2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

64 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
to scores of community organizations on a wide range of communityrelated
data projects. After the founding of this program, CURA was
invited to join NNIP. 9
Having firmly established its neighborhood-level GIS bona fides
with the MNIS project, CURA has since collaborated on hundreds of
community data projects and continues to broaden the data-sharing
environment in the Twin Cities region. An additional effort—the M3D
project—underscores CURA’s role as a proponent of expanding the use
of GIS tools and incorporating previously unreleased or inaccessible
government data holdings into its work.
Minnesota-3D
When M3D was initiated in 2004, the Twin Cities region had been experiencing
a widening spatial mismatch between where people lived and
where people worked, a problem particularly pronounced in areas where
populations of color resided. CURA recognized this problem and partnered
with several government and nonprofit agencies to create M3D, a
web-based GIS assessment tool that provides a comprehensive snapshot
of the region’s housing and labor markets, commuting patterns, transportation
networks, affordable-housing locations, and development
opportunities. 10 CURA and its partners created this application so that
planners, developers, businesses, and the public could have easy access to
the information they needed to make informed policy, investment, and
infrastructure decisions.
The M3D project stands out for two reasons. First, the database
synthesized a huge catalog of datasets—more than 90, in fact, from
sources ranging from regional and municipal agencies to nonprofits.
Second, it empowered a wide spectrum of users to access this trove
of information with nothing more than a personal computer and an
Internet connection.
M3D doesn’t simply incorporate the foundational demographic information
available through the US Census; it ties that information to literally
scores of other datasets—data that CURA, from its centralized role
in the project, helped acquire. To illustrate the benefits of using this tool,
take the relatively simple example of a neighborhood organization in
Saint Paul seeking to enhance transportation options for its residents.
The neighborhood could quickly map the work locations of its residents,
overlay bus routes, and see at a glance where transit service was lacking.