A Portrait of a Neighborhood Is Now Just a Click Away
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: February 6, 2004
Want to know how many vacant lots are in your neighborhood? How steep the rent increases have been? The rate of mortgage foreclosures? How many people live in "linguistic isolation" (bureaucratese for "non-English speakers'')?
Under a new federally financed program, anyone wanting to tap into a wealth of housing (and other) information about any of New York City's neighborhoods - would-be home buyers, renters, policy makers or community advocates - can log on at no charge to a simple-to-use Web site at www.nychanis.com.
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Nychanis stands for New York City Housing and Neighborhoods Information System, and the Web site is the design child of Michael H. Schill, director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University's School of Law, and Denise Previti, a former researcher at the center. It was financed by a $457,000 grant from the United States Department of Commerce, with matching contributions from local foundations and banks.
"The project is part of a national movement toward democratizing data," Professor Schill said. "The idea is that government agencies and private organizations collect huge amounts of information that average people have no way of accessing. With Nychanis, anyone can have this data at their fingertips."