Growing Oakland, one garden at a time
Team Just Des(s)erts
Clint, Greg, Dan, Ugaso
Why is this important?
Many Oakland residents live in a food desert
Grocery stores do not enter these markets
There are over 5,000 vacant lots in Oakland
These offer an opportunity for improvements to food security
What has changed?
AB 551 – Urban Agricultural Incentive Zones act
Passed in California in September, 2013
Allows for counties to reduce property tax to $12,100/acre
For reference property taxes are assessed at 1% of the assessed value
Vacant lots + Food deserts
Inform land-owners of $ savings
Improve food security
Encourage the use of AB 551
What did we do
- Identified vacant lots in Oakland food deserts
- Estimate the tax savings to convert unused vacant land to agricultural land
- Develop a flexible tool to show decision-makers, community members and land-owners the potential
- Economic opportunity ($1.8 million)
- Market size (109 acres), and,
- # of people impacted (thousands)
- http://ugotsoul.github.io/berc_hackathon
What data was used?
- Census Tract Data
- Area
- Population
- USDA
- Food deserts by census track
- Alameda County/OpenOakland.org
- Assessment data
- Oakland Community Land Trust
- Vacant lot data
Technologies
- Parsing Data
- R (dataset filtering)
- Ruby (geospatial lookup)
- Lat/Lon <=> census tract
- FCC.gov API
- Lat/Lon <=> census tract
- Storage
- Postgres database
- Front-end
- CartoDB.com
- SQL query interface
- CartoDB.com
Future Directions
- Find nearby vacant lots using address lookup
- Expand to rest of state
- Expand to other states
- Model "Garden Impact Score" using weighed features:
- Walkscore
- Sunlight level
- Proximity to congregation centers
- Cross-border benefits
- Improved, dynamic interface