Inspiration
- Living in Chicago, we've seen how expensive renting can be, especially when prices are so different from one neighborhood to another.
- That made us wonder why rent varies so much and whether we could use data to understand what's happening.
- We wanted to build something that could help Chicago make better housing decisions as the city continues to grow and invest in new technologies.
What it does
- CHIRent helps people explore and compare rent prices and housing affordability across different Chicago neighborhoods.
- It brings together information like household income, rental costs, and other factors to show where people might be struggling to afford housing.
- It lets users explore different rent limits and see how those changes could affect affordability in different areas.
How we built it
- We started by looking for publicly available datasets related to Chicago's housing market, income levels, and neighborhoods.
- We worked on bringing this information together and presenting it through an interactive map and dashboard.
- We also explored using AI to make the data easier to understand and help users explore different housing scenarios.
Challenges we ran into
- Finding the right datasets was harder than we expected because the information was spread across different sources.
- Some datasets used different geographical boundaries or reporting periods, which made combining them tricky.
- We also realized that deciding what makes rent affordable isn't as simple as looking at rental prices alone.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- We're proud that we took a problem we see around us and turned it into something we could actually work on.
- We found a way to bring different housing indicators together so people could understand neighborhood differences more easily.
- Most importantly, we built the project around a question that matters to us: how can we make Chicago more affordable for the people who live here?
What we learned
- We learned that even neighborhoods with lower rent prices can be unaffordable when people aren't earning enough.
- We got a better understanding of how housing, income, and employment are connected, and why looking at multiple datasets matters.
- We also learned that technology doesn't always have to solve a problem directly. Sometimes, helping people understand the problem is an important first step.
What's next for CHIRent
- We'd love to add more data, especially around evictions, homelessness, and how rent prices have changed over time.
- We want to improve our simulator so users can compare different housing policies and better understand their possible effects.
- As Chicago grows into a quantum technology hub, we also want to explore how new job opportunities and neighborhood development could affect housing affordability.
Built With
- chicago
- data
- fastapi
- geojson
- javascript
- leaflet.js
- openai-api
- pandas
- plotly
- python
- react
- rest-api
