during the pandemic. They created a dashboard with the number of COVID-19 cases, vaccinations, and unemployment claims by neighborhood, and the dashboard also includes data on service requests from 211, 311, and 911. Data intermediaries in other cities also analyzed and published local 211 data on requests for different kinds of services, which helped direct resources and programs in their communities during the pandemic.
Data for informed crisis recovery in communities
As Baltimore, New Orleans, and Houston learned, in a crisis, data intermediaries and their community partners have two priorities: meeting immediate resident needs and using data to build a better future. During the COVID-19 pandemic, data intermediaries in other cities are also contributing to these local conversations. The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission assessed the effects of the pandemic on a range of critical issues — from economic development to broadband access to housing — with a focus on assessing long-term challenges and fostering community dialogue. Drexel University’s Urban Health Collaborative partnered with Philadelphia’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation to map out the prevalence of COVID-19 risk factors alongside data on affordable housing at risk of being lost, and they are using this analysis for housing preservation strategies.
Understanding what communities need for crisis recovery is also critical, as billions of dollars in recovery funding from the federal government flows to cities. Without good data, communities will struggle to equitably direct those resources toward community needs. On hurricane response, Amy Liu and Allison Plyer write in Governing:
Leaders and the public need a shared understanding of the scale and extent of the damage and which households, businesses and neighborhoods have been affected. This is not a one-time effort. Data must be collected and issued regularly over months and years to match the duration of the rebuilding effort…. Without this information, it will be nearly impossible to estimate the nature of aid required, determine how best to deploy resources, prioritize spending and monitor progress.
Communities rely on data intermediaries to be leaders in bringing this scale of data support for the duration of the recovery.
Advocating for data for the current crisis and beyond
Communities often struggle to access the data they need during a crisis, and data intermediaries have an important role in advocating for access to data sources and tools that improve crisis response. During hurricanes, real-time data on flooding and open services remains elusive, with social media taking on a more prominent, but still untapped, role in helping during disasters. During the pandemic, COVID-19 testing data disaggregated by race and ethnicity were not available in most of the US, or they were slow to be released, limiting efforts to understand how COVID-19 was exacerbating racial inequities. The Black Equity Coalition, supported by the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center and other data organizations, pushed Allegheny County to release data disaggregated by race so they could make the case for equitable COVID-19 testing for the county’s Black community. As recovery proceeds, data intermediaries continue to highlight what the crisis is revealing about the need for access to previously unavailable data sources, for new data sources to be developed, and for ways to make existing data useful in a crisis. With these investments in better information, communities will be prepared to respond quickly when the next crisis hits.
