Explainer on Business Improvement Districts (BID) in New York City.

Have you ever heard of a Business Improvement District (BID)? As a resident of New York and a shopper, do you know what a BID does, why it exists and how it changes a neighborhood? If you were a shop-owner, would you want to be part of one or not? There are 67 of them in New York City, investing close to 100 million dollars annually into programs and services, and they shape our experiences in this city more than you would expect.

In Jackson Heights, a proposed bid has drawn controversy. Marty Kirchener, an activist with Roosevelt Avenue Community Alliance, is against it, arguing that it will drive up prices and irrevocably change the Latino roots of the neighborhood. He says, “this is what BID is about: replacing one population, a working class immigrant population, with an urban professional population looking for new areas to find more affordable housing than they can find in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

Marty rails against the way BIDs change the public spaces of neighborhoods, moving them into the private sphere. Is there truth in what Marty says? BID supporters counter that it cleans up neighborhoods, provides a better shopping experience for customers and brings profits to shop-owners – a win-win. Can this be shown through data?

This project proposes to decode what a Business Improvement District in New York means and how it actually changes a neighborhood – for better or for worse.

1. The first step will be to make a map that shows where the BIDS are located and which businesses are a part of them (better than this one ).

2. Then, to look at BIDs over time- when were these BIDS established? Was there a time when creating BIDS ramped up? How have the neighborhoods changed since? Have they changed differently than the neighborhoods without BIDs?

3. Compare budgets of BIDS – categorized from under $25,000 to above $5 million. How much do shop-owners have to pay and what do they get in return? What are the BIDs spending money on? How much does the city subsidize the BIDs? Are some more subsidized than others?

4. Compare what BIDs pay for that overlaps with the city – such as sanitation and security. Many argue that taxes already pay for this - shoulnd't the city be taking care of it? How much more are they supplementing to what the city already pays?

For the human part of this story, I will do a deep dive into a couple different areas that have BIDs (probably 1 in established Manhattan, 1 in gentrifying Brooklyn, 1 in a far-away area, like the Bronx or East Brooklyn) and use Jackson Heights, an area that has been in the process of deciding if it wants to create a BID or not. I’d like to include video profiles of shop owners and shoppers for this.

The data I can get might be a bit complicated. This NYC.gov website has listings of each BID and some basic info like their “assessment” and the year it was created. But then each BID has it’s own personal website with more specific info, like listings of the companies, sometimes financial reports etc. Each BID has their files in their own format, so this will be a big project in learning how to compile and clean different data. I will also learn how to make an interactive map and various graphs.

This is newsworthy because it's a different angle on the gentrifaction/city changing topic many people like to follow. I could pitch this to any New York centric publication: NY Times, NY Magazine, DNA Info, Metro, WNYC etc.

Visualization of Migration in Europe

This project proposes to visualize the unprecedented influx of immigrants/migrants into the EU over the past 23 years and to look at how of the Dublin regulations fuctions. (the Dublin regulations are supposed to regulate asylum applications between member states). The EU is a particularly interesting case because, while the 28-country bloc has become increasingly integrated and has dismantled internal borders, each country has very different policies, experiences and problems in dealing with new migrants and asylum seekers from outside the EU.

I’ve never seen anything that cohesively brings together different aspects of Europe’s changing multicultural demographics and diverse policies, and the issues that arise because it is a bordered entity without internal borders, yet it is not a unified federation with the same laws.

This is especially newsworthy because a record number of migrants and refugees arrived to Italy on boats this summer (over 100,000). For the past year, Italy’s Navy has been running a humanitarian rescue operation to save these migrants. Now that the situation has reached such a crisis, the EU is implementing a new border control system in the area, taking over from Italy’s Navy on November 1st. Many wonder if this is a frim step towards unifying Europe's immigration policy

But the problem is not just about the border controls – this project seeks to add to the story by integrating data on what happens once migrants are inside the E.U.

The Dublin regulations are supposed to streamline the asylum process: each migrant is fingerprinted in the first country he/she arrives and that country is responsible for them. Of course, this puts the border countries (Italy, Greece, Spain) at a big disadvantage in handling the requests. Member countries can also request to transfer migrants to other countries, but it seems this doesn’t happen very often. Additionally, different countries have different asylum policies – ex: Germany and Sweden will provide housing and food for refugees, but Italy doesn’t.

It will be useful to look at: where are new immigrants to the area coming from and where are they moving? Which countries process the most asylum seekers? How often do EU countries transfer asylum seekers among themselves? Can we quantify how much burden each country is sharing?

I will use UN data of foreign born population in each country (which they call “migrant stock” ) from 1990 and 2013 to make a map visualizing the change. I’m thinking something like you can click on “Senegal” and “1990” to see how many are in each country, and then click on 2013 and see how much it has grown. Even using something like Circos. It could be interesting, to map out where people came from and where they went. This side of it is more to visualize the magnitude of the change.

Then there could be a separate map showing where asylum seekers are landing (and how many), where they are processed and how they are moving within Europe, based on Dublin Regulation data.

Then there could be little pop-ups that you click on to find out what policies each country has for migrants and asylum seekers.

This could be published in a Europe-centric publication like The Guardian data blog, BBC, EuroNews or Linkiesta

Thought Experiment on Fancy Cocktails in New York

Creative cocktails are about to hit a bubble – New York’s diners have been increasingly enticed by fancy concoctions that use exotic-sounding ingredients like elderflower liquer, jalapeño infused tequila, or black walnut bitters. But NY Times restaurant critic Pete Wells says the hype is getting to be overblown – more and more of those crazy-ingredient-heavy cocktails are overpriced and simply taste bad.

This project would take a shot at codifying the crazy-cocktail trend and investigate how customers might be fooled by it. It would try to answer: what are the most popular ingredients and cocktail trends? Theoretically, what would it cost to make these cocktails at home?

I’ll take a list of 50 top restaurants and scrape their cocktail menus as best as possible to make tables of ingredients, prices and neighborhood. I’ll call them to ask what their most popular cocktails are as well.

Then, using estimates of prices of the ingredients, I will try to figure out which ones offer the best bang for your buck and try to identify cocktail trends that are interesting– for example, if “black walnut bitters” are a one-off unique thing, or if it’s a trend sweeping the cocktail world, and why? Ideally there will be some kind of trend that shows the restaurants are finding new ways to cheat you – like maybe a drink featuring Vodka with rosemary and lemon is dirt-cheap to make, but restaurants have made it sound fancy and they charge $16 (I’m thinking of the current café trend of “smashed avocado toast” – you know that’s gotta cost nothing to make but it sounds really exciting and they charge $8.)

I think this also has the potential to use funny and cute graphics, like it could be categorized by types of cocktail (highball, martini etc) with pictures of the type of glass.

There won’t really be a human part except I could write a funny first person article of my experiences with good and bad cocktails.

This could be pitched to any New York publication - NY times, NY Mag, Time Out NY etc (I think Bedford and Bowery would definitely take it if I switched it to focus on the neighborhoods they cover)