Behind the Scenes: HPD’s Housing New York Open Data

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) publishes nearly 40 open datasets on the city’s Open Data Portal. These datasets highlight the work we do every day to meet our agency mission: to promote the quality and affordability of the city’s housing and the strength and diversity of its many neighborhoods. HPD accomplishes its objectives through four key services:

• Preserving affordable housing and protecting tenants
• Developing new affordable housing
• Enforcing the Housing Maintenance Code
• Engaging neighborhoods in planning

While we publish Open Data related to a variety of our programs and services, this blog post will focus on the datasets related to the Mayor’s Housing New York plan.

What is Housing New York?

Chart based on Affordability Levels Table in Housing New York by the Numbers https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/about/housing-new-york-by-the-numbers.page

HPD is the agency responsible for leading Housing New York (HNY), Mayor de Blasio’s plan to create or preserve 300,000 affordable homes by 2026. HNY is the most ambitious housing plan in the country; 300,000 units are enough homes to house the entire population of Seattle or Boston.

Over the course of this 12-year plan, the goal is to preserve 60% and create (or build) 40% of the total 300,000 affordable housing units. Each housing unit we create or preserve targets a specific income group. Per the graphic above, nearly 85% of our housing units serve extremely low, very low, and low-income households, which are defined as a family of 3 making $76,880 or less each year.

In an effort to better enable the public to track progress towards Housing New York targets, HPD publishes two datasets with information on projects, buildings, and units counted towards the plan. Broadly, these datasets present information on projects that have been counted towards HNY at a building- and a project-level. You can find them by searching for “Housing New York” on the City’s Open Data Portal.

Housing New York Datasets

Housing New York data is divided into project-level and building-level data because some datapoints collected for the plan describe a whole project, and other datapoints describe attributes of buildings and units counted towards the plan.

As shown below, a project is one or more buildings financed and/or regulated as a group entity. A building is a physical structure containing one or more units within a project. And a unit is an apartment, house, or any single residential dwelling unit.

The building-level file displays project information along with its associated building datapoints such as house number, street name, borough-block-lot (BBL), and Building Identification Number (BIN) for each building within a project. Unit counts are provided by building.

The project-level file displays information by project and includes datapoints such as the presence of senior units. Unit counts are provided for each project, rather than by building.

How to use Housing New York Open Data

You might ask: How can I use these Housing New York open datasets to track progress towards the plan’s objectives? Both datasets contain diverse datapoints, but here’s a quick overview of some of the fields included in each file:

You can use the projects file to see what percentage of HNY units serve low-income households:

The buildings file can be used to look at HNY metrics by construction type. See the visualization of HNY units by construction type below.

And that’s not all! We recommend that you play around with the Open Data Portal’s built-in visualization features to explore our data even further. You can access the visualization tool by clicking the “Visualize” button on the top right of the Housing New York dataset pages.

Tips + Tricks for using HPD’s HNY Datasets

Now that we’ve covered the differences between the Housing New York datasets and some basic examples of what you can analyze with this information, we want to leave you with some final tips and tricks for working with this data.

• HNY by Project dataset presents data at the project-level
• HNY by Building dataset presents the data at the building-level
• ‘Project ID’ links the two datasets together
• HNY buildings are geocoded, except for confidential projects (confidential projects assist specific homeowners or other special populations, e.g.:domestic violence survivors)
• Data are updated quarterly

We encourage you to reach out to HPD if you have questions about our Open Data through the Portal’s Contact Us page, linked here.