SF Budget Block

About this project

The SF city budget is usually presented as dashboards and charts. This walks it instead: one real block of 24th St at Mission — actual building footprints extruded to LiDAR-measured heights, all 165 street trees where they actually stand — rendered as a clickable diorama in the browser. Every object opens a budget card: the parcel's real assessed value and property tax, the $187/yr an average city-maintained street tree costs under the Prop E set-aside, who is actually responsible for the sidewalk (surprise: mostly not the city). The block's public school opens the education side: SFUSD's budget, the $75M bond rebuild of that very building, and why an extra property-tax dollar doesn't actually add school funding. Storefront buildings list their real registered businesses with the post-Prop-M business-tax structure, and small pedestrians on the sidewalks show what a median renter, homeowner, or retail worker sends the city each year. Nearly every object also shows a street-level photograph of the real thing — many as interactive 360° panoramas you can stand inside without leaving the page. Every figure carries a confidence badge — actual, estimate, or illustrative — with the method and sources one click away. The pipeline (a separate Python project) pulls ten public datasets and exports the scene; a three.js app renders it.