About

Civic data, plain language.

We translate Boston's proposed zoning changes into property-specific information every property owner can actually understand.

Who made this

Created by Emily Gamble, a West Roxbury resident who wanted to understand what the city's proposed zoning changes would mean for her neighborhood.

Built by The Last Unicorn, LLC — a studio that builds tools for people who deserve better information.

Independence

This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by the City of Boston, the Boston Planning Department, or any developer, advocacy group, or political campaign.

All analysis is based on publicly available data and the published draft zoning text. We don't have an agenda — we just think people should be able to understand what's being proposed for their properties.

Open source

Every line of code, every calculation, every data source is public. If you think something is wrong, you can check our work — or submit a fix.

View on GitHub

How it works

01

Public data in

We pull parcel boundaries, assessor records, and building data from the City of Boston's open data portal (data.boston.gov).

02

Zoning rules applied

We compare every parcel against both today's zoning code and the proposed draft, computing what would change for each property.

03

Plain language out

The results are translated from legalese into clear, property-specific explanations anyone can understand.

Technology

Hosting

Render

Domain

Cloudflare

Code

GitHub (MIT)

Maps

Mapbox GL

Analytics

Umami (no cookies)

Errors

Sentry

Security

Aikido

Database

PostgreSQL

Public API

All the data on this site is available through a free, public API. No API key required. Build your own tools, run your own analysis, or plug it into your favorite AI.

# Look up a property by GIS ID

GET /api/property/2002226000

# Search by address

GET /api/search?q=156 bellevue

# Street-level aggregate

GET /api/street/bellevue-st

# West Roxbury overview

GET /api/overview

Full endpoint list and response formats are in the README on GitHub. Rate limited to 100 requests/minute for reads.

For AI & Developers

We welcome AI agents, bots, and developers using our data. Our robots.txt and llms.txt files are available at the site root:

/robots.txt/llms.txt

If you build something with this data, we'd love to hear about it — open an issue on GitHub.

Privacy

No cookiesNo trackersNo adsNo personal data collected

We use Umami for basic analytics (page views only) — it's open source and doesn't use cookies or collect personal information. Read our full Privacy Policy.