Stefanie Costa Leabo: Using Open Data to Fix Boston’s Short-Term Rental Woes

Stefanie Costa Leabo, Chief Data Officer for the City of Boston,
shares how her team led an open data project to help manage the
impact companies like AirBnB are having on the city’s property
rental market

Short-term rental companies including AirBnB have transformed
housing markets across the globe. But while many tourists and
property owners have benefited from these services, they have
also made life harder for long-term renters in some parts of the
world.


As Stefanie Costa Leabo, Chief Data Officer for the City of
Boston, reveals in this week’s episode of the Business of Data
podcast, her team is playing a key role in managing this
phenomenon in the city.


“In certain parts of the city, properties were being brought up
by large developers and they were being run as almost de facto
hotels,” Leabo recalls. “[That’s] problematic for a couple of
reasons. One is that there’s a reason that hotels are regulated
and have to hold certain licenses.”


“There are health and safety standards that we apply to
businesses and those regulations are there for a reason,” she
continues. “The second issue is that it was changing the
character of neighborhoods and taking long-term housing out of
the housing market.”


The city decided it needed to find the right balance between
allowing some to generate an income from their spare rooms or
properties and ensuring long-term property is available to rent
for its residents.


So, it decided to set new regulations for short-term renters in
2018. Then, it enlisted Leabo and her team to deliver an
ambitious open data project to assist with the enforcement of
these new rules.
An Open Dataset for the Boston Property Market

Involving Boston’s data office in this project from the outset
was pivotal to its success. Leabo’s team collaborated with other
departments to evaluate what impact short-term rentals were
having on Boston’s housing market. Then, it created a new open
data portal that the legislation mandated.


“The first thing we needed to do was create a new datasetfrom
scratch that would determine the eligibility of every single
residential housing unit in the entire city,” Leabo says. “There
were three different types of license. So, we had to be able to
tell, ‘Is this unit eligible for each different type?’”


“We were brought in from day one and were able to be part of the
policy discussion, be part of the implementation and enforcement
team”
Stefanie Costa Leabo, Chief Data Officer, City of Boston

This project involved gathering data from at least six city
departments including inspectional services, public works and
non-emergency services hotline 311. These were then merged to
create a unified short-term rental eligibility dataset.


“Many of these data sources had never been joined before,” Leabo
notes. “At least, not at such scale.”


“The biggest challenge, that we both saw coming but also
surprised us at times, was data quality,” she adds. “[When]
working with data that is being managed by six or seven different
departments, you have different levels of data quality [and]
different levels of data standards, in some cases.