sid-kap / housing-data

housing-data

housingdata is a webapp that displays trends in housing contruction in US and Canada cities, counties, metro areas and states/provinces from 1980 to present.

The data comes from the US Census's monthly Building Permits Survey (data publicly available) and Statistics Canada's Building Permits survey (not publicly available at the city level, I had to purchase it).

Code structure

The raw data is stored as a combination of fixed-width, CSV, and Excel files at https://github.com/sid-kap/housing-data-data. I try to update the raw data files in that repo when BPS releases new data every month.

The raw data is converted to JSON files usable by the web front-end by python/pandas code that lives in python/. That code runs in every Vercel deploy, which runs after new commits in main. The JSON files are hosted as static assets by Vercel.

The front-end is written in React/Next.js and hosted by Vercel.

Getting Started

You should have yarn and poetry installed on your machine.

# Clone the raw data repo to ../housing-data-data
pushd ..
git clone https://github.com/sid-kap/housing-data-data
popd

# Set up the python venv
pushd python
poetry install
popd

# Run python code to build the static JSON files in ./public
./build_data_local.sh

# Run the local Next.js development server at http://localhost:3000
yarn dev

housing-data's Issues

Feature request: zoom (date range select)

2 requests:

• The ability to zoom in on a portion of the map would be helpful.
• The state comparisons should have an option to view per capita.

I'm happy to take a stab at either or both of these if it would be helpful.

Include unit breakdown chart for regions and whole US

Suggest showing overall trends in single family vs. multifamily.

Option to download values for figures to reformat externally

Feature enhancement request: it looks like the "view source" and Vega options only display the axis data but not the values for readily extracting. It would be nice to be able to quickly download the data underlying a comparison timeseries chart so it can be reformatted externally (i.e., without having to install the whole repo).

Feature Request: allow choosing file names when saving images

This would be a nice feature on the cities page.

thanks for making this tool, really interesting dataset!

Build valuations have wrong units in states tab?

Feature request: dynamically resize y-axis

Thanks for this excellent resource! Would it be possible to dynamically resize the y-axis to the limits of the data plotted for selected cities?