Every dataset, dated and sourced

Every Boston Zoning Board of Appeal case we could recover from the City's published decision documents and appeal tracker, feature-extracted from the decision text.

• Caveat One row per appeal: the City's raw export contains dash/no-dash twin rows for the same case number; twins are merged at load (audit 2026-07-24), so this count is lower — and more honest — than the raw export's.
• Caveat Withdrawn and void appeals are excluded from the decided count and the approval rate.

The City's milestone-by-milestone record for every ZBA appeal, mirrored from data.boston.gov. Powers application status, upcoming hearings, and statutory-clock features.

• Caveat Hearings are scheduled through 2026-10-22.
• Caveat The tracker is the City's own live record of appeal milestones (submitted, received, hearing, decision, closed); we mirror it daily and keep one row per appeal number.

A decision date for each ZBA case, recovered from the decision documents and the City tracker so every outcome can be placed in time.

• Caveat Dates are extracted from the decision-document text (OCR) and the City tracker; each carries its extraction source.

Locally archived City decision PDFs, served per case from decision search and case packets.

• Caveat The City publishes decisions as one batch PDF per filing day, so each file contains every decision filed that day.
• Caveat Archived filing days span 2021 to 2026; earlier hearing days are not archived locally.
• Caveat 48 of 296 hearing-day files referenced by the corpus could not be recovered from the City's links and are not in the archive.

For 2017-2020 the City published no decision documents — it published plain lists instead: case number, address, ward and outcome, grouped by hearing day. Parsed here as a second City source for those years, and as the only record of which older appeals were heard together.

• Caveat Covers 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 only. 2021 onward is document-backed and lives in the decision corpus instead.
• Caveat Outcome is trustworthy on the 2393 of 3486 records whose hearing day printed both an APPROVED and a DENIED section. On days that printed only an APPROVED heading the City files the whole day under it, so denied appeals read as approved — those rows are flagged and never override the appeal tracker.
• Caveat These listings carry no reasoning and no conditions; those exist only in the signed documents, which are not published for these years.

The City's full FY2026 assessing roll — addresses, owners, lot sizes, values. Powers address search, abutter owner lookups, and record cards.

• Caveat FY2026 vintage — the current roll the City publishes; assessed values change on the City's own annual cycle, not ours.

Per-parcel city problem history: ISD code-enforcement violations, property-relevant 311 complaints, and the City's RentSmart roll-up.

• Caveat Counts are city-recorded facts, not a verdict — a building can have issues the city never recorded.
• Caveat 311 complaints are limited to property-relevant reasons and to requests opened since 2023-09-08.

City license records per parcel: Section 12 alcohol, Licensing Board (all types), cannabis, active food establishment, one-day alcohol, and entertainment licenses.

• Caveat One normalized table across seven City licensing datasets; the Licensing Board dataset overlaps the Section 12 alcohol dataset, so duplicate license numbers are kept once.
• Caveat 79.5% of records are linked to a parcel (via the City's SAM address system, address matching, or the license's own coordinates); the rest keep their address and stay searchable without a parcel link.
• Caveat Includes one-day alcohol and one-time entertainment licenses — records of past events at a location, most of them expired.

Every building permit the City has issued, with work type, declared valuation, status and address — joined to a parcel where the City's own record allows it.

• Caveat Issued permits only. Applications still in review, denied, or abandoned are not in this feed — those are in the permit review & inspection pipeline dataset.
• Caveat 99.7% carry a parcel id from the City's own export; the rest stay searchable by address.

Where each building permit sits inside Inspectional Services — its current review or inspection stage, how long it has been there, the plan-review rows, and the city staff named on them.

• Caveat The City's published permit feed lists issued permits only. This dataset adds the review and inspection stages behind them, including applications that were denied, abandoned, or never issued — 26,768 permits here have no row in the published feed.
• Caveat Each permit's CURRENT stage, not a stage history: the City's system publishes where a permit sits now and the date it got there, not the path it took.
• Caveat Enumerated by walking the City's permit-number sequence and querying each candidate; permits outside the walked range, or dropped from the City's system, are not represented.
• Caveat 98.8% of permits are linked to a parcel (through the published permit feed, then the City's SAM address system); the rest keep their address and stay searchable without a parcel link.
• Caveat City contact names are the staff named on a permit's current stage — a record of who handled what, not an assignment roster.

What changed and when Verdwise saw it change — permit statuses, ISD review stages, and Article 80 project stages diffed daily. The only record of movement; every other dataset is a snapshot.

• Caveat Observed day-over-day, never backfilled: the City publishes no history, so coverage begins the day watching started and a missed day is permanently missing.
• Caveat Three families watched: building-permit status, ISD review stage, and Article 80 project stage.

The City's own per-address designations — problem property, income restriction, short-term-rental registration and eligibility, open violation counts — plus active food licenses with inspection history.

• Caveat Flags are the City's designations as published — currently 2 problem-property addresses citywide; absence from the table is absence from the City's list, not a clean bill.

The everyday City facts for an address: trash collection day, city council district and councilor, Neighborhood Services liaison, library branch, community center, pool, fire company, police station, ward and precinct, and historic district.

• Caveat 3,955 addresses (1.0%) have no collection day in the City's table — those are reported as 'not listed', never filled in from a neighboring address.
• Caveat The trash resource publishes a collection day only. It does not state the recycling day separately, so recycling is never asserted — for the 135,530 twice-weekly addresses the data does not say which of the two days it falls on.
• Caveat Street sweeping is NOT included. The City's schedule is by street segment and side of street; its published ranges are linear feet along the centerline, not house numbers, and the address data does not record which side of a street an address is on — so no honest address-level sweeping answer exists from this source.
• Caveat Snow emergency parking lots are NOT included: the source joins every address in Boston to one South Boston garage restricted to South Boston residents. Polling/early-voting is NOT included: the only schedule in the source is undated and from a past election. Ward and precinct are served instead.
• Caveat Park, snow emergency route and splash pad are the City's nearest-facility computations and are labeled 'nearest' — they are not necessarily on the address's own street.

Population, derived median income, poverty, tenure, education and 2020-24 housing production per neighborhood, from the City's own BPDA research tables.

• Caveat Estimates, not counts: ACS-derived modeling by BPDA; median income is interpolated from the published distribution and is always labeled 'derived'.

The Registry's own index of every land document recorded in Suffolk County, swept daily: document type, recording date, book/page and street address for each — the card catalogue, days-current, where the free assessing feeds stop at 2022. Parties and consideration are not in the index; they come from the per-document detail page, which is pulled for a subset (counted below). The recorded document itself — and the legal description inside it — is a separate scanned image at the Registry, fetched on request.

• Caveat Coverage window 2016-04-04 to 2026-08-28 — the sweep watches forward and backfills; earlier history is not yet captured.
• Caveat Nominal ($1) consideration marks family/trust conveyances and is never presented as a price.
• Caveat The index carries no grantor/grantee or price — those exist only for the detailed subset. Treat the full count as 'a document was recorded here', not as a priced sale.

Lot-boundary polygons and 300-ft abutter lists, computed from the City's own Parcels (2025) map service at request time; owner/mailing details join the FY2026 assessing roll.

• Caveat No local snapshot to count — geometry comes from the City's service at the moment you ask.

Boston parcel geometry joined to BPDA zoning subdistricts — the base layer for district lookups and compliance checks.

• Caveat Static extract — zoning map amendments adopted after the sync date are not reflected; verify current districting against BPDA's own zoning viewer before relying on it.

The BPDA's own city-computed base-zoning requirement (FAR, height, units, lot size) versus existing conditions, per parcel.

• Caveat Existing building height is the City's circa 2010-2011 LiDAR model — a frozen vintage that can describe a prior structure on parcels redeveloped after ~2010 (responses annotate this per parcel).
• Caveat Reflects the base-zoning requirement before any variance or other relief already granted on a parcel.

The City's own parcel-level record of what recent zoning reforms allow by right — the denial-driver and reform-watch backbone.

• Caveat Denial-driver trend figures are computed by live SQL against data.boston.gov at request time, so they can be newer than this snapshot.

Public-comment excerpts from recorded ZBA hearings, matched to cases near a parcel.

• Caveat Excerpts are taken word-for-word from transcripts of the City's recorded hearings (public-testimony portion) with a link to the recording; cases whose transcript segment could not be located unambiguously are omitted.
• Caveat 853 hearings examined; only the 167 with unambiguous, verified excerpts are published.

Exact condition/proviso language quoted from City decision documents for approvals that came with strings attached.

• Caveat Every published excerpt is verified as an exact substring of the decision document's OCR text, and only ships when condition/proviso language provably precedes it in the source — unverifiable extractions are dropped, which is why this count is deliberately small.

Logan runway and Boston Class B geometry for per-parcel corridor, Class B, and Part 77 notice screening.

• Caveat Geometric screening from the parcel centroid — informational context, never an FAA determination.

Vesting-deed book/page references per parcel, from MassGIS's statewide parcel attributes — queried live, with a hand-off to the Suffolk Registry for the recorded document itself.

• Caveat Book/page is as published by MassGIS; the recorded deed image lives at the Suffolk Registry of Deeds and should be verified there.