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Call for Papers: Re-Using Data to Drive Local Insights

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The goal of Cityscape is to bring high-quality original research on housing and community development issues to scholars, government officials, and practitioners. Cityscape is open to all relevant disciplines, including architecture, consumer research, demography, economics, engineering, ethnography, finance, geography, law, planning, political science, public policy, regional science, sociology, statistics, and urban studies.

Cityscape is published three times a year by the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Call For Papers: Re-Using Data to Drive Local Insights

A Symposium on Using Administrative Data to Guide Housing Policy and Program Design


Purpose: From property tax filings and building permits to home sales and rental listings, masses of data are collected by governments and commercial organizations every day that could inform local housing solutions. By analyzing administrative data, communities can fill knowledge gaps and surface new findings to guide housing policy and program design. Re-using this data is also more cost-effective than gathering original data, and can provide insights faster and with easier replication.

Cityscape is planning a special issue highlighting innovative approaches to using administrative data in local housing policy and program design. The special issue will be published in Spring 2024 with guest editor Amy O’Hara of the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy as part of its Place-Based Indicators Project.

Call for Papers: Cityscape invites authors to share original research, methodological papers or statistical modeling using administrative data to surface housing trends or measure impacts. Papers may also provide case studies of how local communities have re-used administrative data to uncover original insights about community needs and guide housing decisions.

Papers should feature novel uses of existing government and/or commercial databases or unique combinations of multiple datasets such as, but not limited to:

  • Deeds and mortgage records
  • Property tax rolls
  • Home sales and estimated values
  • Rental prices and rental searches
  • Land and building improvement records and permits
  • Code violations and liens
  • Housing inventories
  • Parcel data and building footprints
  • Housing quality surveys
  • Eviction filings
  • Housing subsidies and tax credits
  • Energy assistance programs or energy consumption
  • Environmental data on air quality, water quality, etc.

Submission Guidelines: Interested authors should submit a 300 word abstract describing their proposed paper by Friday, May 5, 2023 to pbicityscape@georgetown.edu.

Authors will be notified whether their paper has been accepted by Monday, May 15, 2023. Full papers are due by Tuesday, August 15, 2023. Papers will not exceed 20 pages--authors will receive additional guidelines upon acceptance --and will be sent for peer review, with comments expected by Friday, September 29, 2023. Revisions based on reviewer comments must be incorporated into final papers by Tuesday, October 31, 2023.