San Diego Housing Commission

Evari evaluated 28 million anonymous energy consumption records spanning five years from over 480,000 residential housing units in the City of San Diego to extrapolate the number of unoccupied residential units in the city. Following a similar study based in Vancouver, variation in monthly energy usage was used to determine the occupancy status of a housing unit; premises that exhibited extremely low energy usage for six consecutive months or longer were identified as vacant.

Once the number of unoccupied units was identified, cartographic techniques were used to aggregate the findings by relevant geographic boundaries. Evari developed a WebGIS mapping application and published the data generated through the analysis on a webpage created using ArcGIS Online. This allowed non-technical users to access the data and create custom views in any web browser. Working with such a large dataset was a challenge. Performing analysis on the data as a whole took days to run. However, Evari systematically subdivided the data into hundreds of smaller chunks, reducing the processing time to minutes.