IDIES affiliate and JHU mathematician Tamas Budavari was recently featured in the Atlantic’s CityLab blog detailing his research to help predict housing abandonment in the city of Baltimore. From Citylab, “Budavari and Phil Garboden, a doctoral student in sociology and applied math, are working on a statistical tool to predict abandonment. They’re combining publicly available data with GIS technology to create a database of the city’s housing stock. This will serve as a base to do high-level statistical analyses that can help officials make better, data-driven evaluations of current and future interventions.”

“Just like how galaxies cluster in the universe, houses also cluster in the city,” Budavari told CityLab. “So if you have a vacant house in a given place, there’s a higher probability of finding other ones next to it.” Professor Budavari and Garboden are also looking to expand to other cities as well, already submitting grants for funding to apply their research methods to New Orleans and Kansas City as well. Their partnership with Baltimore was through Hopkins’ 21st Century Cities program, which is accepting new grant applications through March 24.

Credit to Technical.ly for their write up on Professor Budavari’s Citylab article.