Joining Boston Property Assessment and Public Works Violations Data with Placekey

When working with property data, merging datasets is a common step to get a complete view of a property and its surroundings. Many cities, including Boston, provide public data portals with information about properties and related characteristics. However, these datasets often lack common identifiers, which makes combining them a challenge.

Boston’s Property Assessment and Public Works Violations datasets are useful but can be difficult to merge due to inconsistencies and variations in address data. Placekey addresses this issue by providing a unique identifier for each address, allowing these datasets to be joined quickly and accurately. These datasets, along with others, are available in the developer dashboard for free, making it easier to explore and analyze trends in Boston’s property data.

Insights from the Join 

We first applied Placekeys to 182k addresses in the Boston Property assessment dataset and 781k rows in Boston Public Works Violations datasets.

After applying Placekeys, we can quickly identify patterns and relationships between property values and municipal compliance. Here are some key insights from the joined data:

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Boston Property Assessment Data:

• Boston Property Assessment Data when joined to Boston Public Works Violations matches on 56,820 Placekeys of its 182,241
• Boston Property Assessment Data added 56,820 values for 'code'
• Boston Property Assessment Data added 56,820 values for 'ward'

Boston Public Works Violations:

• Boston Public Works Violations when joined to Boston Property Assessment Data matches on 56,820 Placekeys of its 781,002
• Boston Public Works Violations added 56,820 values for 'SFYI_VALUE'
• Boston Public Works Violations added 56,820 values for 'geocode_latitude'

How to Perform the Join Yourself 

You can sign up for Placekey, execute this join, and download the datasets for free. We recommend navigating to the Join Datasets section of the developer dashboard to do this.

Other options are available like dropping off a file in the Bulk Upload section or using the API to append Placekeys to your own datasets. Whatever method you choose it takes just a few minutes to get started.

About the Datasets

The Boston Property Assessment dataset provides information on properties across the city, including residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. It contains details about property locations, ownership, building characteristics, zoning classifications, and assessed values. This dataset is useful for analyzing property trends, exploring real estate markets, and understanding how land is used across different neighborhoods in Boston.

The Public Works Violations dataset includes records of violations related to issues like illegal dumping, unpermitted street activities, and improper waste disposal. It tracks violation types, locations, and compliance actions taken by the city. This data can be used to identify patterns in public works violations, evaluate enforcement efforts, and support efforts to improve city infrastructure and cleanliness.

What is Placekey? 

Placekey is a universal standard identifier for physical places, designed to make it easy to join and merge location-based data across different datasets. By assigning a unique key to each address or point of interest, Placekey eliminates the complexities of joining datasets and reduces data discrepancies 

With Placekey, organizations can match, deduplicate, and sync location data with speed and accuracy, enabling deeper insights and better decision-making. It simplifies traditionally complex processes, allowing users to focus on unlocking the value of their data rather than dealing with its inconsistencies.

For more information, explore the documentation and our technical whitepaper.

Potential Use Cases

The Boston Property Assessment and Public Works Violations datasets, when combined using Placekey, create a source of information for analyzing urban trends, addressing city-wide challenges, and evaluating properties. This unified dataset can support various use cases, including:

• Real Estate Analysis: Investors and developers can analyze property values, zoning patterns, and nearby violations to identify attractive opportunities or evaluate risks in specific neighborhoods.
• Urban Planning: Planners can assess correlations between property types, land use, and public works violations to prioritize infrastructure improvements or target areas for development.
• Geospatial Analysis: Researchers and analysts can integrate the data into GIS platforms to visualize trends, predict future development patterns, or conduct spatial analyses of city dynamics.

With Placekey enabling easy merging of these datasets, users can transform siloed data into actionable insights for better decision-making across sectors.

Final Thoughts

Joining Boston's Property Assessment and Public Works Violations datasets with Placekey offers us a powerful tool for unlocking insights into property values and compliance issues. By leveraging the Placekey, we can easily merge datasets and explore new perspectives on Boston's real estate landscape. I encourage you to try this approach yourself and unlock the potential of your data with Placekey. Whether for property value assessment or public works data analysis, the possibilities are endless.