City officials told the Committee on Housing, Homelessness and Parks on Sept. 24, 2025, that they are building a consolidated, searchable database of city-owned properties and have identified a first set of 11 properties to pursue for affordable housing development.

Kevin O'Shea, director designee for the Department of Housing and Land Management, said the department is assembling an inventory required by the city charter and that the work will centralize records now scattered across multiple systems. Kira Chucham, the mayor’s chief data officer, described a planned central data repository that will ingest departmental systems, GIS layers and external sources for validation and public-facing dashboards.

"This will be a first opportunity where we'll give DHLM an opportunity to actually manage their own data," Chucham said, describing a workflow that includes data staging, cleansing, validation and web-enabled dashboards. Chucham said two new budgeted data positions — a data scientist and a data governance analyst — were being filled and that software licensing to integrate sources had been funded.

O'Shea told the committee that the administration has identified 11 properties it considers suitable for development and has issued requests for qualifications for eight of those parcels, selecting seven development partners so far. He said the 11 properties, if developed as envisioned, "would support more than 2,500 units of affordable housing." The department plans additional procurement rounds and a Center for Public Enterprise engagement in October to explore financing alternatives beyond low-income housing tax credits.

Council members pressed for interim information while the repository is developed. Chair Waters asked if a "crude list" could be produced sooner than the projected go-live of May 2026; Chucham and O'Shea said departments already maintain partial records and that the data-integration work would allow early sharing of counts and prototypes as sources are connected. Chucham described differences among departmental systems and said the project includes validation steps to reconcile mismatched records.

Committee members and O'Shea discussed specific parcels and next steps. O'Shea said the administration would continue negotiating development contracts and ground leases with selected partners and planned outreach to council members before launching additional procurement on the remaining sites. The committee requested interim reports and earlier access to aggregated lists so council members can identify district parcels for housing development.

No formal action was taken; the briefing was accepted and the administration agreed to provide ongoing updates and an interim draft of the inventory as data sources are consolidated.