At present, housing developers are deterred from engaging in inclusionary housing development plans, owing to barriers in interpreting the City of San Jose’s Inclusionary Housing Ordinance (Chapter 5.08) and other relevant regulations. Importantly, one of the determinative steps in the process of building new inclusionary housing developments in San José is to complete a regulatory compliance plan explaining how the proposed development complies with the City of San José inclusionary housing regulations. These regulations are highly complex, allowing for multiple overlapping avenues to compliance. Housing developers writing compliance plans are required to fill lengthy PDF forms and frequently make mistakes that must be manually detected and corrected, requiring significant time and effort from both housing developers and city staff.

Our project seeks to (1) encode sections of the City of San José’s inclusionary housing regulations in a form amenable to computational analysis and (2) develop an interface with which to provide the relevant data on a particular housing development. Together, these will enable automatic compliance checking and verification of housing development plans.

Project Leads:
Megan Ma
Stephen Caines
Will O’Hanley