City staff presented an overview of a draft housing production dashboard to the Housing and Land Use Committee on Sept. 30, describing an internal tool intended to centralize project status, unit counts, affordability levels and geographic distribution to support strategic oversight.
Vincent Montgomery, planning manager, said the dashboard is being developed to pull verified data from permitting and entitlement systems, provide interactive filters (tenure type, affordability, council district), visualize production trends and allow exports for council reporting. Staff said they are building version control, staff validation checkpoints and standard operating procedures for data quality.
Luis Rodriguez, community development analyst in the housing division, explained how beta testers were chosen: "We assess internally who had the most familiarity with the software," he said, and noted the team included senior staff from current planning, permits and buildings, and GIS from public works to mirror a state reference tool the city is adapting.
Staff said internal testing will come first; once the tool is public-facing the department plans community training and feedback opportunities so nontechnical users can access and use the dashboard. A community participant offered to help disseminate messages and training materials after public deployment.
Committee members asked for logs to show permitting timeline start-to-finish so the dashboard can highlight processing time and bottlenecks. Staff agreed to incorporate committee feedback as they refine the prototype and to include community-facing training when the public release is scheduled.