Hub:Albany Data Stories

What is Albany Data Stories?

Albany Data Stories uses public data to create non-partisan, unbiased stories about our government and our community of Albany, NY. We are launching with a dozen stories and will be adding new stories as we conduct additional analysis.

Albany Data Stories is inspired by USAFacts. If you’re not familiar with USAFacts, it is a non-profit started in 2017 - their mission is interesting:

“No one at USAFacts is trying to convince you of anything. The only opinion we have is that government data should be easier to access. Our entire mission is to provide you with facts about the United States that are rooted in data. We believe once you have the solid, unbiased numbers behind the issues you can make up your own mind.”

Who are the authors?

Albany Data Stories team members includes Karl Urich (KarlTyche), Adam Daskalakis (AdamTyche) and Keith Gargiulo (KeithTyche). Find out more on the about pages but the basics are that Karl and Adam live in Albany and Keith lives in Peoria, IL.

Where else can you find us?

Follow Albany Data Stories on Facebook, where we post links to our new and recent articles, providing threaded discussion.

We also post up our articles on Reddit, in r/Albany. Search for "Albany Data Stories", there can be some interesting conversation on any of our posts.

What are we working on?

We have a number of things that we are looking at for our next stories:

1.  Updating the "Who are Albany's vendors story?" with 2023 and 2024 data.  We have FOIL'ed the data from the City of Albany on 2/27/25.  We are awaiting this data as of 4/15/25.

2.  We are obtaining 2024 property data so that we can do some comparative analysis, 2023 to 2024 changes, year over year

3.  We're going to delve into the world of infographics and create a Sankey Diagram that shows the City of Albany's revenue and expenditures

4.  We have a concept of an article related to the landfill.  The landfill closure is very topical and can we construct a P&L for the landfill over time?

5.  Cannabis tax revenue - we had noted that the revenue line for cannabis increases dramatically in the proposed budget - how can we understand this more?

6. What does business growth look like in our City over the last two years?  How many new businesses, where are they located, what type/category of businesses, etc

7.  What are outside rating agencies such as Moody's saying about our City's health and what actions of our government make these ratings better or worse?

8. How quickly are we developing new housing and what programs catalyze the most housing?

9.  Can we try to create a Case-Shiller index for the Capital District to see how affordable our housing is?

10. Flooding... using FEMA data can we show how much of Albany (and what important areas or areas of new growth) are susceptible to flood?