Data Driven Decision Making

Over the last three years, the community has made excellent progress on understanding rental house challenges.  See Councillors Report to the Community.

We’ve worked with multiple departments in the City, and over the past six months, residents believe they are seeing positive changes – BUT – we have a shortage of credible DATA to support what we think is happening.

To make good decisions (i.e.: do we hire more by-law enforcement staff, do we change by-laws, do we increase fines, do we have other city departments help enforce or ??),  we must be able to secure good data to analyze.

• To get good data, we must ensure we REPORT all infractions – and we must learn how to properly report infractions.
• Lack of reporting or inadequate reporting is the #1 reason for lack of enforcement.

The Fort Richmond-University Heights Neighbourhood Association, in partnership with myself and various City departments, are now tracking ALL requests for service, by law infractions and more related to illegal rooming houses .  City staff are making a concerted effort to work with the Zoning, Community Services and Fire Inspection departments to coordinate efforts. New process, data collection  and reporting systems have been put in place.  This new approach to collecting data, will enable us to better analyze and make better informed decisions.

We will now be able to report back to the community with regular updates on:

• How many requests there are to investigate suspected illegal rooming houses,
• How many investigations occurred or are in progress,
• How many houses were evacuated and shut down,
• And more.

BUT – the ONLY WAY we will have this information, is if people properly report infractions.

Twitter:  https://janicelukes.ca/?p=10639