San Francisco Resets the Bar with New Online Approvals Database

The irony of publicly available information is that you typically have to know a few things before you can find anything out.

Wonder what’s going in at the boarded-up storefront a few blocks down?

Curious about the number of condos proposed for the Mission?

Without the address of the storefront or, um, every single street number in the Mission, that’s pretty hard to search for on Planning’s informative but rather limited Property Information Map.

All that’s about to change, though: The San Francisco-based startup Buildingeye just went live with the initial version of a map that shows all the projects in the Planning approval process going back to 2009. Projects appear as clickable pins–green is for completed Planning applications, and blue is for projects still under review–and they can be manipulated as easily as Google markers or taco results on Yelp. (Fear not, wonks: All the backend info you know and love is still there on the Accela site; this is just a handier way of getting to it.)

http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/09/planning_debuts_awesome_map_of_every_project_proposed_in_sf.php