Access & equity reporting.

Taxonomy v0.1 · Draft · 2026-08-30 · Categories not yet enabled in the app UI

A pothole is a pothole. A missing curb cut, a broken elevator in public housing, an English-only city form, a school-zone crossing with no guard — these look like different problems, but they’re the same underlying failure: infrastructure that excludes the residents it was supposed to serve. Fault Line’s Access & Equity taxonomy is our public commitment to treating these with the same evidence discipline as physical road defects — category by category, with named responsible authorities and cited statutes.

Why this taxonomy exists

Existing 311 systems handle access and equity issues badly because they route to different departments with different response protocols — and because most residents don’t know which department owns the problem. A resident who tries to report an ADA-noncompliant crosswalk to a general 311 line typically gets bounced between transportation, ADA compliance, and public works, and gives up. That’s not a bug in the 311 process — it’s a structural feature of a fragmented accountability landscape.

The Access & Equity taxonomy solves the routing problem in three ways:

• Per-category responsible authority. Every category maps to one or more named authorities (municipal ADA coordinator, transit authority, public housing authority, school district, etc.) with escalation paths pre-configured.
• Per-category legal framework. Where a category maps to a specific statute or regulatory body (ADA Title II, Fair Housing Act, Section 504, state ADA law), the letter generator cites it.
• Environmental-justice aggregation. When multiple category-A/B/C reports concentrate in the same census tract at a disproportionate rate compared to the peer group, that pattern itself becomes a reportable fact — equity data with statistical grounding, not anecdote.

Guardrails: what this is NOT

1. Not a substitute for legal complaints. ADA and Fair Housing violations have formal complaint mechanisms with statutory teeth (DOJ, HUD, state ADA offices). Fault Line reports document the underlying facts and can be attached to formal complaints — but the complaint itself is filed through the legal channel. Reports are the evidence; the complaint is the vehicle.
2. Not a substitute for community organizing. Access issues in a neighborhood are often best addressed by residents organizing together. Fault Line is documentation infrastructure for that organizing, not a replacement for it.
3. Not a way to name-and-shame residents. Everything on this page targets institutions and authorities. Reports about individual residents (loud neighbor, unshoveled sidewalk aimed at a specific homeowner) are explicitly out of scope for Fault Line; different domain, different due-process design.
4. Not a demographic surveillance tool. Aggregation across census tracts is done at the tract level using public census data, never using individual reporter attributes. Fault Line does not track or infer reporter demographics.
5. Not universal. Not every category applies in every jurisdiction (some states have stronger ADA laws than the federal floor; some cities have their own equity ordinances that supersede the framework below). Where a category doesn’t apply, the routing falls back to the federal floor (DOJ for ADA, HUD for Fair Housing).

Summary

32 categories across six report groups, plus one computed aggregation. Each report category has: a named responsible authority, a documented escalation path, and a cited legal framework. Every citation on this page links to the primary source (regulatory text, federal register entry, or authoritative agency page).

What still needs to happen before this ships in the app

1. Category constants + reporting UI. Add the 27 new report categories to src/constants/categories.ts with appropriate severity axes and icons. Quick-report grid picks the highest-frequency subset (probably missing curb cut, ADA-blocked path, broken elevator, missing crossing guard).
2. Routing dataset. A new versioned table (src/services/routing/authorities-by-category.ts) mapping each category to (a) primary responsible authority, (b) escalation authority, (c) federal-level fallback, all keyed by state/jurisdiction where the mapping varies.
3. Letter-template extensions. Additional templates in the letter generator for ADA Title II, Fair Housing, Section 504, and Title VI framings. Statute dataset extends beyond the current defective-highway focus.
4. Photo-optional reporting. Some access failures don’t photograph well (a broken screen-reader flow, an English-only phone tree). The reporting UI needs a text-first or audio-first path for these categories.

Full engineering scope is in DEFERRED.md #25.

Not legal advice. This taxonomy is a reference framework. Formal ADA, Fair Housing, and Title VI complaints must be filed through the applicable legal channel (DOJ, HUD, EPA, or state civil-rights office). Fault Line reports are documentation of the underlying facts and can be attached to formal complaints — the complaint is what triggers legal remedy.