 Hi Ben, thanks for joining me to discuss your map that is related to their recent reappraisal by the city. It looks like the city did estimate the fair market value of all properties in Burlington and the last time it was done it was in 2005. Yeah and and I can just to give a quick background at the end of one of my work days um uh you know I'm a PhD student at the University of Vermont, I'm working on various things and I check my email near the end of the day and Front Porch Forum comes up and I'm a very avid reader of Front Porch Forum and I've been seeing over the last couple days a lot of different people who are very concerned about the reappraisal process and so one of them said I would love to see a map procrastinating a little bit for about an hour and a half to make a little tool to help folks visualize. I need you to let me share my screen. So I linked two different data sets and that's a you know just a pretty common thing to do and so I started with the the city had just a spreadsheet on their website. I can bring up the URL or you can we can share that in a moment and then I linked that with the Vermont uh the state of Vermont has a a data set that is a map of every parcel in the state of Vermont and so I obviously only needed the ones in Burlington so I filtered them them down and then I just linked the records between those those two um and so the the and so I use that also to create a percent increase in assessment uh value for each one and then made this this little uh pretty simple interactive map that allows you to so you can see right here the color bar just purple the to yellow yellow the highest and it's a little bit uh truncated because there are some properties that are that are below zero and are some properties that are much higher than 200 percent. One of the limitations of this is I don't have from this data set I can't tell the difference between somewhere where the property assessment went up because a new building was built there I believe you know down at Cambrian Rise the assessment on some of those parcels went up by a lot because they built an enormous apartment building so one one of the big concerns that motivated this map or that people were were talking about was the question of whether assessments were rising more in the old north end than in other parts of town there are a lot of people who are concerned who feel like the old north end is a little bit of a gentrification front right that the housing prices might be increasing faster and that people feel a little bit squeezed and like they might be be pushed out so that's one of the reasons why people were were asking for this um and and you can see here we are in the old north end um and there are few properties that have increased increased in lot in value but if we reset doesn't seem to be a huge there's no big color trend around the city the one big thing I mean it's it's probably the biggest parcel on this map is the the Burlington Country Club and it is one of the few properties that actually if you look at the um percent change it's it actually decreased in its assessment and that's an interesting uh so I'm just not not sure why that happened and and that is um certainly a very interesting thing because it's a very I remember somebody had a a piece about this or I was in a conversation with somebody about how um you know there's a property across the street from the country club that's you know 120th or 130th the size of it that's assessed that only a quarter of the value or something like that because it's you know it's not zoned to build a bunch of houses on um and that gets reflected in its assessment and that's certainly um it's interesting to have somebody pay a lot more money for a quarter acre of yard um proportionately than than a the country club might pay I don't know how large that parcel is but it's you know dozens and dozens of acres but the person who lives across the street who has a small yard is paying much more per square foot in property taxes one of the cool things about this is um basically anybody else who knows how to uh write computer code in the programming language python which is one of the most popular ones it's one of the easiest to learn it's the one I know because it's one of the easiest to learn um can actually uh just download all the all the work that I have and could take this figure and and make their own version of it they could could figure out how to make it a little bit easier to see or they could add features or what not um just by uh it's what I have is publicly posted on the web yeah tell me a little bit about so you created this in a tool called bouquet is it correct yeah I believe that's how you pronounce it it's uh what's it's a um it's a programming or a a library or a package that you use within the the language python to create these kind of things um and it creates it as a little um basically portable file such that I can just send this this this little file to anybody and they can open it on their computer and and do all all these things or also interact with the um with the the figure in all the way in all the functionality so that I put into it uh just on there it just it moves around and all those functionalities uh stay with it well like I said before um the the code for this is available on uh this web website github where millions of people around the world will just share their different programming uh projects so anybody if anybody knows any python who's listen watching this uh or if anybody has a has a kid who's into programming they can just uh come and and look at it I can not provide that link and basically you have a bunch of sort of functions that help to uh construct the data there's um I merge together the two different data sources which are the spreadsheet from the city and this set of these are the parcels and then you have a little bit of of code that just kind of builds this figure and then it just gets saved as a little file and it's uh like I said it doesn't mean anything to anybody who hasn't um uh who who has never done any computer programming before but it's among people who who have it's fairly simple and it's hopefully hopefully easy to understand the thing about um computer code is sometimes when you uh don't understand it it's because somebody else actually wrote it poorly well thanks Ben um super helpful good to meet you and appreciate you taking the time to chat with us thanks