Inspiration
As Jacksonville grows, housing affordability is declining, pushing low-income families toward instability. We wanted to create a data-driven system that identifies where affordable housing is most at risk and guides targeted, equitable investment for long-term community well-being.
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What it does
HomeLens uses AI and geospatial analytics to assess housing affordability, economic vulnerability, equity, and preservation risk at the neighborhood level. It calculates an Investment Priority Score (IPS) and visualizes it through interactive city maps, helping policymakers decide where to invest to maximize social impact.
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How we built it • Collected and cleaned multi-source datasets: HUD, CHAS, Census, NHPD. • Engineered 40+ indicators capturing affordability, income disparity, and cost burden. • Trained a Random Forest model (R² = 0.99) to compute IPS for 25+ U.S. cities. • Created tract-level hotspot maps for Jacksonville using GeoPandas and Folium. • Automated outputs: scored CSVs, policy summaries, and equity dashboards.
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Challenges we ran into • Cleaning and merging large, inconsistent federal datasets. • Matching census tracts to housing data for accurate geospatial mapping. • Maintaining model interpretability while achieving high predictive accuracy. • Rendering large interactive maps efficiently within Colab’s constraints.
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Accomplishments that we’re proud of • Built a fully automated pipeline analyzing 4500+ housing tracts across 25 cities. • Identified Jacksonville’s top at-risk neighborhoods for affordable housing loss. • Delivered interactive maps and policy-ready insights for city leaders. • Created a scalable AI framework for housing equity across U.S. cities.
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What we learned • How to combine AI and social policy to drive real-world decisions. • The importance of data transparency and interpretability in civic analytics. • How structural inequality becomes visible through data — and can be acted upon.
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What’s next for HomeLens: AI for Affordable Housing Equity • Integrate real-time rent, eviction, and employment data. • Build a public web dashboard for housing equity visualization. • Partner with city governments and nonprofits to guide affordable housing investment. • Scale nationwide to support equitable urban growth across all U.S. cities.
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