Matt McBride’s List of City Initiated Demolitions in Google Maps
Note the structures along the river, where there was no flooding.
I followed Ashley Morris’ recipe for creating a Google Map using the GIS Visualizer from the data complied by Matt McBride and released as spreadsheet in his community email entitled The Latest Demolition List from the City: Over 1,400 Properties.
- City Initiated Demolitions Map for January, 2008 - Google map of the federally funded (FEMA) city initiated demolitions in New Orleans.
The info windows include Matt McBride’s consolidated demolition information, including necessary reviews, percent damage increases from the 70% scandal, permits and (for a few of them) the owner.
Google Maps
You can read about how Karen Gadbois uses Google Maps in her work tracking the city initiated demolitions of private homes in her article Google Maps. The city is working very hard to turn New Orleans into a vacant lot. The city is keeping the information sequestered in City Hall. The work of Karen Gadbois, Sarah Elise Lewis and Matt McBride is nothing less than forensic.
Today, I conversed with Gregor Rothfuss, a fellow that I met though software development mailing lists, who’s now working for Google. He had a lot of suggestions and abbreviated my search for tools for dealing with these maps. I’m very interested in the idea of implementing a heat map of the demolitions, to see how many land in the National Register District, the jurisdictions of the Historic District Review Committee and Housing Conversation districts. He sent a link to a site with examples of polling results maps, Moving Past Push Pins, that included heat maps of the New Hampshire primary results.
Grassroots GIS
There are already some GIS bloggers in New Orleans, like Mark Deane who’s drawn some simple maps on Public Housing and a riff on the Gambits 40 under 40 most influential New Orleanians, the 41 under 21 who died in the homicidal year of 2007.
Recently, the Broadmoor Improvement Association hosted a series of Neighborhood Leadership Forums, in partnership with the Kennedy School of Government, Bard College and Shell. This is an effort to exchange the lessons learned in the “Broadmoor Project” with other neighborhoods in New Orleans. The Broadmoor Project was launched to aid the recovery of the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans.
Attached to these forms was day long training for neighborhood leaders in ArcGIS. Currently, there is an effort underway to use the computer center at the Trinity Christian Community Center to apply these new grassroots GIS skills in informal coworking sessions.
Now that we’re moving into the implementation, we the citizens of New Orleans are going to have to continue to develop our ability to gather information as well as present information. Those of us who attended the Neighborhood Leadership Forums were able to see the way that maps can be powerful presentation tools for organizations seeking to influence the dialog between citizens and government.
GIS Round Up
Who else has used Google Maps or similar mapping tools in their New Orleans blogging? What GIS tools are available to us through the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the City of New Orleans, our local universities? Who is using GIS in their neighborhood development?
Update:
P.K. Chen from EditGrid stopped by to tell me how to create a map for each zip code directly from EditGrid. His instructions are in the comments of this post. I’m very impressed with EditGrid already, and the active responsiveness of the EditGrid team to people who are using their product gives me the warm-fuzzies.
If you click on view larger map, you’ll view the map in Google Maps with higher resolution and more features.
So, my next task it to create a map for each zip code that I can distribute in the Think New Orleans newsletter. Thank you very much P.K. Chen.
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P.K.
I hope you’re still listening on this channel. Working with the EditGrid API, I’ve developed a database of all the building permits issued in the City of New Orleans nice January 2005. I’m going to write a nice article on how to use the EditGrid API to create a quick and easy database.
http://www.editgrid.com/user/alangutierrez/New_Orleans_Permits
The permits exist on a website, velocityhall.com, but you need to punch in a specific address. The EditGrid spreadsheet contains all of the permits. The permits are geocoded and the addresses are normalized. Because they are geocoded, we can place them on maps. Because the addresses are normalized, we can begin to cross-reference them against other data sources.
The problem is that the EditGrid export to Excel is hitting an issue. It says…
Caught exception “Died at /var/srv/editgrid/eweb-prod/bin/../lib/EditGrid/Export/BookRev.pm line 87.”
I’m going to go and report it at the EditGrid.com website, but I figured I’d give you an update on where we’re going with EditGrid here in New Orleans.
Hi Alan,
I just tried and got the same error as you did (though it works when I export it into .gnumeric file format). Will follow up and revert to you shortly.
I am glad you find good use of the EditGrid API. Eagerly looking forward to your article.
Yours,
P. K.
The EditGrid Team
P.K.
If you’re still listening on this channel, I’ve gone and written about EditGrid and the KML generation, as well as few other EditGrid related things things.
Sorry that it took me so long to get around to it. David Lee from EditGrid also asked me to submit a user story, so I’ll be doing that as well. Thank you for your help on this project. I’m very impressed with all that EditGrid can do.
Hi Alan,
I am very glad that you are finding good uses of the EditGrid API as well as EditGrid’s capability to mashup spreadsheet data into KML file format (we call that My Data Format), and honoured to have played a bit role here.
The most important thing is to make the important information of city demolition status as widespread and accessible as possible. What you and Matt have done here is very important to the New Orleans citizens. Of course, as you said, technology makes things like this much easier than ever, and we at EditGrid are proud to be able to help in this regard.
And here’s a shameless promotion: if anyone has found the information on the Google Maps transformation or Alan’s EditGrid-empowered database useful, do let us know by submitting your story here!
Yours,
P. K.