Case Study: San Mateo County achieves greater housing transparency and cross-department data collaboration with Tyler Technologies

San Mateo County Uses Data to Address Housing and Hunger

San Mateo County, home to Silicon Valley, faced a severe affordability crisis: between 2010–2014 the county added 54,600 jobs but only 2,100 homes, rents rose sharply, and just 16% of households could afford a median-priced home. That mismatch drove out-commuting, traffic, and growing concern that the county must meet the needs of all residents for housing, food, and health services while providing 24/7 mobile access to government information.

The county implemented Socrata-powered Open San Mateo County and a public performance portal, partnering with a Code for America brigade and five departments to publish datasets and visualizations (including a widely used affordable housing map, a job-classifications dataset with 48,400 views, and 221,000 parcel-level tax records). The open-data approach produced strong engagement (35,000 map views, regular monthly traffic), saved staff time (about 4 hours/week), enabled apps for benefits and flu-shot access, and supplied evidence (e.g., tax-revenue modeling) to inform decisions and reduce opposition to new housing.

San Mateo County

John Ridener

Open data community liaison