Page 6 - GCN, March and April 2017

[BrieFing]
City enlists Instagram in blight cleanup
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
Mobile, Ala., turned to Instagram to address blight and put the city on track to restore millions of dollars in real estate equity by the end of this year.
About 18 months ago, officials downloaded the popular photo-sharing app to their city-issued
cell phones and began
snapping pictures of
rundown properties.
To parse the resulting
data, they created a
complementary app
that lets officials cat-
egorize and respond
appropriately to each
blighted property.
The project grew
out of Mayor Sandy
Stimpson’s request
that the city’s Bloom-
berg Philanthropies-
funded innovation
team find a way to reduce Mobile’s high blight rates. The project revealed that blighted properties make up 2 percent of the city’s housing stock, and about 25 percent — or more than 13,000 — homes are within 150 feet of blight.
“Every home in that blight zone has a negative $6,300 impact to the value of their home on average,” said Jeff Carter, executive director of the in- novation team. Overall, blight created an $83 million negative impact on real estate values in the city.
With Instagram loaded on their phones, five teams of two people cov-
ered the entire 159-square-mile city in eight days, taking photos of neglected and unsafe properties and coloring in the completed areas on a map.
Armed with that basic data, the team migrated to a more powerful platform by automatically pulling the information into the city’s Esri ArcGIS
resulted in a Blight Index that Carter likened to the game Plinko.
Officials enter a blighted property at the top of the index, and a resolution pathway emerges that lets city depart- ments respond to the properties with the most appropriate action, such as ticketing or demolition.
The index’s poten- tial was not lost on the Mobile City Council, which changed the nuisance abatement ordinance so the city could enforce tougher penalties on owners of blighted structures.
As a result, of- ficials expect to free 2,600 homes from blight and recover at least $10 million in real estate equity for homeowners.
“Instagram really gave us three things,” Carter said.
First, it offered employees a sense of accomplishment and the knowl- edge that they could make a differ- ence in their city. Second, it provided a baseline number of blighted struc- tures. Third, it gave the city a way
to map general locations of blighted properties.
“The thing we’re most excited about exporting from this is this culture of innovation throughout our city,” he said, adding that the project demon- strated that cities don’t need more money, people or resources to solve problems. •
6 GCN MARCH/APRIL 2017 • GCN.COM
Paula Hillery, a code enforcement officer, takes an Instagram photo of a blighted property in Mobile, Ala.
database. The Collector for ArcGIS module lets employees gather informa- tion in the field using a mobile device and writes the data directly to the database.
Because employees were able to tap into all Mobile’s property-related data- sets, “this is where we really feel pretty excited,” Carter said. The team mem- bers joined together all the databases that hold property tax information, records of code enforcement problems, historical registry listings and owner- ship details.
Then they built a data profile for ev- ery blighted structure in the city, which
CITY OF MOBILE