San Francisco Building Permits

  • by user1
  • 05 March, 2022

5 years and 200k building permits

LicenseDatabase: Open Database, Contents: Database Contents

Tagsbusiness, tabular data

Background

A building permit is an official approval document issued by a governmental agency that allows you or your contractor to proceed with a construction or remodeling project on one’s property. For more details go to https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-a-building-permit-1398344. Each city or county has its own office related to buildings, that can do multiple functions like issuing permits, inspecting buildings to enforce safety measures, modifying rules to accommodate needs of the growing population etc. For the city of San Francisco, permit issuing is taken care by www.sfdbi.org/

Why is this important: In the recent past, several posts and blogs highlighted that main discrepancy in demand and supply in real estate industry is due to delays in issuing building permits. Refer:
https://www.trulia.com/blog/trends/elasticity-2016/ – Introduces concept of elasticity, and nice scatterplot of various cities. A good data story!
https://biv.com/article/2014/11/city-building-permit-delays-costing-developers-tim

Content

The data was downloaded for the dates ranging from Jan 1st, 2013 to Feb 25th, 2018 using the filter in San Francisco open data portal. This is the exact link: https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Building-Permits/i98e-djp9/data
There are 43 columns and close to 200k records in the downloaded version (kept here). Description is separately uploaded as dictionary.

Thanks to

  1. San Francisco Open Data portal for keeping and updating this data every Saturday.
  2. A fellow Kaggler and mentor Rajiv Shah for encouraging me to think of business problems
  3. A friend, Nandan PC, for suggesting to post it here and another friend Andrew Maguire for encouraging

Challenges

May be some of the questions that can be answered are:

Can you try predicting permit issue times for various permit types? Which ones matter more?
Can you suggest which is the best week day to visit Department of building inspections, based on this data?
Can you conclude anything on the city’s developments based on this data?

Waiting to hear from all enthusiastic Kagglers! Enjoy..

Size: 18450 KB Price: Free Author: Aparna Shastry Data source: kaggle.com

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