A Spreadsheet With Every Permit Issued in Orleans Parish Since January of 2005
Rebuild by B E M.
Recently, Matt McBride showed his spreadsheet acumen by creating a spreadsheet of the city’s targeted demolition list. He cross-referenced the demolition list against the city’s permit database, to find which of these structures already had demolitions permits. He did so by punching in addresses at city’s online permits database.
For those of you who don’t know, I was once a computer programmer.
It would make Matt’s life easier, I figured, if Matt didn’t have to pick through the city website to obtain the demolition permits. It would be easier if he had them all in a spreadsheet, because he seems to like spreadsheets.
So, I went and gathered up all the permits issued in Orleans Parish since January 2005 and put them into spreadsheets. They are available for download at Think New Orleans.
I wrote a program that would fetch the demolition permits for him. The program initatates a web conversation with the city website, obtains the HTML page that contains the permit data, converts it to an XML document. From the XML document, it takes the address of the permit and runs it against GoogleGeocorder to obtain the latitude and longitude, plus a normalized address (one that is the standard address that the USPS demands for bluk mail.) The program then creates a record and posts it directly to EditGrid, appending a row to a sheet in an EditGrid workbook.
EditGrid is an online spreadsheet. It is a full featured spreadsheet with a lot of extra features that come from being entirely web based. One of these features is the EditGrid programmer interface, which allows a programmer to manipulate an online spreadsheet from a computer program.
The program I wrote runs automatically five times a day. It fetches the most recent permits. Geocodes them and puts them into EditGrid. It sends me an email to let me know it’s alive. If you catch the permits spreadsheet at the right time, you’ll see the most recent permits popping in to place at the end of the worksheet with a little red flash.
You’ll always have the latest permits.
I’ve written an article at my personal blog about my experiences with EditGrid entitled How To Use EditGrid to Create a Database With A Slick User Interface With Zero Lines of Code for those of you so inclined.
The spreadsheets are updated five times a day. You’ll always be able to see the latest permits. You can download the spreadsheets to your computer as an Excel spreadsheet.
Here are the spreadsheets.
Feel free to do so. If you have any questions about the spreadsheets do not hesitate to ask.
We’ll be using this, and similar data sets to generate maps of our recovery. I’ve created a forum for discussion of this project. Please leave your questions in the GIS forum.
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As noted, I really want your input, but I’d like you to please comment in the GIS forum. There will be a lot more to discuss soon.
[...] I set out to create a database of every building permit issued in the City of New Orleans since January of 2005. This is to support the work of Karen Gadbois, Matt McBride and Sarah Elise Lewis. Ultimately, I [...]