Calgary is facing a downtown vacancy crisis. Over 30% of office space sits empty, eroding the commercial tax base and quietly shifting the burden onto residential homeowners, yet most citizens have no visibility into how their taxes work, why their bills change, or what policy alternatives might look like.
The platform delivers integrated experiences through a single interface. First, citizens can click any property on an interactive city map and see their exact tax bill broken down by service transit, police, parks, and infrastructure, along with a clear explanation of how much of any year-over-year change was driven by downtown vacancy eroding the commercial base. Second, citizens can type policy questions in plain English, such as "What if we added a tourist levy and lowered property tax?" The system uses Claude's API with function calling to translate the question into simulation parameters, runs it across the full agent model, and returns a personalized answer showing city-wide revenue impact, equity analysis, and the specific dollar effect on the user's own property. Third, the platform analyzes every vacant downtown building using transit accessibility, foot traffic, demographics, and market data, then recommends optimal reuse as co-working spaces, community venues, and pop-up markets and simulates the economic revival effect, including jobs created, tax revenue recovered, and impact on surrounding property values.
Every data point in the platform is sourced from Calgary's public open data portal and is fully verifiable. CalgaryPulse transforms municipal finance from something opaque and inaccessible into something any citizen can see, question, and help improve putting the analytical power of a full policy research team into the hands of a single person with a single question.
PLEASE NOTE VIDEO IS AI GENERATED