Figure out how to pipe HUD subsidy data into PostgreSQL

[noemata83]

Background

HUD (when not shut down) publishes monthly data on housing subsidies, including Section 8 and LITHC, on its website. We would love to be able to pull this data to examine changes in the availability and density of subsidized housing locally, as well as (potentially) to make available in a more accessible and digestible format to interested parties data about subsidies imminently due to expire.

Description of the Issue

HUD publishes its data on expiring section 8 subisidies in an Access 97 database (.accdb file). This file can be easily opened in current versions of Microsoft Access, and exported thence to .csv and into PostgreSQL. We would love to develop a similar process to fetch the data, convert it to csv, and import it into PostgreSQL automatically in a cron job on the same server that hosts our visualizations (whatever that turns out to be). Hence, a linux bash script would be ideal.

Current Status

I have made some progress toward resolving this issue using this tool. However, I am still working out how the database schema could be imported (or inferred by Postgres) in addition to the tables