Questions

What question was I exploring?

With talk in recent months about the State of Massachusetts trying to reduce funding for its flagship energy + emission reduction program, MassSave, I was curious how effective it had been. Concurrently, I had been exploring civic-related open data from the City of Boston and State of MA. This led me to discover the Regional Environmental Justice dataset, and hence this project.

What did I learn?

According to the data, there is actually no significant difference in MassSave participants between REJ and non-REJ census tracts in MA. I suspected otherwise. This was also my first real foray into proper data science since back in school, so it was quite the thrill to be back crunching numbers and discovering statistics!

What feels unresolved?

As of this writing (April 2026), I had not published the in-progress blog posts about the technical challenges and general coding process on this project, which any good research project really deserves.