Holmes Project · About
Mapping Philadelphia's risk systems - block by block
Housing intelligence · Connectivity foresight · Audit explainability
In 1683, Thomas Holme laid a grid across a swampy river peninsula and called it Philadelphia - the city of brotherly love. As William Penn's Surveyor General, he didn't just draw lines on parchment; he mapped a future. His plan allocated public squares, organized neighborhoods, and ensured that the city would grow with intentionality.
Three hundred and forty-two years later, Philadelphia's grid still exists - but stretching across it are over 21,000 vacant properties, 4,000+ L&I violations, and thousands of eviction filings. The city Thomas Holme imagined is in crisis.
The Holmes Project carries his name as both tribute and mission. Just as Holme mapped Philadelphia's future in 1683, we map the city's modern stress signals so Philadelphia can plan its next chapter. Every vacant building, every blight score, every connectivity gap, and every intervention log becomes a clue in a new survey of the city we inherited.
Dead Zone Detective
We extend Holmes into predictive connectivity intelligence using real Philadelphia tract and public Wi-Fi data so judges can see where access stress is concentrated and where fallback infrastructure exists.
Signal overview, live Leaflet map, tract scoring, resident-facing Wi-Fi explanations
Glass Box
We turn Holmes into an explainability dashboard for Inhibitor logs so a non-technical reviewer can inspect what happened, what triggered it, and what action a team should take next.
Audit dashboard, event timeline, action breakdowns, policy trigger summaries
Culture & Community Innovation Award
Holmes strengthens shared culture and fosters meaningful community connection by making civic data accessible to residents, organizers, and nonprofits. We reflect and uplift diverse experiences through equity pattern analysis and create environments where collaboration, belonging, and collective growth can thrive.
Multi-stakeholder platform, equity analysis, community-centered data access, shared cultural narrative
Vacant Buildings
OpenDataPhilly
Vacant Land
OpenDataPhilly
Property Assessments
OPA Philadelphia
L&I Code Violations
OpenDataPhilly
Eviction Filings
Philadelphia Courts
Neighborhood Boundaries
Azavea / PASDA
Philadelphia Connectivity Tracts
Philadelphia ArcGIS
Public Wi-Fi Locations
Philadelphia ArcGIS
Inhibitor Audit Logs
Challenge sample logs
All data sourced from OpenDataPhilly and public city APIs. No personally identifiable information is stored.
Next.js 16
Full-stack framework
OpenNext + Cloudflare
Edge deployment and runtime
Neon PostgreSQL
Always-on database
Pinecone
Vector retrieval with cosine similarity
Cloudflare Workers AI
Streaming AI response layer
Leaflet
Interactive geospatial layer
Framer Motion
Animation system
Recharts
Data visualization
Tailwind CSS v4
Styling framework
Building AI for Philly's Future
Submitted to Philly Codefest under the theme "Building AI for Philly's Future." Holmes now tackles multiple challenge prompts inside one product shell: the original housing-intelligence concept, Dead Zone Detective for predictive connectivity risk, Glass Box for audit-grade AI explainability, and the Culture & Community Innovation Award for equity-centered civic data access.
"He mapped our beginning. We map our present."
The Holmes Project · 2026