The City of Boston’s annual report on student housing is being assembled and is expected to roll out within the next several weeks, according to city officials.

Assembled from the University Accountability Reports, which are submitted by higher educational institutions in Greater Boston, the city assesses student housing trends. Universities are required to submit by Nov. 15 information regarding on- and off-campus housing locations for all fall semester students. This marks the second year that the data has been gathered. The Boston City Council passed and Mayor Martin Walsh signed an amended ordinance into law in late August 2014, requiring additional statistics on off-campus students.

Dorchester has been among the most student-heavy neighborhoods in past years, with the 2014-2015 report finding 14.03 percent (2,488) of all students in Boston lived in Dorchester, between areas designated as “Upham’s Corner - Columbia Point,” “Dorchester,” and “Bowdoin.”

Boston’s Inspectional Services Department (ISD) uses the report to narrow down priority properties for inspection, said William “Buddy” Christopher, ISD commissioner. “It helps us in defining those locations where there may be an abundance of students living in a unit,” Christopher said.

By cross-referencing those units with ISD’s problem properties list, known problem areas, and police reports, the department assembles a starting point of a few hundred residences at the top of their inspectional pile.

Enforcing the “No More than Four” policy was a priority in the 2014 report. Christopher said they are now taking a hard look at the policy, and “trying to morph that into something more useful for us as a city.”

As the second year including more comprehensive data, the report will offer the first chance to compare the shifts in student concentrations via the report’s “heat map” of residences, Christopher said.
The student housing trend report offers potentials for city planning and identifying new areas of needed infrastructure, especially transit, Christopher said.

“If there are great concentrations of students, what does that mean to us?” he asked. “We’re not just collecting data, we’re using data to see how we can improve the neighborhoods.”