Omar De La Riva, Renia Kagkou
Use of Craigslist Data to understand rental conditions for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council
Over the past two years, the MAPC has collected data on 1.95 million rental listings in Massachusetts to better understand housing affordability and spatial variation in rental prices in the Boston Metropolitan area. Recognizing and predicting these patterns can help the MAPC work with partner cities to propose effective policy that preserves affordability in communities throughout the region.
Because the listing information was collected through a scraping process on websites such as Craigslist and PadMapper, the data includes listings that are duplicates and/or improperly geolocated. Drawing meaningful relationships and conclusions from this dataset, then, can be hindered by the excess, and often incomplete, information.
Renia Kagkou 