Inspired by mutual aid, this crowdsourced digital map of Halifax shows which vacant properties could be turned into housing. How useful is that data?
Why It Matters
Crowdsourcing data from the community can take the onus away from local social purpose organizations to gather their own data. However, it also raises concerns about the quality and reliability of the data, and members of the community may not understand ethical issues that surround data collection, such as privacy, ownership and sensitivity.
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As of September 2022, nearly 700 people in Halifax – the traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people – were experiencing homelessness, according to the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia. That number has more than doubled since the year before. This was the context in which journalist Lorax B. Horne created This Should Be Housing, an interactive tool that invites members of the public to identify vacant properties around Halifax and ‘pin’ them onto a digital map.
Created in 2021, Horne initially only had ten pins on the map. It has since grown organically and has more than 1,000 data entries of buildings that are vacant and could be converted into housing or shelter.
The map began when Lorne was at a rally for Halifax Mutual Aid, who were distributing stickers marked ‘This Should Be Housing’ to put onto vacant property. “I wondered if people were registering [vacant property] in a physical space, could we do it in a digital space, and keep track of the places in the city that we thought could become housing?” they say.
Today, both the physical stickers and the digital map work in conjunction to pinpoint vacant property around the city of Halifax. Information flows into the digital map when people add a new pin to the database. Each entry must specify who owns the building – for example, is it private property, or is it publicly owned? If public, is it a federal, provincial or municipal building? This was an idea for a feature that came from Halifax Mutual Aid directly. People entering the data then have the option of inputting an address and additional information about the property.
Halifax Mutual Aid has also been able to use the map as a planning tool, Horne adds, identifying spots in the city where they can place solid shelters for those experiencing homelessness.
Why create an online database that the public can contribute to, and what are the challenges with crowdsourcing data?
For Horne, creating a participatory and collaborative digital map that relied on crowdsourced information was important since the inception of the map. It firstly removes pressure from a single individual or organization to gather data, especially since most don’t have the capacity or the resources to manage a database of this size.
Crowdsourcing information also means that the whole community is able to feel involved in tackling the issue of homelessness, much in the spirit of grassroots mutual aid, Horne says.
Politicians have also added data to the map, they add – and in one instance, Liberal MP Darren Fisher even appropriated the This Should Be Housing branding campaign to further his own political statement about providing affordable housing.
Crowdsourcing data doesn’t come without its challenges though, Horne says. “We knew the data wouldn’t be perfect and it wouldn’t be factually correct all of the time. For example, ownership of land changes all the time.” Horne also verifies some of the incoming data themselves using public sources, such as Google Street view or Apple Maps. Another risk of managing a public map is that the database is inevitably open to “junk data”, they add. They have previously had to run through each entry and eliminate the false ones.
Horne generally relies on corrections coming in from local residents to the map’s email address or on social media, and at one point in time, was driving around the city to fact-check the vacant property entries. “I was doing more fact-checking at the start, when it was important to teach people how to use the map by having the most accurate data possible as examples. I probably was spending four or five hours a day on the map, in the first week or two after launch. Now that there are more than 1000 rows of data on the spreadsheet, I only check in one in a while to de-duplicate and clean up known errors, maybe [for] a couple of hours a week.”
And while the map and database have now been running for around 18 months, it isn’t always easy to maintain a consistent flow of new, up-to-date information about vacant properties. “At the start, there was a rush of people contributing. It’s been growing by a few dozen every few weeks.” It needs to be extremely easy for people to enter new information about properties they are seeing around Halifax, Horne adds.
They also need to communicate consistently with people – both those within and outside the mutual aid community – about the map itself, to make sure that the information being entered into the database is up-to-date and relevant. That is why the website for the map itself is now printed onto the physical stickers that Halifax Mutual Aid hands out, which helps spread awareness of the map. “We’ve also participated in some rallies and teach-ins to talk about the map, and spoken to a lot of groups who have been interested in using it for other cities,” Horne says. The code required to build the map has deliberately been left as open-source, so that it can be replicated in other cities.
How can others rely on crowdsourced databases, and what can their impact be on mutual aid networks?
Although Halifax Mutual Aid have been able to use the map to plan temporary settlements, and local politicians have been known to contribute information about vacant properties, it’s difficult to pinpoint whether the map itself has affected housing policy decisions in the city, Horne says.
“It’s not the end of the world – it’s like a community message board or bulletin board, and we aren’t proposing any specific action for the properties,” they add. “It’s sort of a suggestion and a place for imagination.”
Horne has been discussing an additional map feature with Halifax Mutual Aid, which would detail how far these vacant properties are from a public washroom, something which is a “key factor in the success of a campsite,” they say. “Working with people on the ground like Halifax Mutual Aid was really key to building a tool that was actually useful. They were able to give us feedback on the sorts of information that would be helpful to people living outside and the people who needed it most.”
Crucially, the map needs a consistent flow of up-to-date information about vacant properties in order to stay relevant, as well as to hold local housing institutions accountable. In order to maintain that flow of data, a simple interface is vital, as is a system of entering data that requires as little from participants as possible, Horne says.
“Our map was so easy to understand and to contribute to, even if people didn’t have all of the answers or fields filled out [about a particular property],” they say. “That was encouraging to participants. If it’s a big ask, you won’t get a lot of contributors.”
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