Research & Publications

Democratic participation is unequally distributed because civic information is unequally accessible. Every week, local governments make decisions that shape housing affordability, transportation, public safety, climate resilience, disability services, childcare, and public health. While these decisions are technically public, they are rarely understandable to the people most affected by them. Residents with fewer resources—working parents, renters, immigrants, people with disabilities, young adults, and those unfamiliar with legal or bureaucratic language—often cannot afford the time or expertise required to interpret legislation before decisions are made. As a result, public participation disproportionately reflects organizations and individuals who already possess the time, knowledge, and relationships to navigate government. This creates a feedback loop where...

Existing tools for understanding economic wellbeing at fine spatial resolution are constrained by fundamental survey design limits. Traditional small area estimation methods become statistically unreliable below the block group level, carry high compliance overhead, and can take years to reflect ground conditions. This project developed a geo-temporal Earth observation and machine learning pipeline to predict average material wealth at the 1km grid level—framed as a gap measure between absolute income and relative cost of living—enabling program targeting, infrastructure planning, disaster preparedness, and causal analysis of policy treatment effects at the neighborhood level. The pipeline proceeded through complete data preparation phases in R and Python, with Google Earth Engine satellite image...