For More Questions Contact @Robb Herndon @Ale
This project was completed in conjunction with the Opportunity Project (TOP), a program of the Census Open Innovation Labs in the U.S. Census Bureau. This program helps companies, non-profits, and universities turn federal open data into new technologies that solve real-world problems for people across the country. This year, the program’s problem statement is focused on grant funding available through the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“The Federal Government awards over $1.5 trillion in Federal contracts and financial assistance each year—and sometimes much more in times of crisis. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), enacted in November 2021, represents a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness with $1.2 trillion in appropriations funding for over 375 programs, many of which are competitive grant programs that jurisdictions must apply for. Unfortunately, many historic barriers exist to accessing financial assistance, especially for lower-resourced communities … This reinforces existing inequities as higher-resourced communities are more successful in accessing these grant opportunities while lower-resourced communities are left behind.”
The specific challenge issued by the TOP program was to build “Tech tools that customize the delivery of relevant program opportunities to lower-resourced community leaders and help them prepare and plan for upcoming application deadlines and referrals for technical assistance could help mitigate many of these barriers.”
After much discussion and research, our team decided to narrow our focus to a specific issue area addressed in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law - the prevalence of lead pipes in the drinking water systems of the United States.
about Hazel Crest study & how performed
roughly 13,000 residents . Hazel Crest has a predominantly
Black/African-American population (~88%).
For this project we started with two datasets. The first dataset was from the Cook County Census report, and included demographic and infrastructure data for all of Cook County, Illinois, including the city of Hazel Crest. The second dataset was pulled from a website that reported the findings of a study on lead in water service lines in Hazel Crest, and included some demographic and infrastructure data for all homes in Hazel Crest, along with the predicted likelihood of the presence of lead in the pipes of each home based on the study completed by the city’s Metropolitan Planning Council. When we first obtained it, we believed that it was the original dataset used to formulate predictions in this study. However, upon further examination we discerned that this dataset was auto-generated from the interactive built to display the features considered and the lead probabilities predicted in the study. We used these two datasets because Hazel Crest had conducted a similar analysis to what we want to accomplish in this project, and the census data provided important address-specific information which we hoped to use to generate predictions on the presence of lead in specific homes.
Open the links below to view data sources: