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Boston Zoning Board of Appeal Decisions Archive


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Since early 2021 Zoning data is available on data.boston.gov

The downloads below contain a compiled archive of Boston Zoning Board of Appeal (ZBA) Decisions derived from the ZBA site. The archive was last updated on 11/21/19 and currently contains over 3,000 cases. For more information about this archive continue reading below or contact nattaylor@gmail.com.

Download Decisions

Download Boston ZBA zoning decisions formatted as a spreadsheet.

Download as CSV Open as Google Doc Open as Web Page

Download Cases

Download Boston ZBA zoning cases formatted as a collection of documents.

Download as JSON Download as CSV Open as Google Doc

ZBA Trends

About the Archive

The archive was created because the Boston ZBA offers no reports or tabular data, so it is very tedious and error prone to aggregate decisions and observe trends.

The source of the decisions data is the decisions page. The methodology for compiling the decisions, which you can inspect in the source code, is to parse the HTML published by the ZBA then fix typos and other irregularities and translate it into a table.

The source of the cases archive is the minutes page. The methodology for compiling the cases, which you can inspect in the source code, is to convert the Minutes PDFs to HTML, then fix typos and structure each case into a little “document” with properties like purpose, article(s), discussion, testimony and vote. NOTE: In some cases, without indication, properties have been normalized (e.g. “Timuthy” corrected to “Timothy”; “John Smith, Esq.” normalized to “John Smith”) The archive implements the Boston Zoning Appeal Archive Specification v1.0.

If you have questions about the archive, please contact Nat Taylor <nattaylor@gmail.com>

License

Copyright 2019 Nat Taylor

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this data, to deal in the data without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the data, and to permit persons to whom the data is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Data.

THE DATA IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OR GUARANTEES OF ACCURACY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.