Following the passage of Int.-1572B in 2021, which requires a racial impact study to be conducted prior to most rezonings in New York City, the Equitable Development Data Explorer (EDDE) was created to support the advancement of the City’s fair housing and equitable development. The EDDE analyzes the demographic, social, economic, and housing conditions of every community in NYC.
Accessible data is useful in helping to push elected officials to advance equity by improving our communities outside of land use changes. Additionally, the information from the Equitable Development Data Explorer allows advocates and community members to proactively address the needs of neighborhoods by responding to land use or planning proposals, as well as determining whether or not new development projects will meet community needs. Read more in our January 2023 blog, ANHD’s Equitable Development Data Explorer Training Modules.
ANHD is fighting to create fair and affordable housing throughout New York City that prioritizes those most in need and least served. Our trainings will help communities learn how to use these new resources to understand existing needs of their neighborhood and see how they compare to other parts of the city. Is your neighborhood being served as well as other neighborhoods? Are you lacking the resources you need?
Module Overview - Click here to access the full module playlist.
Module 1: Introduction and Background on the EDDE and Why It Matters
Module 2: EDDE Basics
Module 3: My District
Module 4: Finding Data for My Community District – Community Data View
Module 5: Understanding Displacement in Your Neighborhood – Displacement Risk Index and Map (DRI/DRM
Module 6: Understanding the Data as a Community with Our Guiding Questions
Module 7: Data Analysis
A text-only guide for the modules is available here.
In these video modules, we use the case study of Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in northern Queens to walk through the Equitable Development Data Explorer’s (EDDE) Community Data view and Displacement Risk Map (DRM).
We also use a set of guiding questions to work with the EDDE and provide an example of how to learn about your community with the data tools available. Our guiding questions that you will see us answering for Jackson Heights in the modules are:
Which of my neighbors are most at risk of being pushed out of our neighborhood?
What is the financial situation for the majority of my neighbors (not the average)?
What are some assets and resources in the neighborhood that most of my neighbors have access to?
Welcome to ANHD’s training modules on the Equitable Development Data Explorer (EDDE)! The EDDE was developed by the Departments of City Planning and Housing Preservation & Development, but came out of the work of the Racial Impact Study Coalition (RISC) to demand racial equity and the furthering of fair housing in land use actions. Module 1 provides an overview of the reasons why advocates pushed for the creation of the EDDE, the city law that was passed to require its creation, and what makes the EDDE and its other tools helpful in addressing urgent local housing and displacement issues.
In Module 2, you’ll learn about the design of the EDDE website, how to maneuver the map views, and how to learn more about how the Departments of City Planning and Housing Preservation & Development decided on what data to include in the tool. This will help you get comfortable with the initial website before diving into research about your community.
Module 3 provides you with steps for identifying your community district within the EDDE and introduces you to how the website represents information about your district once you’ve found it. We practice with the case of Jackson Heights in this video, but we encourage you to practice with your own community district or a district that you work in to bring this a little closer to home!
In Module 4, we take a deep dive into the data that is available from the tables in the Community Data view once you select your community district (or borough, if you’re looking at that level). Continuing with our case of Jackson Heights, we try to look through the data available to answer some of our guiding questions as a model for how you can think of the story of your community that is told by the data in the EDDE.
In Module 5, we zoom into the neighborhood level to understand the risk that households face of being displaced because of population, housing, and market trends (with race strongly considered as a component across these factors). We provide a guide for moving through the EDDE’s Displacement Risk Map (DRM) as well as explain the Displacement Risk Index (DRI) that it is built from.
Module 6 takes some of the major findings that we had about our case of Jackson Heights and compiles them to help answer our guiding questions from the perspective of a community member or organizer trying to explain the situation of housing and quality of life in the area. This is not the perfect or “right” way of looking at the data, but one way of many that you can use to think about using the data to answer difficult questions about your neighborhood, district, or borough.
In Module 7, we provide a quick step-by-step guide of how to download and look at the data that is available from the EDDE and DRM. If you are someone excited about doing quantitative data analysis, this gives you the option to dive a little deeper and start to do some comparative analysis between different community districts or different geographic levels in the City.
Note: There is no activity for Module 7.
ANHD is grateful to all who contributed to the creation of the Equitable Development Data Explorer and Displacement Risk Map, especially the Racial Impact Study Coalition and Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams. ANHD also thanks Alex Fennell, former ANHD Senior Political Organizer, and Abdul-Razak Zachariah, 2022-2023 ANHD Land Use Justice Intern for helping establish these initial training modules for land use justice advocates across New York City.