While not as robust as the ArcGIS mapping platform some city planners may use, CityNexus is easier for non-techies to adopt quickly. Properties can be tagged with keywords, and users can specify priorities such as sanitary violation tickets, 911 calls, tax assessment data, or unusually low or high water bills that may flag an unoccupied or overcrowded property. He says part of the tool’s strength is that it can clean up data set variations so they can be merged across departments. While the CityNexus concept was developed by de Jong and his students, the software tool was built by Sean Alaback, an Ash Center Summer Fellow and course coach. There was no systematization.”įield Lab graduate students worked with Murphy to create a shared Google Docs system first, which then evolved into the more sophisticated CityNexus, introduced by a second cohort of students in summer 2016. “When the task force met,” she adds, “we would go through a list, but there was no prioritizing. Police data was with the police department, fire calls with the fire department, code information in the health and building departments.” When data was shared, it was in “manual ways” such as emails. “We were not very well organized,” Murphy says. A city ordinance defined problem properties as those experiencing in a single year four or more instances of certain types of code violations and police or fire calls.īut even with these efforts, data remained decentralized. Led by Jorrit de Jong, a lecturer in public policy and expert on public sector innovation, and Somerville, Massachusetts, Mayor Michael Curtatone, the Field Lab’s graduate student teams are working with five Massachusetts cities to implement new systems that foster data-sharing and collaboration and help prioritize each city’s greatest areas of risk.īefore partnering with Field Lab in 2015, Fitchburg department heads had formed a problem property task force. The Innovation Field Lab at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation wants to fix this. And when separate city departments operate in silos, holding data in unshared spreadsheets (or paper records!), the early indicators that portend vacancy and blight can remain under the radar. Even when a city does have a problem property list, there may be no easy way to prioritize the most urgent cases. No city wants blight to proliferate, yet municipal governments struggle to identify and resolve vacant properties, much less prevent them. The annual Reclaiming Vacant Properties conference, held last month in Baltimore, drew some 1,100 attendees from diverse disciplines and communities to seek and share solutions. Whether stemming from Rust Belt deindustrialization or the more recent foreclosure crisis, the problem is entrenched and widespread enough to spur advice from HUD and even creative responses like vacant home tours and art installations that highlight the human stories behind deteriorated facades. Cities large and small grapple with neglected properties that can give rise to public safety and health risks, push property values down and drain city tax coffers.
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