Research at Community Game
Independent, community-oriented research.
Community Game is a volunteer-run community project. Alongside our neighborhood events, we pursue independent research — applying open scholarly literature and public data to questions about communities, systems, and local life in the Central Savannah River Area.
What we look into
Our reading ranges widely, but keeps circling a few questions about how communities and organizations actually work and stay healthy.
Systems & organizations
Cybernetics, systems thinking, and how groups self-organize and stay viable.
Local economy & place
Neighborhood change, housing, land use, and regional economic analysis.
Public health & wellbeing
Community health, social determinants, and what helps people thrive locally.
Governance & policy
Public funding, regulation, and how civic decisions get made and evaluated.
What the data shows
A few findings from our open-data work on Augusta–Richmond County and the surrounding region. Each carries a support grade — A means directly verified against primary sources, B means a sound estimate from them.
FY2026 adopted at $1.33B across all funds, down $138.2M — grant-funded programs cut nearly in half, passed on a 6–5 vote.
A vacant lot's neighbor is vacant 5.2× more often than a built lot's — and 41% of those vacant-next-to-vacant pairs share one owner.
People living in low-income, low-food-access tracts across the 15-county region — a map of where groceries are hard to reach.
Toxic-release facilities in Richmond County across 56 tracts, with 439 block groups flagged on EPA's environmental-screening index.
Annual VA economic inflow to the 8-county CSRA, supporting a population of 53,395 veterans.
Federal flood-insurance claims filed in Richmond County, against 2,984 mapped special flood-hazard zones.
A closer look: where vacancy spreads
Mapping all 84,530 county parcels and their neighbors, vacant land turns out to be strikingly contagious — and often quietly assembled by single owners.
Probability that a parcel's neighbor is vacant. Vacancy clusters at 5.2× the baseline rate; 41% of vacant-adjacent-to-vacant land shares the same owner — a signature of quiet land assembly. In historically D-graded (redlined) areas, 35.9% of parcels are vacant; in flood-hazard zones, 46.7%. Tier B.
The CSRA Data Lab
Behind these findings is a small, open-data warehouse for the Central Savannah River Area — parcels, flood and environmental layers, federal funding flows, health and demographic data — stitched together so the insight shows up in the overlap between datasets.
Explore the data yourself
A live map of Augusta–Richmond County by census tract. Pick a metric, toggle the overlays — 1937 redlining grades, toxic-release sites, vacant public lots — and click a tract for its numbers. A controlled, read-only slice of our CSRA data studio.
How we work
We built a small, custodial research pipeline that finds, captures, and organizes open-access scholarly literature losslessly — keeping every source verbatim and traceable, so claims stay anchored to what was actually published. It draws on open, public scholarly sources, including:
The emphasis is on rigor, provenance, and open data — reading primary sources carefully rather than skimming summaries.
Get in touch
We're a small, independent effort and happy to hear from people working on similar things.