There is significant concern about the current state of the environment in the United States, particularly related to housing conditions. How can local governments come up with the kind of data that will help residents understand the situation in their community?

With help from the “Local Data for Equitable Communities Initiative”, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, communities now have tools they can use to report environmental issues that affect the living conditions in their homes and neighborhoods.

In an October 20 blog post on the initiative website, Nona Mitchell Richardson, who specializes in social change communications, reported that “Across the country, communities are generating their own local data to document environmental conditions they experience daily. They are measuring air quality inside homes, tracking water outages and safety concerns, mapping extreme heat block by block, and documenting where failing infrastructure creates health and environmental risks.”

As Richardson explains, “measuring conditions where people actually live can provide information that broader environmental data may not capture. It can help connect residents' experiences to evidence about when, where, and how environmental exposure is occurring”.

One example cited comes from Larimer County, Colorado. Residents there have been worried about water quality, low water pressure and recurring outages.

In response, according to the report, The Family Center/LaFamilia, an initiative grantee, “is working with resident leaders from 12 mobile home communities and the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment to develop a bilingual water quality and access reporting tool. 

“With the tool, residents will document water outages, water-quality incidents, their perceptions of water safety, and their experiences trying to resolve previous complaints.

The project team will analyze the information and develop recommendations for improving how water deficiencies are reported and how policies and infrastructure respond to them.”

When findings are in, they will be shared with residents as well as the local governments themselves. “The goal is to provide timely, community-generated evidence that can inform policy, programs, and infrastructure improvements while giving residents better tools for documenting problems they experience.”

As the blog post concludes, projects like this “demonstrate the value of locally generated data. They can reveal conditions that other datasets may overlook, add context that numbers alone cannot provide, and create a clearer picture of how environmental hazards affect people at the household and neighborhood levels. 

“Valuing lived expertise and pairing it with local data collection empowers communities and their partners to uncover patterns that might otherwise be missed, and build the evidence needed to press for changes in policies, public investments, and infrastructure.”

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