While governments and nonprofits pivot from response to recovery in the coronavirus crisis, they’re looking to a data analytics tool that can help map out which areas—down to specific neighborhoods—remain most vulnerable and what kind of infrastructure and resources they need to emerge from the pandemic in a better, stronger position.
The tool is an open source platform developed by California-based urban planning and software company UrbanFootprint that combines multiple datasets—jobless claims, COVID-19 infections, location of supermarkets, to name just a few—and crosses them, mapping and measuring their potential impacts on specific areas and populations within cities.
The firm recently partnered with the Center for Planning Excellence to analyze the impact of the coronavirus crisis on Baton Rouge and Louisiana. In a webinar Tuesday, UrbanFootprint CEO Joe DiStefano presented statistics that showed just how serious the situation is here:
• Before the crisis, 25% of Louisiana residents lived in an area considered vulnerable to economic stress. Today, nearly 80% do.
• The number of children in Louisiana who face chronic food security issues has risen in the past two months from 26% to 35%.
• Unemployment in the state has risen from 7% before the crisis to more than 15% in April.
But the software shows the problem is not evenly distributed and is worse in some areas than others. Breaking the data down by cities shows Baton Rouge has the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the state. The hardest-hit Baton Rouge neighborhoods are Smiley Heights, Istrouma, Downtown East, Legion Village and Istrouma.
“We want to be using this comprehensive information to build a multiple layer cake so we can understand the scale of these issues and very critically how they are distributed across the landscape and how underlying factors are impacting how this crisis is felt on the ground,” DiStefano said.
Looking at where supermarkets that sell fresh foods are located across Baton Rouge neighborhoods presents the picture from another angle, showing that some 200,000 households in Baton Rouge do not live within a 10 minute walk of a grocery store.
Having that kind of data is key in planning for the future—not only where to locate supermarkets but where other kinds of resources are needed.
“The ability to walk to a place—a grocery store, medical clinic, testing site is so important and essential workers are concentrated in areas that are most hard hit and have low access to automobiles,” he says.
CPEX Executive Director Camille Manning Broome hopes the data from UrbanFootprint can be used in the short term to help local governments and front-line service providers track rapidly changing needs and test interventions to address those needs.
Longer term, she hopes CPEX can identify resources to help it house the platform and use it as a tool to inform interventions, planning, projects and policy to support an equitable and resilient recovery.
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