LACITY Exploration 14 | Mapping LADBS Code Enforcement Cases

##Background The Department of Building and Safety for the City of Los Angeles publishes data on cases related to Code Enforcement on building, electrical, mechanical and zoning regulations. According to the data description, a case may originate from a customer service request to investigate a possible Code violation, from a planned and authorized inspection of a neighborhood for the purpose of reducing blight, or from a proactive inspection of a site due to an observed hazardous condition. A case is closed (indicated by a "C" status) when the site satisfies the requirements for Code compliance, or when no Code violation is found. A case remains open (indicated by an "O" status) until the site satisfies the requirements for Code compliance.(data.lacity.org)

##Exploration An exploration of the case data with data from the LA County Assessor identifying industrial properties with inquiries to:

• Identify repeat cases on an individual property
• Directly load case information from Building and Safety
• Quality issues with the data

##Methodology

Obtaining and cleaning of data

• Data was downloaded from the City of Los Angeles's Open Data Portal
• Original Data (Last Updated 12.5.2016 before export on 12.7.2016), can be also downloaded in this repo.
  • Approx. 12,100 rows
• Filtering necessary attributes.
• The Case Type attribute contains the following (Description Source Link):

Case Type	Description	Include
BILLBOARDS	Off-Site Advertisement	No
CITATIONS	Citations	Yes
CNAP	Contract Nuisance Abatement, Abandoned Building Task Force, and Problem Property Resolution Team	Yes
FRP	Forclosure Registry Program	No
GENERAL	General	Yes
PACE	Pro-Active Code Enforcement	Yes
SIGNS	On-Site Advertising	No
VEIP	Vehicle Establishment Inspection Program	No
XXX	Adult Entertainment	No

• Data was filtered and saved to this LINK
• Data was furthered filtered by removing attributes not needed for this exploration
• LADBS Inspection District, GIS Parcel Identification Number, Area Planning Commission
• Converting to geojson file for GIS software (QGIS, ESRI)
• The Latitude/Longitude attribute was split into two columns, lat and long, for CSV load to GIS Software
• A new year column was created based on Date Case Generated attribute, for visualization
• ladbs_code_enforcement.geojson generated | Can be found in this repo

Mapping data

• An interactive map was made using Mapbox software and base layers to load the ladbs_code_enforcement.geojson file
• Map was color coded by the year a case was reported (2010-2016)
• 2015 data from the LA County Assessor was added to identify industrial uses in the city.
• Webpage for map was split into two panes for map on left and a iframe to load the LADBS Permit and Inspection Report
• The Case Number attribute is pulled when a user clicks on a marker for JQuery to load ladbs report on that case number.

LIVE MAP

Data Inquiries and Comments from Exploration

• The data seems to have the bulk of the cases in 2016 and decreases dramatically to 2002

Year	Count
2002	2
2003	1
2005	2
2008	3
2009	4
2010	5
2011	407
2012	558
2013	764
2014	1157
2015	2129
2016	4974

• The data has the attribute Status of Case which all cases are indicated as O - Open, there are 108 cases indicated as closed with the Count of Date Case Closed
• Using the map to load up the ladbs case report, many cases (manual inspection of 20 cases) dating back 2 or more years indicate of them being Under Investigation
• Case Types with the PACE value have are little on details from LADBS other than Inspector name and phone number. No description is provided.
• It would be worthwhile to perform a scraping of LADBS case report site to find substandard orders which may involve (or request it to be added to this dataset):
• Construction Work without required permits
• Illegal Occupancy

Like what you see?

Check out sectionLA, a collection of explorations of LA. The analysis, maps and code behind the explorations contribute to the services I offer as a consultant developing analog and digital tools and visualizatoins for Civic Engagement, Planning, Land Use Development and Public Policy. Think you could use my services?

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