Why subscribe?
Subscribe if you want to know how American cities are actually doing, by the numbers.
Transparent City makes public data useful, readable, and relevant. We started in San Francisco as TransparentSF, and we now cover nine cities: San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Austin, Oakland, Seattle, Denver, and Cincinnati.
This publication is the nationwide view. When you subscribe, you’ll get posts that put cities side by side: which places are getting safer, where housing is actually getting built, what one city can learn from another, and the stranger things we find in the data along the way.
For the local view, head to transparent.city and set your location. You’ll get a weekly briefing built around where you live: your block, your district, your city. That’s where the really good details are.
Transparent City isn’t traditional journalism, and it isn’t political commentary. It’s something new: reports written by AI, checked and contextualized by humans. We built Seymour, our custom AI system, to scan hundreds of thousands of data points across civic metrics like violent crime, housing permits, and business closures, and to flag the shifts and anomalies you won’t typically see in the headlines. Seymour writes the reports and draws the charts. We fact-check and add context.
Transparent City is independent. We’re not affiliated with any city government. Our data comes directly from each city’s official open-data portal, so you’re seeing what the city itself reports, not our spin on it.
Our mission is simple: turn raw public data into a clear picture of what’s happening, so residents can hold city leaders accountable for measurable outcomes.
If anything you read here sparks curiosity or helps you see your city in a new way, reach out. And if you know someone who cares about one of our nine cities, send them to transparent.city.
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