Boston's District 7
Aayush Joshipura, Benoit Cambournac, Daniel Xu
The primary motivation for our project was to tell a compelling story regarding the current condition and needs of District 7 of Boston. In creating this story, we considered various ideas for our visualizations, such as budget allocations, homeownership, transportation accessibility, health of small business, and other demographic information about the districts of Boston. To guide our analysis, we had the opportunity to meet with District 7 councilor Tania Anderson and discuss some of the challenges that neighborhoods in District 7 - Roxbury, Dorchester, Fenway, and part of the South End are currently encountering. High dropout rates, increasing mental health issues, a lack of public infrastructure, equity, commercial real estate, and most importantly, neglect from Boston leaders, has put District 7 in a bind. From our interview, we gained numerous key insights regarding the current state of District 7 residents and came up with a few guiding questions to base our work off of.
To illustrate the disparities between District 7 and the rest of Boston, we compared factors such as demographics, budget allocations, and existing projects in the area to other districts of Boston. This provides viewers with a holistic view of Boston’s distribution of these key features, highlighting how District 7 differs from other districts. We also dug deeper into District 7 itself to provide a better understanding of the allocation of projects, demographics, and money within District 7. We allow users to interact with and narrow down our visualizations into projects geared solely towards a specific district.
For this project, we worked with categorical and quantitative data regarding various citywide and district-specific projects and their associated costs in the capital budget spreadsheet. Additionally, we worked with detailed breakdowns of the overall capital budget for the city of Boston in the budget comparison spreadsheet, which consists of only categorical and quantitative data that relate each governmental department and their budgets for 2022 and projected for 2023. The budget spreadsheets and external Boston district data we obtained generally consisted of only categorical and quantitative data.
The main datasets we utilizied are the capital budget plan, Boston demographic and household information, article 80 reviewed real estate projects, and Boston poverty data sets. The data is primarily quantitative, linked to categorical neighborhood data, with the capital plan excel file serving as a strong example. In this file, the data was partitioned to have a row of data that corresponds to a specific neighborhood, district, location, etc. and a specific statistic or instance of data to go with it. Our demographic data for instance was divided by neighborhood and provided specific quantitative insights into the demographics of each neighborhood.
For data cleaning, we removed, added, and altered many of the headers in the excel files to match their expected column name. For the poverty concentration file provided to us in particular, we had to remove many of the rows near the bottom of the file to ensure that Tableau and Python were able to properly read and attribute the correct data type to each column. For the capital plan file, we had to filter out some of the projects since they were enacted as part of citywide efforts and not dedicated to a specific neighborhood. We decided that it wouldn’t be necessary to show those projects in our visualizations as they do not convey information about the distircts themselves.
We worked with the following online datasets:
Meeting with Councilor Anderson and her staff was a unique opportunity to speak with a “change maker” in our local government and gain insight on the key issues that plague District 7 today. In our interview, the councilor gave context on the problems that people in her district face on a daily basis and painted a vivid picture of life in the district. In turn, we asked about ways we can contribute to showcasing these issues and requested access to different forms of data to guide our visualizations. We gained insights about the various problems citizens of District 7 struggle with today: low rates of homeownership, weak support for local businesses, scarce budget allocations for public services, and the lack of investment into the area. Leaders in Boston have long realized District 7's various afflications, but the councilor believes that they lack the necessary context and insight to demand more funding. In working with our group, the councilor and her staff emphasized the need for our visualizations to serve as “storytellers". The City Council and Councilor Anderson have been able to identify issues, but require strong visualizations to effectively display the district’s shortcomings and gain support for new initiatives from Boston leaders. By focusing on making comparative visualizations which contrast the funding between Boston's districts, our goal was to help support the councilor’s call to action for the Boston City Council and demonstrate the need for genuine investments into District 7.
As a precursor to our final visualizations, we want to give you a glimpse of our data, sourced from the April 2022 capital plan provided to us with the goal of visualizing the funding of projects across Boston, separating data by neighborhood. In creating this visualization, we encoded different Boston neighborhoods on our x-axis and the total projected budget on the y-axis to compare the figures for neighborhoods. Our analysis displayed the districts that these neighborhoods belong to, which were encoded through color. The length of the bars represented the magnitude of funding and worked with color to give insights on funding in Boston neighborhoods and districts. From this visualization, we observed that projects in Chinatown (District 2), Fenway/Kenmore (District 7 and 8), Roxbury (Districts 3, 4, 6, and 7), and South End (Districts 2 and 7) had the highest amount of funding. The results are not surprising given that Fenway/Kenmore and Chinatown are two of the most populous and busy areas of the city, which likely resulted in high amounts of project funding. Additionally, our group focused on District 7 in particular, where we observed that District 7’s Roxbury and South End are getting funding for some upcoming projects. Our visualization suggested that the problem likely was not the amount of funding in District 7, but in where the funding was allocated.
For our visualizations, we chose to focus heavily on task 1 in our task analysis table, specifically focusing on links between capital budget allocations, project quantities, and the size of new construction projects across Boston neighborhoods. Addressing disparities between different neighborhoods and the corresponding allocations each Boston area receives was a key theme of our project as a whole, and we wanted to use our interactive visualization in service of this goal. Our visualization allows users to complete these tasks by using interactive components to illustrate connections between different neighborhoods and attributes. Using the various marks and channels, users can view our bar graph and make observations about which neighborhoods receive the highest number of projects (length of the bars) and the different project types present across Boston. With our geospatial map, users can view the different points to identify the location of Boston projects, while using the size and color of the points to observe the project size and type respectively. Brushing and linking methods were used to connect our two visualizations and create an interactive component. When viewed together, users can select specific neighborhoods from our bar graph and view not only their allocations, but also see a filtered version of our accompanying geospatial map, which isolates all the projects for the selected neighborhoods. These actions allow users to effectively identify which neighborhoods & districts have the most and largest projects across the city of Boston.
District Projects in Boston
Our first visualization links a map of Boston (separated by districts) with a bar chart depicting the number of projects across neighborhoods in Boston. By clicking on areas on the map, the bar chart highlights the selected neighborhoods and displays number of projects. Interactions with the bar chart by clicking neighborhoods highlights the location, project type, and size of projects on the Boston map, allowing users to gain insights on specific projects and neighborhoods. IDPs are institutionally funded development projects, which refer to construction for academic and medical institutions across Boston. NPCs reference “Notice of Project Changes”, which denotes projects where the type of building is being changed.
For our analysis of Roxbury, we found that while the neighborhood had a high quantity of projects relative to other Boston areas, most of the "larger" projects all focused on Northeastern University and their ongoing construction efforts. While these projects are of high quality and quantity, they do not affect the struggling areas of Roxbury. Outside of university projects, the ongoing work in Roxbury consists of many smaller projects which are spread out across the neighborhood, illustrating the need for larger investments targeted towards improving Roxbury as a whole.
Total Budget by Neighborhood
Our second visualization depicts allocations of the Boston capital budget for the fiscal year 2023 for the various different city departments. Neighborhood is encoded on the x-axis with total spend encoded on the y-axis. This visualization highlights how spread out funding towards Roxbury and other district 7 neighborhoods is. Compared to other Boston areas, District 7 neighborhoods receive little direct investment towards upgrading specific infrastructure (i.e public schools). The quantity of funding is not the problem District 7 faces, but rather the lack of targeted investment into neighborhoods due to allocations being spread out across departments.
Through our analyses above of Boston's 2022 project funding, we arrived at a few key conclusions about Roxbury and District 7's condition relative to other areas and neighborhoods of Boston. Throughout the last 10 years, Article 80 approved projects in Roxbury and District 7 have seen splintered investment across a myriad of categories, mainly clustered in smaller real estate projects. Whereas Roxbury only sees these smaller projects, most other Boston neighborhoods see a more direct investment seen in larger, community centric projects that have a greater impact on their constituents. Consequently, this misrepresents the true state of District 7 since these over-representations of past investments in Roxbury, hides the lack of true positive economical impact across District 7.
Further extensions of this project are possible with stronger and more detailed data sources regarding Boston’s budget allocations and capital budget. These visualizations could be applied to past years of the budget to show how allocations for projects and neighborhoods have changed over time. Additional work could be completed in specific subsets of the budgets, possibly detailing changes in allocations for public works, parks, public transportation, affordable housing, and other departments utilized by the city of Boston. Gaining access and properly cleaning this data will improve the use-case of the provided visualization and analysis, but even at our current level of research, our work generates critical conclusions that members of the city’s governments must act on.