How the City of Philadelphia spends $3.5 billion annually: 10 best charts and graphs

How the City of Philadelphia spends $3.5 billion annually should be better visualized online, we say.

The state-empowered Philadelphia Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA), which is chaired by investor and former mayoral candidate Sam Katz, released in November a citizen’s guide to the City of Philadelphia General Fund that was full of visualizations — all buried in a PDF.

While we shared the document a few weeks ago, after seeing it on PhillyDeals, it seems that it all passed with too little fanfare. While we at Technically Philly would love to work with PICA to develop a friendlier, more interactive web version of this project, we thought we’d start by sharing our 10 favorite of the many charts and graphs detailing where the city government gets its money and how it’s spent.

In addition to the one above, see our 10 favorites below.

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Philadelphia’s literary presence peaked in 1940: it’s growing, slowly, shows Google Books

Graph showing a 1940s spike in literary mentions of 'Philadelphia,' as compared to other cities, including a last quarter century surge from Chicago. Click to enlarge.

Google Labs did an amazing thing this week.

Mired in copyright battles over its collection of some 5.2 million digitized books, the company released the 500 billions words that lie within, without context other than its published year. In one of its forms, the use of any word can be graphed from 1500 to 2008 or at any limit in between. This has, of course, brought on a wave of discussion and research.

For us, well, it’s all about Philadelphia. And, in graphing Philadelphia, it becomes clear that during World War II, Philadelphia was a hot topic. In a story we all know too well, the next half century wasn’t particularly kind to Philly, including de-industrialization, white flight and, yes, a crash and subsequent flat-lining of cultural references to our metropolis.

Who has an explanation for that explosion in the 1940s? Could it be misleading data, considering Pittsburgh goes through such a similar blast in the late 1950s and early 1960s?

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Avencia, city Dept. of Records launch LandStat real estate data site

This isn’t quite the type of city government Web site you might expect in Philadelphia.

Aggregating millions of Philadelphia real estate transactions into a set of reporting and analysis tools, LandStat is the fully-functioning love child of the city’s Department of Records and Avencia, the wonkish Callowhill-based geographic analysis and software development firm.

Using its Kaleidocade Indicators Framework platform, the site was originally designed to help city staff visualize and interpret geographic patterns and trends in the city’s real estate market. The partnership is perhaps just one of the more impressive publicly accessible web-based applications from records department data.

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