Our Data Trapped in a Castle of Stone
Larry Stone is a dragon sitting on a hoard of data collected from you, the citizenry, valuable data that rightfully belongs to all of us, guarded jealously from the light of day. What is this treasure of data, and how is it locked away? Let me explain.
Within the antique database of the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office lies a report known as the Property Characteristics File. What is this document? This report summarizes all information related to the physical characteristics, location, assessment value and ownership history of properties within Santa Clara County. This data can be analyzed to gain deeper insights into factors affecting property in a location or area, which is invaluable in analyzing areas such as housing trends, what is driving those trends, and how they impact affordability. But how does one unlock access to this valuable document?
To Stone, the answer is easy: money, lots and lots of money. Specifically $47,195. Let that sink in for a moment. Over $47K, which is over 60% of the salary of the average Californian. Oh, but this must be competitive with other major cities? Sorry, not even close. New York provides this data for FREE. Ah, it must be because this is California, in the Bay Area? What about San Francisco? Also free. In fact, of the top 20 municipalities nationally, this data is available for free or for a modest processing fee.
The office says $47K is to cover their costs. According to their website, this fee structure was evaluated by a third-party consulting firm and approved by the County Board of Supervisors nineteen years ago in 2003. You know, back when a computer mainframe had the storage capacity of your cell phone. And the data is already paid for, as the data’s processing and storage have already been covered at taxpayer expense as part of the duties of the office. (And since the office is not allowed to make a profit, Stone boasts about the money he returns to the general fund, due to his parsimonious habits.) And that brings up additional questions. Is this cost because the data is housed in a database from the 1980’s, when it cost millions to store the amount of data you currently have in your free email account? Does this mean that delivering 500 MB of data is done so inefficiently it would bankrupt a private business? And what about the fact that government - unlike private business - is supposed to be providing a service to its constituents? Other municipalities do this. What makes Santa Clara County different?
Stone says you can get data for free, provided it’s about your own property. That’s not what we’re talking about here. What about more comprehensive data? What if you’re, say, a nonprofit?
“Oh, wait!” says the data-hoarder-assessor, “you can apply for a fee waiver! You just have to be qualified.” So, what is this qualification for a waiver that is nowhere mentioned on the official Santa Clara County Assessor website? That’s a very good question that doesn’t seem to have a good answer. In the past 28 years, the Assessor’s Office is happy to tell you it has waived their fee 27 times. Fourteen of those were for cities and municipalities within the County. Wait, shouldn’t there be a reciprocity agreement between government bodies within the same county, anyway? Just how dysfunctional are these relationships? Others are again governmental bodies, such as the Sanitation District and the Water District. Again, shouldn’t this data be shared anyway? Of the rest, we have a couple of news agencies, Silicon Valley Clean Energy, and Professor C.J. Gabbe at Santa Clara University studying environmental sustainability and housing affordability–the only one marked “Public Purpose.”
When Professor Gabbe was contacted to discover what he had to do to get the ONLY “Public Purpose” fee waiver issued by Assessor Stone in the last quarter century, he said “Santa Clara County has the most expensive assessor data that I have encountered. It has only been accessible to me for specific research purposes with a letter from a public agency funder. Santa Clara County's approach inhibits important research in the public interest, including that to address the housing affordability crisis. The SCC Assessor should reconsider its approach and adopt the open source ethos of many other successful counties.”
Others who applied for and were denied the waiver have been told the standard to receive the waiver is that their group must “demonstrably benefit Santa Clara County or the Assessor’s Office.” Wait, what? The Assessor’s Office? So their purpose is self-serving? They also point out that their fees are approved by the Board of Supervisors, who have apparently never questioned why the cost is so high, compared to other jurisdictions.
Now let’s ask who has actually bought this data? Several private businesses marked as “Data aggregator and seller.” So there you go, the data about our property is all about selling to people who hope to profit from it. Draw your own conclusion as to who this serves.
With regard to sharing with nonprofits and civic organizations, the Assessor’s Office waived the fee and delivered data to an average of less than one requestor a year, and only if it is seen as of direct benefit to the County or Assessor’s Office. Fulfillment is determined by an undocumented standard and even the ability to request a waiver is opaque. Contrast that with San Francisco, whose Assessor’s Office has provided the same report, for free, to 5,451 requestors as of 5/30/2022, with a single click to download! No need to prove your case for why you desire this report, and all for free. This is what it looks like to live in the 2020’s! Instead of keeping pace with the past, we need to lean into the future, adopting the model used by so many other California Assessor’s Offices.
We live in the age where data is a vital part of society. Why is it hoarded away, when there are so many ways it could be used, that could benefit us all? The Assessor’s Office is trapped in obsolete paradigms of the late 20th century. Andrew Crockett will release our data from its captivity, freeing the data from its castle of Stone, enabling it to serve us all rather than a chosen few.
