Drawing Fair Lines: Open-Source Neighborhood Delineation for the Future of Valuation
Presentation Category
Modeling and Valuation
General Session Description
Neighborhoods remain the foundation of valuation. They shape how markets are modeled, how assessments are defended, and how taxpayers perceive fairness. Yet for most jurisdictions, neighborhood boundaries are still drawn manually, often relying on local knowledge and historical precedent. The result is uneven, subjective, and difficult to explain to the public. New advances in GIS and data science make it possible to do better. With algorithmic community detection methods, assessors can automatically generate neighborhoods that reflect how markets actually behave. Combined with open data sources like OpenStreetMap and free tools such as QGIS and GeoPandas, these techniques allow valuation professionals to enrich parcels, detect meaningful clusters, and build consistent, reproducible neighborhood layers.
Start Date
3-31-2026 10:30 AM
End Date
3-31-2026 12:00 PM
Drawing Fair Lines: Open-Source Neighborhood Delineation for the Future of Valuation
Neighborhoods remain the foundation of valuation. They shape how markets are modeled, how assessments are defended, and how taxpayers perceive fairness. Yet for most jurisdictions, neighborhood boundaries are still drawn manually, often relying on local knowledge and historical precedent. The result is uneven, subjective, and difficult to explain to the public. New advances in GIS and data science make it possible to do better. With algorithmic community detection methods, assessors can automatically generate neighborhoods that reflect how markets actually behave. Combined with open data sources like OpenStreetMap and free tools such as QGIS and GeoPandas, these techniques allow valuation professionals to enrich parcels, detect meaningful clusters, and build consistent, reproducible neighborhood layers.