An interactive graphical simulation of New York City non-market housing.
During my Government and Economics class, I was tasked with creating a project that addresses one of the two given prompts; in my case, a presentation of a possible solution to the housing crisis in NYC. Given a 9-day time frame, I decided to use the opportunity to connect class topics to my programming hobby, which is one of my favorite things to do. This project has also been featured in a segment of CBS Class Act and presented at a community event.
- 2D/3D rendering of NYC housing data using Bevy.
- Uses real-world data sourced from NYC OpenData and OpenStreetMap.
- Flexible and modular OpenStreetMap feature rendering, including rails, bridges, runways, etc.
- PMTiles and MBTiles streaming support to allow WASM and native runtimes.
- Arcade-like simulation of NYC housing market with simplified budget.
- Graphical user interface for converting and building new housing and toggling settings.
- In-depth camera controls for navigating the 2D/3D scene.
This project contains multiple scripts to generate the resources needed from the datasets, and a Rust project that can be built and ran. You can checkout the live WASM version at https://non-market-housing-simulation.pages.dev/
To build and run the project fully locally the following pre-requisites are needed:
- New York OpenStreetMap Data.
- PLUTO Dataset
- NYC Building Footprints Dataset
- Tilemaker CLI
- PMTiles CLI
- Rust toolchain
Ideally, all downloads above should be in the same directory, with datasets being under a data/ subdirectory.
Begin by generating the .mbtiles file from the .osm.pbf with:
tilemaker data/new-york-260512.osm.pbf --output res/new-york.mbtiles --config scripts/config-openmaptiles.json --process scripts/process-openmaptiles.lua
You can then convert the .mbtiles file to a .pmtiles file with:
pmtiles convert res/new-york.mbtiles res/new-york.pmtiles
Generate the lot_lookup.bin.gz file with:
python scripts/build_lot_lookup.py ./data/BUILDING_20260513.csv ./data/pluto_25v4.csv ./res/lot_lookup.bin.gz
Edit line 25 of src/main.rs:
- pub const RUN_LOCAL: bool = false;
+ pub const RUN_LOCAL: bool = true;
Finally, run the project via Cargo:
cargo build --release
cargo run --release
As with all other projects in this playground, the license is CC BY-NC.
