Add it up.

As part of a course entitled “Journalism and the Audience,” students were asked to spend the semester reporting on a specific subject matter and to use design thinking in presenting that material to a particular audience. I chose to present information on housing as my subject matter, but rather than rely heavily on text reporting, I used Los Angeles city open data to create something that enables users to explore citywide housing construction for themselves.

The project had several parts: a weekly email newsletter for a specific ZIP code that alerts users to changes on the hyperlocal scale; a website displaying interactive maps on the ZIP code and city scale to explore differences in construction patterns and change over time; and a set of written summaries, using insights from housing experts, to explain some patterns on the city scale.

Data was obtained weekly and then cleaned and organized using a Python program. Another Python program sent emails using the SendGrid API. The website was built using Node.js, Express, and Handlebars on the back-end and Mapbox.js and VueJS on the front-end.

This project is no longer maintained and no longer available, but you can browse its code on GitHub.