Neighborhood Explorer

DYCD's Neighborhood Strategies Unit asked for an interactive tool to centralize the community-level data it relies on — demographics, poverty, crime trends, health indicators, community needs, and its own program locations — which today is scattered across separate systems and hampers coordinated planning. The desired outcome was a centralized, user-friendly platform with updated neighborhood profiles for all Neighborhood Development Areas (NDAs) and police precincts, combining indicators, assets, and DYCD program locations for strategic decision-making.

Sponsor: Tarsha Black, Citywide & Faith-Based Borough Manager · NYC DYCD

Neighborhood Explorer combines DYCD's 41 Neighborhood Development Areas and NYC's 78 police precincts with DYCD's program-site footprint, contract funding, Census demographics, poverty indicators, precinct crime data, and community health indicators in one browsable map. A visitor picks an indicator family, switches between NDA and precinct geographies on a choropleth, filters DYCD program-site pins with contract-dollar rollups, opens a neighborhood profile, and exports the underlying data as CSV — replacing a manual stitch across DYCD site lists, contract tables, Census downloads, NYPD data, and health profiles.

• Explorer · /neighborhoods
• Precincts · /neighborhoods/precincts
• Compare · /neighborhoods/compare
• Methodology · /neighborhoods/methodology

• DYCD Program Sites — 28,830 rows; DYCD Contracts — 12,208 rows
• 41 NDA boundaries; 78 police precinct boundaries
• ACS 5-Year 2020-2024 — 41,886 tract/variable rows
• NYPD complaints (YTD + historic) — 133,114 + 137,460 raw rows, aggregated to precinct/year
• CDC PLACES — 89,238 rows; DOHMH Community Health Profiles — 4,538 rows
• NYCgov Poverty Measure — 12 borough rows
• 19 public sources in total

Thirteen ingest scripts and five derivation passes pull from Socrata, Census, CDC, and nyc.gov sources into Neon Postgres (`nyc.neighborhoods_*`), and Next.js server components render the live MapLibre choropleth pages directly from that data on every request. There's no LLM or predictive model in this product.

Live verification rated this product TRUSTWORTHY with two minor, non-blocking issues: 12 of 15 done-when criteria passed outright, one (citywide ACS reconciliation) is honestly labeled Pending, and 6 of 6 spot-checked citations matched their authoritative sources exactly.

• DYCD's internal community-needs assessments and participant-level program data — agency-only, not ingested
• The crosswalk between Census tract/NTA/community-district geographies and NDA borders is a documented approximation, not exact
• "Community assets" beyond DYCD's own sites (faith institutions, CBO inventory) is a roadmap item, not yet built